“Template: (a) A pattern or gage such as a thin metal plate with a cut pattern, used as a guide in making something accurately; (b) The piece of stone or timber used to distribute weight or pressure evenly”.
At a time when increasing natural disasters – from torrential rains and flooding to droughts and devastating forest fires – command increasing public attention, the issue of climate change is forcing its way onto the public agenda. Pope Francis’ recent Encyclical “Laudate Si” and the 2015 Global Climate Conference in Paris both advanced alternatives to humanity’s past habits of overconsumption and disregard of the problems they bring.
In The Template: a Parable of the Environment, a new approach is suggested. It proposes a model for changing human behavior through a global rating system for products or processes based on their environmental benefit or risk: the higher the rating, the better the product. The Template essentially promotes a system where conservation becomes the new model for human behavior in place of the unbridled consumption of the past.
Involving collaboration between nations, similar to that evidenced by the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, the Template model recognizes that to effectively address environmental problems we must approach our planet from a new and global perspective. This perspective may be likened to that of the astronauts first viewing the Earth from the moon in 1969 and seeing our planet as “Spaceship Earth”: a robust yet fragile habitat on which we all depend and towards which everyone must bear responsibility for not just ourselves, but for future generations.
Infused with humanitarian as well as a religious overtones of responsibility towards our environment, The Template also advances a faith-based concept of good stewardship of the Earth with which each of us has been entrusted.
In short, The Template is intended to stimulate dialogue and actions for conserving “Mother Earth”. These actions, in turn, may better assure we reverse past patterns of wasting our blessing, into those of preserving them for those who come after us.