1.10.1. Introduction and Soul Search – Sacred Landscapes Series
This seems a strange inclusion in Section 1 which so far has presented physical creations – paintings, poems, music, etc – that offer insight and appreciation of the Nature-human relationship. Often, these insights have been informed by science, b...
1.10.2. Encyclical on the Environment: Laudato Si’ – On Care for our Common Home
This is in many ways an extraordinary document. Stretching to 42, 000 words it covers sources from, “St. Francis of Assisi and St. Bonaventure, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas, but also to Eastern Christian traditions. It even quotes a Sufi Mystic. ...
1.10.3. Soul Search: A Grounded Theology
It is a bit embarrassing to be so shamelessly mining Meredith Lake’s fine work on Radio National, ABC Australia, again! (sorry Meredith, I hope you see it as a compliment), but the previous programs and Pope Francis’ encyclical are largely, but by...
1.10.4. Islam and Nature
Below is an extraordinary new building in Cambridge, England: Cambridge Mosque. I was in Cambridge for a year in 1979 and if you’d told me then that in 2021 there would be a grand mosque, with capacity for 1000 people, on the Mill Road, I would ha...
1.10.5. Hinduism and Nature
If, as I suggested, spiritual and religious responses to the environment are a topic as huge as the ocean, then Hinduism must surely qualify as a sea. It is so diverse, diffuse and old that I imagine even practising Hindus find it difficult to gra...
1.10.6. Soul Search: Jane Goodall On Humanity and Hope
Jane Goodall is a fascinating person enough to make this podcast worth including, but I was particularly interested in her spiritual insights here and how they have arisen, though not exclusively, from and within Nature.
She is not, as far as I...
Explore Other Sections
1. Build the Nature-Human Relationship
This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical ...
2. Reduce Consumption
I hope Reneé Descartes would forgive us for saying that, at least for the modern world, he was wrong. When, in 1637, he said: “I think, therefore I am”, he could not have anticipated that the majo...
3. Replace God of Growth with God of Quality
In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: ...
4. Work, Volunteer, Act for the Environment
What we do in our day-to-day lives can have great impact. Section Four divides up these actions into three groups – Work (4.2 & 4.3), Volunteering (4.4), and Action, e.g. voting, protesting, et...
5. Reduce Population
Even on top of Mt. Everest, in one of the remotest, most difficult places on earth, there is a great traffic-jam of people jostling for position. And yet, ever more vociferously, we deny that overp...
6. Ensure Media Acknowledgement of Environmental Context
The media is one of the three, great ‘poles’ of power in the world (alongside political and corporate power) and how they frame and present ‘the environment’ has a profound effect on how we respond...
7. Stop Further Loss of Natural Habitat and Species
New York is an exciting, mesmerising place. Human culture is extraordinary and often wonderful. Our powers of transformation of the natural world seem limitless. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be...
8. Assist Energy Descent and Transition
Our current energy largesse is an extraordinary ‘gift’, an unprecedented gift of the ages; millions of years to produce and from millions of years ago. Coal, oil and gas, forming...
9. Support New, Environmentally-Aware, Economic Systems
Just as with the previous section – ‘Energy’ – which is, inescapably, all about fossil fuels so pre-eminent and extraordinary has been their dominance and transformation of the world in the last 20...
10. Reduce Wastes to the Rate of Natural Assimilation
Section 10 will attempt to organise this enormous topic by addressing the context and status of pollution in 10.2, before focussing in on air pollution; particularly greenhouse gas pollution and cl...
