Sustainability stories - Central Manchester LM

Jonathan Dale, Central Manchester LM

I have been very sensitive to the beauty of the 'natural' world for as long as I can remember. Very gradually this feeling was deepened by a sense of the awesome responsibility before God of my generation, seemingly failing to pass on to our children and grandchildren, a world with as much beauty and variety of forms as we had inherited as well as the possibility of visiting unimaginable sufferings on million upon million of our fellow human beings.

So Emily and I started to shift our habits. We have minimised our consumption of meat; lean towards organic production; all long distance travel was by train, including to visit my son and granddaughters in Berlin – I last flew in 1997, to speak to Quakers at Pendle Hill; the car was not replaced after the last one was written off in a vandal attack on the estate where we live; we moved our electricity supplier to Good Energy also about twenty years ago; the massacre of tropical forests meant that we became more careful about sourcing timber.

Over the last twenty years in Central Manchester (Mount Street) Meeting and Manchester and Warrington Area Meeting I have nurtured groups which produced a comprehensive social and environmental audit of the Area Meeting; a lifestyle group to share individual experience; a tree planting annual event for the Area Meeting; Area meeting discussions on Air Travel and Congestion Charging and a Walk Cheerfully Group that strives to share experience and bring that experience to Friends more widely in the area. Individually and with the Meeting there has been a good deal of lobbying squeezed in too.

Yet there are so many contradictions in my lifestyle. We decided to buy a possible retirement place in the country on the grounds that we wouldn't be able to stay put when I retired in case I got in the way of my successor at the housing co-op. But that hasn't happened and so we have a second property jointly with our daughter. An acre of organic fruit and veg and seven acres of woodland, which provides the fuel for our log boiler. This has been a wonderful exercise in the discipline of overcoming the expectation of life being dedicated to comfort, convenience and ease; the logs need cutting and splitting and the log boiler doesn't produce usable heat from cold for several hours.

It's only now that I have finally retired that I have had the time to get together a plan for PV panels to reduce still further our demands on the wider world's resources for our energy. (After not quite meeting criteria for hydro and wind turbine schemes)And we still have two solid-walled homes that are exceedingly difficult and expensive to insulate effectively. I need to start to tackle this problem soon.

I can honestly say that all the effort cycling in all weathers and the chopping of wood and the research into the products and firms to be avoided has been undertaken with a sense of rightness and, therefore, a deep satisfaction; even though I know it is not enough. Without it, how would I be able to look my grandchildren in the eyes? How would I be able to speak with my God openly, sharing my successes and failures. The process of coming to terms with the impact of intensified human activity on the natural world has enabled my spiritual sense to deepen and widen; now I can see that, if right relationship is at the heart of the divine intention, then every single aspect of my life has to be brought into right ordering. The Quaker insistence on the sacramental nature of the whole of life has been made fully real to me at last.
 

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