Source: BBC Radio 4: Thought for the Day
URL: N/A
Date: 27/12/2018
Event: Giles Fraser: Climate change and "the warning of Watership Down"
Credit: BBC Radio 4, Giles Fraser
People:
Giles Fraser: Richard Adams' classic novel Watership Down, animated this Christmas by the BBC, begins with one of the rabbits predicting environmental disaster to their burrow, and then traces the adventures of the rabbit community as they search for a new home. And amongst the most unexpected of the dangers they face on their travels comes from an apparently friendly burrow run by a rabbit called Cowslip. As evening begins, the now homeless rabbits settle down to tell their new friends some of their favourite stories about the creation of the rabbits at the beginning of time, but their hosts are uninterested.
"We don't tell the old stories very much", Cowslip explains. And this, it turns out, is the great weakness of the Cowslip warren because, to cut a long story short, this warren is little more than a collection of individuals, not bound together by anything more substantial than self-interest. And when danger threatens, they have nothing to hold them together.
The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has written that Watership Down nicely illustrates the way in which communities and their moral values are shaped by the big stories that we tell ourselves about who we are. Communities are story-formed, he argues. Stories hold us together and give us a moral horizon larger than ourselves. And watching Watership Down with my family this Christmas, it struck me that the way many of us approach the threat of environmental catastrophe is very much in the style of the Cowslip warren.
Why was it, for instance, that environmental disaster on the scale predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last October didn't even make the front page of some newspapers? Perhaps because many no longer set their lives within an overriding narrative that's expansive enough to include a sense of common enterprise with future generations.
"In the beginning was the Word", is the way the big story I believe in traditionally opens, this Christmas time. "Through Him all things were made and without Him nothing was made that was made". Other stories are available, as they say. But this one sets human life within the context of all creation and over all time. It understands our existence as more than economic units or expressions of genetic self-perpetuation. We have a wider cosmic significance - we're part of something so much bigger than our own 80 or so years of individual existence.
And this is the warning of Watership Down. Those who try and do without a wider story of who we are and what we're here for, may well find it hard to summon the moral enthusiasm for dealing with threats to future generations. For in order to tackle the threat of climate change we first need to feel a part of a story in which the world's meaning does not just revolve around me.