talk (sermon?)delivered at Hinde Street Methodist Church, London, on 23rd May 2000 following the Friends Annual General Meeting [Sir Ghillean Prance (a committed Methodist)is a former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and is now a Scientific Director of the Eden Project. The irony of his passionate concern for biodiversity lies in the fact that few human institutions have intervened more in natural evolutionary processes than has the Kew Gardens, which in the hey-day of British imperialism laboured mightily to mix-and-match species between biomes and continents, radically and irreversibly altering evolution in all the major continents. Mark] Thank you very much for your introduction. I may disappoint you. I'm going to say more about the real Garden of Eden than the Eden Project, I think, tonight. It is, first of all, a great privilege to be here and have this opportunity to speak to you. It is so important to support this Mission, the sorts of things this Mission is doing. So, I'm sure they appreciate the work of the Friends. I congratulate you too on such a brief AGM, that's the sort I like. I wish some of the other organisations I was on had AGM's so rapidly! It wastes a lot of my time, these meetings. I think its very appropriate to talk on the topic David asked me to talk on - Caring for Creation - here, because the sorts of things the Mission is doing are partly, and very closely linked to the environment too. Some of them are because of the result of the environmental problems that there are in the world today. And tonight I basically want to talk to you about three different things. First of all, to ask the question - what are we doing to creation? And give you some answers of what I think we are doing to God's creation. Then, secondly, what is our response, what is the Christian response to this? And thirdly, how can we respond as individuals to the environmental problem? Now, I, in my job as a tropical Botanist have had the chance to travel all over the world so forgive me for using a few examples from the various places I've been. Last October, I was accompanying my wife, who is Chairman of a charity called Impact, working on the prevention of disability, and we were in Bangladesh. We flew over Bangladesh quite a lot because we went to several different sites where Impact is working. I've never seen quite so much water covering what is meant to be land. There were enormous floods. So, I began to make enquiries about this. 'Is this normal?' And they said 'Well it's pretty normal nowadays. We get many floods. We didn't used to get nearly such heavy flooding.' And Bangladesh is flooding because they are cutting down the forests further up in Nepal, and the neighbouring countries, and it's wonderful how forest holds the water of the rain and storms and releases it gradually. But you cut that down and then the rain just runs straight off into the rivers and you get enormous floods. And then as I was leaving Bangladesh, they were very nervous because a typhoon had been forecast and it was coming towards Bangladesh. In actual fact that typhoon didn't hit Bangladesh but it went straight into the coasts of Orissa in India and there was terrible devastation. You probably read in the paper about the devastation there where about 10,000 people died in the storm. Well one of the things that would have prevented that would have been if there had been Mangrove forest, which is a tropical forest that grows around coastlands and it would have deadened the storm. But Orissa has cut down all those forests had been cut down. And how are these things linked? I don't know about Orissa but I do know that 2 much of the mangrove forest around the world which has been cut down has been cut down to make charcoal for barbecues in America and in Europe. So, buy sustained British produced charcoal, not from tropical rainforest. In September of last year I was in Brazil, and my wife and I were on a tour in the State of Mato Grosso in the Brazil and I've never seen so much flames and smoke as the place was being burnt. And our daughter, who works for Oxfam in Brazil, was going to travel to meet me in the city of Manaus in the Amazon. And she was in another State of Brazil, the state of Acre, and she couldn't fly on the day she wanted to or the next day, because the forests of Acre were burning, and the airport was closed in Rio Branco in Acre. So she was two days later than she had intended to be. Twenty-nine thousand square kilometres of the Amazon rainforest was burnt down last year. We've just got the figures from satellite data, so we know how bad the fires were last year. And what distresses me as I go all over different places in creation I see this sort of thing. I went to Antarctica once and that is the most beautiful part of God's creation. You can't believe the beauty of the different colours of the ice, the icebergs, the mountains, the penguins and the seals. And we visited various scientific research stations, and there, what were the scientists working on over their long winters in Antarctica? In one station they were working on atmospheric pollution, and that was because pollutants were coming in from the industries of Sao Paulo and other places in Brazil and blowing over to Antarctica. In another station we visited, they were working on penguins and they were picking up things like lead, heavy metals and