The day after the end of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP15, I stumbled across the end of a radio adaptation of L Frank Baum’s classic “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. Our heroes the lion, tin man, scarecrow, Dorothy and Toto have reached the end of the yellow brick road and found Emerald City in search of courage, heart, brains, a way home and some doggy chews respectively. Of course just as they arrive full of hope, the machinery of power begins to crumble and the wizard is discovered to be no wizard after all but worse than a politician: a humbug. His response when thus revealed is “But how can I not be a humbug, when people always want me to do things that everyone knows can’t be done?”
Of course the lion is found to have courage after all in his response; the tin man does have compassion by the bucketful; the scarecrow is endowed with reason; and Dorothy when she realizes exactly what she wants to find back home in Kansas gets there in the end. I suppose Toto finds some delight too, but my point is: just what did we ever expect COP15 to achieve?
The Book of Genesis was written at a time when exiled Israel’s own yellow brick road seemed to have led them nowhere. The allegory of Adam’s fall is surely not about pinning blame on wayward woman or slippery serpent, but to peg out for all to see that sin is ever before us and we are always having forbidden fruit handed to us. We cannot blame others, be they politicians or wizards, for turning out to be snake-oil salesmen. The way home is there for all of us, and courage heart and brains enough to see us through the journey. But it is our journey, for we not them are stewards of creation. The dark satanic mills of some remote industrial wasteland are not the cause of climate change: our desire for their shiny plastic output is to blame. Just click your heals together …
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