Climate Emergency, Compassion Emergency – Kindness Festival Week

Our society’s preoccupation with material wellbeing in the form of economic growth, to the neglect of the impact of this on both the non-human world and the wider human community, much of which is excluded from the benefits of industrial growth, has led to a deep and worsening ecological crisis that is also a crisis of global justice. We urgently need to find ways of delivering well-being to all members of our human community, while recognising out deep dependence on the non-human world and the need to care for nature and all living beings.

The City of Leeds has a strong track record as an environmentally concerned city; the Leeds Climate Commission represents a pioneering initiative in building a city-wide partnership that brings responding to the challenge of climate change to centre stage in the aspiration to create a truly Compassionate City. But the continuing demand for economic growth is hard to reconcile with the ecological imperative – we will hear from representatives of Extinction Rebellion, the School Strike movement, and the animal rights movement about alternative strategies for returning to a sustainable way of life that respects the natural world and seeks to restore equality within the global human community.