other nasty things in the blood of the penguins. One of the things that tells us is that the whole world is linked together in the environment. What we do affects people elsewhere. What another country does affects us, and that's what the environment is about. It all linked together. And we're beginning to see that more and more so now. At Kew Gardens, one of our Botanists, Nigel Hepper, has kept records of the flowering of plants over the last 35 years. And today, the things are flowering 12 days earlier than they were 30 years ago. And I was recently in Washington in America and someone gave me a paper to publish in a journal I edit about the flowers in Washington. And that was a paper about the flowers in Washington flowering 10 to l2 days earlier. Now, something's happening. The climate is beginning to change. And global warming and climate change is something real. Why is this happening, though? What are the reasons? Well, one of them is de-forestation and the burning up of the rainforest, and the other is all the fossil fuel we burn, and all the cars we drive, all the coal we burn. And this is puffing carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere and that and other gases act rather like the panes of a green house, and so not all the heat of the sun gets reflected back that used to. So, the climate is getting warmer. More alarming is not just the simple change, but the fact that the predictions of climate change are that storms will become commoner and more violent, and that is a cause for alarm. In 1972, I made a visit to Costa Rica, and one of the most remarkable things I remember in the Cloud Forest there was a little toad, bright orangish-golden colour. Very striking. You couldn't mistake it. It wasn't very large but it was just so striking in its colour. And I was fascinated by those toads in the Monte Verde Cloud Forest Reserve. When I went back earlier this year I was told that the golden toad is now extinct in Costa Rica, and that confirmed what scientists are saying in many parts of the world. That frogs and amphibia are dying out. It wasn't just that one, but its fifteen 5 species in Costa Rica that are no longer there that used to be about 30 years ago. They are finding the same with frogs and amphibia in Australia. Somewhere that couldn't really be further away from Costa Rica. This is happening in many parts of the world. In South America. In Chile. Why? We don't really know yet why, but it is obviously something to do with the changing environment. Perhaps the increased radiation of ultra violet light with the Ozone layer getting thinner, because frogs and amphibia are very sensitive to ultra violet radiation. Maybe this is like the miners' canary, that the miners used to take down into the mines and if the canary fainted, died, they knew that there was poisonous gas there and they evacuated the mine quickly. Now, perhaps those frogs are telling us something. Perhaps the other thing that's been in the papers the last few weeks, about sparrows disappearing throughout this Country is saying something. I remember there being hundreds of sparrows on every farmhouse around in the area I grew up, and now they are becoming rare. Who would ever have thought that the sparrow would become a rare bird? Perhaps again that is another symbol that the environment is not quite right. So, those are some of the things we are doing to creation. I could go on giving many other. You read about these quite often in the Newspapers, see it on the TV, and they're doing quite a good job of giving us the bad news. But I'd like to challenge you a bit more about what we should be doing about it rather than just depressing you tonight on a night when we should be celebrating the work of this Mission. One of the interesting things about the environmental crisis that's amazed me recently, is rather like what was said about prophecy earlier this evening. A lot of the secular world is beginning to make prophecies about the environment, but in them, they're beginning to say that it's not just science which will solve the environmental problem, but that it is such a deep moral and ethical and spiritual crisis that it needs moral spiritual and ethical solutions. Larry Hamilton, who is director of the East West Institute in Hawaii, in a book that is a secular book about the environment, says in his introduction, that it is not the ecologists, the economists or scientists who will save space ship earth, but the poets, priests, artists and philosophers. And he goes on in that book to say several times, that the environmental crisis is an ethical one. Some years ago, there was an earth summit in Rio de Janeiro when heads of State came together to discuss climate change and Bio-diversity. The man who organised that is a man called Morris strong, a Canadian. I invited him to come to Kew the next year and to give a lecture on Rio de Janeiro, Earth Summit - One Year After. He gave a good explanation of what he thought the conference had achieved and what it hadn't achieved and about what we need to do in the future. And I want to quote to you his concluding words. Now this was not in a church, this was in the auditorium of the Joderel laboratory in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to an audience of scientists, politicians, conservationists, etc. And he said 'in the final analysis, our economic and social behaviour is rooted in our deepest, moral and spiritual motivations. We cannot expect to make the fundamental changes needed in our economic life unless they're based on the highest and the best of our moral, spiritual and ethical traditions. A reverence for life, a respect for each other, and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the earth are essential. The transition to a sustainable society must be undergirded by a moral, ethical, and spiritual resolution which places their values at the centre of our individual and societal lives. 