The Archbishop of Canterbury this week has called for both voters and political heads to change their attitudes towards environmental issues. At Kent University, Rev Rowan Williams requested that a charter for environmental rights should be established.
At the gathering, Williams also gave a stark warning to the public to quickly change its attitudes. He said, "An economics that ignores environmental degradation invites social degradation - in plain terms, violence."
With May’s UK General Elections coming up, environmental concerns are quickly becoming one of the major debating points for political parties. Williams asked for increased awareness and support for environmental issues and said that they should be seen as a major election concern.
Williams said, "Economy and ecology cannot be separated. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try and formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature."
He added, "To appeal to a technical future is to say our most fundamental right as humans is unrestricted consumer choice. All the great religious traditions insist that personal wealth is not to be seen in terms of reducing the world to what the individual can control and manipulate for whatever exclusively human purposes may be most pressing."
In conclusion, the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion stated, "to do better justice to the 'house' we have been invited to keep, the world where we are guests."
