If you had told me four years ago that I would be sitting in on an MRTI committee, urging them to divest, I would have thought you were crazy (that is, after you had to explain to me what exactly MRTI is). Four years ago I knew absolutely nothing about MRTI, shareholder engagement, or the divestment movement. And then I was chosen by my seminary to represent them as an advisory delegate to the 2016 General Assembly (GA). The GA meets every two years, with representatives from every presbytery in the US, to decide major issues for the PCUSA. Commissioners and delegates are randomly assigned to committees, and spend three days debating the issues, before bringing their recommendations to the whole Assembly for a final vote. That year I was assigned to the Committee for Immigration and Environmental Issues. The main issue on the agenda that year: fossil fuel divestment. Of the 11 overtures assigned to the committee, 5 dealt with fossil fuels in some way. Some asked us to divest, some asked us to continue shareholder engagement. Many included other ways of fighting climate change, in addition to or in place of divestment. I was plunged into a world of complicated financial and scientific language. It seemed like the more I researched, the more confused I became. Some presbyteries, where many of their members relied on the fossil fuel industry as the only way to make a living, viewed divestment as a moral condemnation of their jobs and worried they would lose all their members. MRTI made a very convincing argument for the continuation of shareholder engagement. Yet Fossil Free PCUSA emphasized the urgency of the situation and that shareholder engagement is too slow of a process. I arrived in Portland in June for GA with absolutely no clue how I was going to vote.
On the first day of committee work, the floor is open for anyone who wants to speak about any issue before the committee. You do not have to be a commissioner or even a Presbyterian to speak. Each person gets one minute to tell the committee why they should vote for or against any of the issues. That year people flew in from all over the world to speak in favor of divestment. Among them was the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC), a woman named Martha. If you have followed my blog for any length of time, you know that I served as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) in Colombia in 2016-17. The 2016 GA was only a few months before I went to Colombia. My Spanish was still limited, and I knew very little about the country. But Martha used her one minute to teach us all something about her home. In Colombia, foreign companies, including fossil fuel companies, have very few regulations. They can go into an area where they want to mine or drill, and kick the inhabitants off their land, leaving them homeless and without a source of income. The companies can pollute the water and destroy the land, making it uninhabitable. And if anyone tries to protest, the companies just hire hit men to kill them. Martha brought a new perspective to the argument. While we were busy talking about the effects of climate change and how the fossil fuel industry contributed to the problem, we had overlooked the human rights abuses committed by the companies.
Because of Martha’s testimony, I voted yes for divestment.
Climate change, fossil fuels, divestment, shareholder engagement, it’s all so complicated. There is no simple solution to any of it. Even if we divest, that won’t be the end of our work. Stopping or minimizing the impact of climate change will take a lot more than just divesting from a few companies. This is only one small step in a long process. But it’s a step that people in frontline communities are asking us to do, and we need to listen to them.
Psalm 8 tells how God, who created all the wonders of the universe, created us as well. The Psalmist says “You have given [us] dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under [our] feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” (Psalm 8:6-8, NRSV). While verses like these have been used to say that we can do whatever we want to the earth, I believe it teaches that we have a responsibility to care for creation. We’ve been charged to take care of the earth, not destroy it. If we only use it for our own pleasure, we not only abuse the power that God gave us and betray God’s trust in us, we also end up hurting each other. Fossil fuel companies have hurt people in their quest for more resources to make them more money, as seen in countries like Colombia. Our over-consumption of fossil fuels has already hurt people as the changing climate causes more and more natural disasters and droughts from rising temperatures contribute to famine, disease, and violence. We have a responsibility to fix this mess we’ve created out of the creation God entrusted to us, and that begins by recognizing that we can’t continue as we have. It’s time for a change.
The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program provides a daily lectionary of scriptures based on themes of peace and peacemaking. Over the course of 2019-20 I’ll be basing my blogs on one or more of the scriptures from each week’s lectionary. If you would like to follow along in the lectionary with me, here are next week’s scriptures:
Sunday – Numbers 24:1-13
Monday – 2 Chronicles 15:1-8
Tuesday – Isaiah 42:1-4
Wednesday – Psalm 139:1-12
Thursday – John 14:15-21
Friday – 2 Corinthians 1:19-22
Saturday – Acts 15:22-35