4 Now there, if ever there was, is a prophet speaking. What more do we stand for as Christians than a reverence for life, a respect for each other, and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the earth. But his message is that this must be undergirded by spiritual resolution to reconsider our values. Now, what I would ask tonight is how has the church really responded to this? Some years ago I gave a talk in Hong Kong on 'The Environmental Crisis - A Moral Issue.' And I gathered together a whole series of quotes from different secular environmentalists that were all along those lines. I don't want to quote lots of things to you tonight, but all are saying that the environmental crisis needed a new ethic, and were calling on the religions of the world to respond. Now I think we are actually being very slow to respond. Yet, I've seen other religions respond in various ways. My very first trip to the rain forest. I went to the country of Surinam, former Dutch Guyana, at the top of South America. We flew into a jungle air strip. Then we went two days in dug out canoes, and then we walked six hours to the base camp and there I met colleagues from New York Botanical Gardens with whom I was going to go on the expedition. As I walked into the camp the leader of the expedition said 'You did your thesis on the plant family crisabalinasy?' and I said 'Yes, I did.' And he said, 'Well that tree over there is one.' And I got very excited seeing the individual tree of the group that I'd been working on in laboratories for the last three years for my doctoral thesis. And I said' We must collect that,' and he said 'Yes, I'll get one of the local people who are helping us to collect it.' There was only one local person in the camp at that time because the rest were out with the other expedition members collecting. He asked this man, Frederick, the cook, to cut down the tree, and Frederick said 'No.' Then Howard started arguing with him in the Creole language and they had a good chat. I caught a few words because it's a funny language, it's a mixture of English, Spanish, Dutch, African words, so I understood a few words out of it, but didn't get the gist of what it was all about. And then it calmed down and Howard said that Frederick will cut down the tree in half and hour. I said 'Well, why in half an hour, why not now?' I thought perhaps he's got to cook the lunch, or something, but no it was because he had to appease the bushy Mamma, his God, so that he makes sure that the blame for cutting this tree down so stupidly goes on the white man and not on him. Now, that was the chaos I caused within half an hour of landing in the rainforest for the first time, and I have never forgotten that experience for many reasons. First of all, it was the first time of many that I saw the respect that many of the indigenous people's have for the environment around them, and usually linked to some spiritual animist religion belief of some sort, or some sort of taboo. But nevertheless it protects the environment. So, I began to think about that experience a bit. Now, what would a young Christian, as I was at that time, react to that. Well, you might think, well, here's a good religion, it protects the environment. But what I've actually done over the years is asked the question 'What does my own religion say about care of God's creation? And I've found that the Bib]e is so rich in this and it is so much part of the Christian faith but it is part of the teaching of the church that we have tended to neglect. That's why I put together that little booklet that David advertised earlier on about this sort of thing. And its very important to think about what the Bible says about stewardship of creation, because many people today in the secular world, do take on beliefs various religions. That's what the new age is all about. And we want to make sure that we can defend ourselves against that and we know what our own scriptures say about the care 5 of creation. One of the verses of the Bible I really really love, is Genesis, chapter 2, verse 9. 