Well-known Birmingham photographer produces video shorts for Jubilee Year
A Birmingham-based photographer has turned his skiils to video production with a series of Catholic videos for the Year of Jubilee.
Con McHugh is already well-known and respected for his work over many years as a photographer for events across the Archdiocese of Birmingham, but over the coming months he will be releasing a series of short videos that will explore each of the Jubilee themes:
1. Care for Creation
2. Food Poverty
3. Modern Slavery
4. Managing Debt
5. Forgiveness
6. Rest and Worship
In the first video – Care for Creation – Fr Rob Taylerson (pictured) reflects on the need to live sustainably and to make good choices to care for the earth.
Fr Rob is a priest of the Archdiocese and a member of staff at St Mary’s College, Oscott, a seminary where priests are trained.
Before becoming a priest, Fr Rob was an agricultural scientist and taught in agricultural colleges. He wanted to help feed the world!
Born in the mid-1950s, with a world population of 2.8 billion, roughly 1 in 4 of the world’s population went to bed hungry, without having had a substantial meal that day. By 2027 the world population will be 8.4 billion and the world’s population will have trebled in his lifetime, with the world’s food production having roughly quadrupled, now 1 in 8 people on earth go to bed hungry. It is still too many but the progress in feeding the hungry of the world has been far beyond anything imaginable 70 years ago.
Fr Rob explains:
“The blessings of more abundant and more affordable food still currently its downsides. Much of the increase in food productivity and the reduction in its cost has been achieved by capturing nitrogen from the air to make it accessible to plant roots as nitrogen fertiliser. This industrial chemistry requires huge amounts of energy. Other large amounts of energy are used in agrochemicals, machinery and transport. So Yes, it has required an awful lot of energy to quadruple world food production. And yes, this is responsible for a significant increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and that trebling world population also inevitably results in more production of greenhouse gasses which were already too high.
“My understanding of the science tells me that too many greenhouse gasses are being released into the atmosphere, and that the rich nations of the world currently emit, per head of population, ten to twenty times the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, than the poor nations.
“My life, our lives, must be simplified, must use less energy, must care for this world and all created life on it, with a determination and intensity that will allow our world and our poor to flourish. My cry from the heart is live simply, tread lightly on this earth, that the poor may be fed and live with dignity and that God’s beautiful creation may flourish.”
WATCH THE VIDEO