Courses & Learning
Background to the Good Lives Project
The Problem
The twin threats of climate change and peak oil raise fundamental questions about our familiar way of life.
Peak oil signals the time when half the world’s accessible oil resources have been used up, and production will inevitably decline. Our entire way of life depends, directly or indirectly, on the abundant availability of cheap oil.
Climate change describes the impact of increasing amounts of particular gases in the atmosphere, created and released by human activity, that trap the sun’s heat inside our climate system. The effects of this include changed weather patterns, drought or floods in different parts of the world, melting ice-caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, increasing severe storms, changes to growing conditions and food production, eco-system disruption and species extinction.
While there are obvious and real reasons for anxiety in the wake of these problems, focusing on the ‘danger’ is more likely to be paralysing than inspiring.
The Opportunities
We could be living better, more satisfying, more enjoyable lives!
Our oil-fuelled economy has not increased human happiness. Mass transport has drained the life out of our local communities. Mass-produced consumer goods, sold by vast corporations, have destroyed the livelihoods of many small-scale producers and retailers, and reduced variety and local distinctiveness.
What kind of lives do we want for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren? What can we start doing now to help ensure that it happens?
We can make changes in our own lives and in the lives of our local communities; we can, together, create the popular will for change that moves our politicians (locally, nationally and internationally) to start making the large-scale changes that only they can do.
This is an exciting time to be alive, because – quite literally – everything we do makes a difference.
A question of justice
The impacts of these issues are not just at some distant future – they are now affecting the poorest people in the world. The questions about climate justice will become ever more pressing. It is the rich of the world who are driving climate change and the poor who will, as always, suffer first and suffer most.
It is also the children of the world, our own children as well as others, who will reap what we are now sowing. So, for justice’s sake, we must sow the seeds of hope and a changed way of living, and not continue the injustice of the present order.
Why are Quakers doing this work?
Quakers have a witness to peace, justice, simple living and the right use of the earth’s resources; a commitment to spiritual rather than material values. There are already injustices and conflicts fuelled by oil and climate; there will be more.
Quaker witness is needed now, at least as much as in former times.