'And the Lord God made all kinds of tree grow out of the ground. Trees that were pleasant to the eye, and good for food.' That's very interesting because it's telling us two things about the reason for the trees around us. And the first one is pleasant to the eye. We're getting disconnected from creation today and it's very easy to if you live in the city. But, the trees around us, the trees in the city parks too are 'pleasant to the eye.' The aesthetic, to be enjoyed. And, they it says, are good for food. First of all the aesthetic and then the utilitarian. We would not have made such a mess of the environment if we didn't put the use, the utilitarian first. Greed - we must use it. There are so many examples in the world of where there has been a biological resource and people use it till the last one and it goes extinct. Instead of enjoying it and then managing it fish species in the North Sea are becoming extinct because we over use them. The people of Easter Island cut down every last tree. I don't know if you saw a programme recently by David Attenborough about a carving from the last Torromiro Trees that were there. Well fortunately Thor Heyerdahl kept the seeds from the last tree, gave them to Gotoburgh Botanic Garden and they sent some to Kew and that tree survived. But more seriously, the population of Easter Island crashed because they destroyed all the forest. The things that were most useful to them, the wood they made their carving from, the fruit they eat, every last tree being destroyed and then their population went down to the remnant that was there. And there are many examples of that and it is probably because we just don't listen to that good word. The Lord God made all kinds of tree to grow out of the ground. Trees were pleasant to sight. A respect for them. Then, straight after that, later on in Genesis Chapter 2, it says 'The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.' Till and Keep are the words in this translation, Hebrew words Shamar and Hava, which really literally mean to serve and to preserve. Now here again another good instruction to the first people in the second chapter of Genesis - not just to abuse the land, but to till it, to serve it, to preserve it, to take care of the land. One of the real problems in the environmental crisis today is just the opposite of that -the way we're destroying the soils. The top soils are disappearing in the most alarming rate in some parts of the world, especially in countries like the United States and India, and this is another thing that is abusing it, and not taking care of it. Not thinking about the future because one wants to make a profit, just in the present. So, much of this is motivated by greed. Exodus Chapter 23 Verse 10 says 'For six years you are to sow your field and to harvest your crop, but during the seventh year let the land lie unploughed and unused that the poor among your people may get food from it and the wild animals may eat what they leave.' Now, there are several places in Exodus and Leviticus that say a similar thing. Leaving the land fallow for the sixth year. In other words the land too needs a Sabbath rest. Now, why does it say it needs it here? Its not only that the land needs it to recover but it is linked here with the poor among your people, that they can get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. How much linked to the sorts of things that are going on here and helping the people who have been less fortunate than we have. Very similar is the sentiment that is expressed here. I think of the Aymara Indians in the Andes. They own land, each individual family has plots of land, but they don't decide what they are going to cultivate. All the landowners meet together with the council. The village council says to one you plant potatoes this year, you plant amaran, you plant ochre, you plant kinowa, that are 6 various crops that they grow there. And so they do, but then they say to one family, you leave your field uncultivated this year, actually they say this to several families in most villages, they are not cultivating anything that year. Do they starve? No they don't because everyone else brings in their first fruits and they probably do better in the year that their land is left fallow. So they had a system very similar to this in Exodus. But the Bolivian Government was in a very bad way some years ago and the balance of payments was terrible, and the debt of the country was terrible and the Minister of Agriculture had a good idea - 'Look at all that wasted land in Aymara territory.' And so they sent in agents, sometimes with guns to force the Indians to cultivate the land that was lying fallow because they said there we can increase our agricultural exports by using all this land. Well, the interesting thing was that the productivity did not soar up but gradually went down and it would have been a real environmental disaster for the Aymara if a coalition of different church missionaries that were there had not intervened and seen what was happening and pleaded with the government to let the Indians go back to their traditional system. I think it was a mixture of Catholics, Mennonites and Methodists that actually got together to do that. The Church intervened in that case and helped them to go back to their traditional system. So, leave the land fallow that the poor among your people may yet food from it. Proverbs 29, verse 7 says 'The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.'' An important verse, one of the many that talk about the cause of the poor. 1 John, Chapter 3, verse 17, 'If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need, but has no pity beyond him, how can the love of God be in him'?' The issues of justice and the issues of the environment are so closely linked, and so the sorts of things that the Mission here is doing are so closely linked to the environment and much of the Christian reason for doing it come out of the same texts in the Bible. I have studied over the last years, many different parts of the whole Bible, really for what it says about Stewardship, and I can't go through all of it in one evening. But what I just want to say is that as one goes through it I have seen such a wonderful call to stewardship of creation. One of the parts of the Bible I really love is the Book of Job, Chapters 38, till the end. Do you remember that God came to Job after he had been comforted by his friends who didn't do much good, but finally God spoke to him out of a storm and what does God do? He didn't just say Job repent, but there is a wonderful four chapters about the glories of creation, and talking about how wonderful creation is. Then the Lord answered Job out of the world wind, 'Who is this that darkens council by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you. Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth?' And it goes on to talk about the physical and the biological part of creation. We read about the wild goats and their habits, the ostrich leaving its eggs, and saying it's a careless animal, the eagle soaring and bringing in food to its young. We read about the whales, leviathan, beamot, the hippopotamus, etc, etc. All there. So what God is doing to show Job how great he is is just showing his revelation through creation. The Psalms are just full of praise for creation as well. We could read many songs of creation in the psalms, 'Oh Lord our sovereign, how majestic is your name, in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens,' etc, Psalm 8. So I think there is no doubt that as Christians, we have a responsibility to take care of the environment. Now, I've talked about the environment of exotic places that I've travelled in. Bangladesh, and Brazil and other places like that. But we need to take care of the environment and we can take care of it and help a little bit as one couple I met on 7 holiday recently. When we arrived at the hotel I noticed as we walked in that the trees and the grounds of the hotel were labelled. They had their names of the trees in Spanish, and in Latin, and as we walked to dinner on our first evening, I said to Ann "That tree there is not a Cordi, that's a fig, they've got the label wrong. And so we went in and there the owner of the hotel was to greet his guests for dinner and so I politely after chatting to him for a few minutes said 'Do you know that one of those trees there has the wrong label on it?' And he said 'How do you know?' I said 'Well, I'm a Botanist.' and so then the owner said 'Oh my wife would love to meet you because she wants to make this whole ground into a Botanic Garden and she'll be disappointed that they've got the name wrong on one of those trees. Would you walk round with her in the morning and make sure that all the other labels are right?' So I did, and I'm very glad I did because I found someone, a couple, who were really trying to integrate their environmental behaviour into their lives. I ended up having tours of the kitchen, of the recycling bins, of the purification plant of the swimming pool because it didn't use any chlorine in it, just used UV light. I saw a solar heating system to heat the water when people were taking showers, I saw that all the waste was separated into four different bins, and the green waste, the organic waste, was taken and tipped into little pits beside the coffee bushes, and the coffee bushes on their property were so much more vigorous and better than on a neighbouring farm because they got that extra fertilisation. Little compost heaps beside each bush. Then in the bedroom I saw that there was a notice on the bed - 'If you want your sheets changed, put this notice on your pillow when you leave the room.' But you know that changing your sheets every day uses an unnecessary amount of water and detergents. 'And if you want a clean towel leave it on the floor, but if you put it on the rack we'll assume that you don't need a clean towel today.' How often in hotels that I go to you're not given that choice? Such a simple thing, we certainly don't need clean sheets or towels every day. We certainly don't have it at home, so why do we need it when we're in a hotel? And they were growing organic vegetables and getting them from an organic supply very near by. The owner took me to see an organic and vegetable herb farm of her neighbours. We just hit quite by chance on somewhere that was really integrated into the environment. Now, I think the challenge for us is that where ever we are, whether we are out in the country, in where was it, in Whitney I think, or whether we are in central London, there are things that we can do to be better environmentalists. But not just for secular reasons, because we are frightened about climate change or something, but because of our Christian faith, because the Bible tells us that we are to be carers of creation, stewards of the earth, and that to me is a central reason why I feel I should be so involved in environmental issues, because it is God's creation, and because God has said that creation is good, he's said that it's very good, and he has asked the human race to take care of it. Instead greed has dominated, we don't listen to the prophets who are saying what is happening. We don't listen to our own secular prophets who are saying "Please church, please religion, respond to this." And so I hope that you will respond. You'll think about how you're treating the environment. And do it because you are a Christian steward of God's creation. _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
