Begins with "C" & Ends With "A"

The city of Shanghai in China, with the largest population of any city in the world at over 20 million, has ground to a virtual standstill because of choking pollution. Government cars have been ordered off the roads, factories told to curtail activity, school children told to stay home. The photo above shows the commute from hell. This is a big deal for the coastal city Shanghai which usually has mild to modest air pollution.
Increasingly the industrial engine of China's economic growth is overwhelming the environment, with air and water and earth saturated with toxins. The water supply of many cities has been rendered undrinkable by pollution, including in one case the carcasses of thousands of pigs. It is a nightmarish picture in this country of 1.3 billion people, almost a fifth of the world's human population.

The statistics are staggering but so are the individual stories. An eight-year-old girl has been diagnosed with lung cancer, the youngest patient ever recorded with this disease. Pollution is the suspected cause.

Several things come to mind when I see these grim reports. One is that our Western economies drive the Chinese industrial expansion. We buy and buy and buy what China produces, and we love our cheap consumer goods. But at what true cost?  The second is that we seem to forget that there is no such thing as the "non-smoking section" of our planet. What affects distant lands eventually affects us, whether we want to pay attention or not. The third is that we should wake up to the cautionary tale of China for ourselves. Canada has recently been ranked 58th of 61 nations in terms of mitigating the effects of climate change. http://www.fastcoexist.com/3022288/ranking-countries-for-climate-change-performance-and-why-the-us-is-just-43rd#10We are outrageous per capita polluters and we have a federal government that just doesn't care as long as our economy benefits. This is a matter of scale and timeline, but are we really any better?

The Christian community and all people of faith must keep yapping away about this, regardless of the naysayers. But surely we must also make personal choices about lifestyles which actually reflect Jesus' teaching to keep it simple. As the other country which begins with "C" and ends with "A" we better wake up (okay, there is also Columbia, but you get my drift!)

Thoughts?