earth watch
Godly gardening
Simon Marsh
In the UK, we are a nation of garden lovers. We may not be Capability Brown, or even Monty Don, but two and a half million of us watch ‘Gardener’s World’ every week.
There are 23 million gardens in the UK, which if put together cover an area of a million acres, roughly one-fifth the size of Wales. That’s more than all our national nature reserves put together.
Evangelical
scientist warns
Iain Taylor
The world cannot adapt its way out of the
climate crisis, and counting on adaptation
to
limit damage
is no
substitute
for
urgently cutting greenhouse gases, leading
evangelical
climate
scientist Katharine
Hayhoe (see photo) has warned.
Hayhoe, chief
scientist
for
the Nature
Conservancy in the US, professor at Texas
Tech University, and Climate Ambassador for
the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), said
the world was heading for dangers unseen in
the 10,000 years of human civilisation.
earth watch
A story of hope
Simon Marsh
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity
of the climate and ecological crisis.
‘Eco-anxiety’ may not be a medically-recognised condition, but
it’s
something
many people can relate to, especially if they
care deeply about
the natural world. It’s
important for Christians not only to share
the hope we have in Jesus Christ, but stories
of hope we can experience
in the world
about us. Indeed,
secular communicators
recognise that always harping on about the
bad stuff only puts people off taking action,
and so organisations working to care for
creation need to tell positive stories (while
not ignoring the bad news).
COP 26 and the Great Commission
Climate science is a sophisticated business, so it is a sitting target for sceptics and climate change deniers. But you don’t need computer modelling to sense that something is not right with nature.
Southern species are moving northwards. I picked up two ticks this year walking in the north of Scotland. You can now find hummingbird hawk moths in Derbyshire. And if you want to climb down to the Mer de Glace, a mighty glacier near Mont Blanc, you must abseil 300 feet further than when I first did that descent in 1974; the glacier is shrinking!