God is green

Having woken-up in the early hours of this morning I grabbed our mp3 player and, thanks to restored internet connection at the office and the wonders of BBC downloads, listened to Radio 4’s Start the week. After listening to Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist and creator of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, talk about her new autobiography Unbowed: My Autobiography, I heard about a Channel 4 programme called God is green (to be broadcast at 8pm on Monday 12th Feb). In this programme broadcaster Mark Dowd speaks to religious leaders about why there isn’t a clearer message on the environment and climate change coming from the world’s religions? The interviews with the environment spokesperson for the Vatican suggested he didn’t know what he was talking about, the Bishop of London commits to not flying for a year, and, perhaps surprisingly, the programme finds that ‘US fundamentalist Christians’ are providing more of a lead in picking up the environmental debate than anyone else. Anyway sounded like an interesting programme for those with access to Channel 4 on Monday.

Another guest on Start the week, Michael Portillo, went on to argue that the environment is nt a ‘religious issue, but a political one. I couldn’t disagree with him more – not only do most religions believe in a creator God, the Bible clearly calls followers of Jesus to be good stewards of the earth which, at times, will need us to ‘get political’. Politicians alone will never be able to respond adequately to the predicted rate of climate change, as revealed in the recent UN IPCC report findings, without ‘religious’ people, and the wider electorate, taking up the issue and their responsibility in it.

That gave me pause for reflection as I gave up trying to get to sleep and instead opted to listen to the Zambian dawn chorus and the sounds of Ndola coming back to life.