Theology can appear very abstruse at times, perhaps inevitable when its subject cannot be seen. Right now, however, on the campus of Zomba Theological University, it is taking a highly visible and tangible form.
The verandah of the Vice-Chancellor’s house has been transformed into a cloth bag production centre as tailors work their way through the manufacture of 200 bags. Their work is complemented by that of student anti-plastic advocates who are systematically convincing residents to give up single-use plastic bags in favour of the washable and almost endlessly reusable cloth bags now being produced.
Though Malawi functioned perfectly well for centuries without using plastic at all, in recent times plastic bags (locally known as “jumbo”) have become ubiquitous – and admittedly very handy if you are buying tomatoes or beans at the market. The little-considered snag, of course, is the question of what happens to the thin plastic bags after the beans or tomatoes arrive home. Many end up disfiguring the landscape and eventually joining the mass of plastic that pollutes rivers, lakes and oceans, jeopardising biodiversity and threatening the human food supply.
The easiest way to reverse the damage being done by excess plastic is not to use it in the first place! This is what we are attempting at ZTU as part of our ecotheology project.
One approach to the current ecological crisis is to hope that “something will turn up” – a recipe for complacency. Funnily enough, those most disposed to hope for a magical technical fix are those who are profiting most from current arrangements. For the rest of us, a sober reckoning with reality means that we need to do what we can –in the hope that many small steps will eventually make a big difference. We hope that the adoption of cloth bags by ZTU shoppers can be one of these small steps.
Thinking Mission Blog 