Community Service Volunteers, CSV Environment, is one of the placements of Birmingham volunteer Matthew Bentham. Matthew is engaged in a range of activities taking the role of a teaching assistant involved in outdoor education with school pupils of all ages. His work can include teaching, arts and crafts, bushcraft skills, and gardening.
Below Matthew offers his recent reflections on our responsibilities to the wider environment.
The profound moments of my day-to-day life occur most often when I am outdoors. The natural environment is my spiritual haven. As such working for CSV Environment I live out some of my lifestyle aspirations and those of JVC.
The outdoor educational work with young people at CSV aims to improve access to local green spaces and to encourage a greater respect towards the wider natural environment.
Many of the young people I work with are from deprived areas of Birmingham and often their local parks are unclean and unsafe. This is a social injustice because any child who cannot freely and safely access the outdoors has a poor quality of life.
When passing polluted streams and canals in the city I reflect on our current culture and lifestyles. Lifestyles that are materialistic, that put the individual first, and are driven by greed to instant gratification by means of mass consumption. Consumption in which the worst consequences are so removed from us, both in temporal and spatial scales, that we never truly realize the damage we cause. Damage that affects the poor the most as they are the least able to cope and the least able to speak up for themselves, spreading more social injustice.
When the negative impacts of our lifestyles extend to a global scale should not our responsibilities also extend to a global scale?
The simple lifestyle provides an answer. The simple lifestyle rejects the material to focus on the spiritual and to have solidarity with the poor. However it also benefits those unseen peoples, flora and fauna suffering the consequences of excessive consumption.
Widening our sense of responsibility to such a degree is difficult. However within the environmental movement such a change was spurred by the first images of the earth from space. Images that expose our fragility and insignificance, but also our unity. When being mindful of our wider responsibilities to the world’s environment, all peoples and all life it is helpful to remember that we are all of the same community, united in our insignificance, vulnerability and rarity.
In the creation myth all life made prior to man was deemed “Good” independent of any services it could offer to man. Past interpretations of our responsibilities to the wider environment being only of domination, conquest and superiority should be challenged.
To deny our wider responsibility to the wider environment is to deny that we are all interconnected and interdependent on each other as well as those natural systems, flora and fauna, around us. To deny any responsibility to the environment is to acknowledge that it exists only to serve us. To believe that is to submit willingly to greed.
If in working with young people they connect with their natural environment on a deeper level, acknowledging an intrinsic value of nature independent of the services provided to mankind, then maybe we can circumvent that greed and all its consequences.
Holy Joe 