Diocese of Liverpool

Thought for the Day, 28 July 2004

The Rt Rev. James Jones

Good Morning

They're tall, slender, standing in serried ranks with their trident blades whirring in the wind – and they're dividing the nation! Wind farms!

Personally, on aesthetic grounds, I rather like them! As public art they have a towering and powerful presence on the horizon. But opponents would say “Just wait ‘till they put one on your favourite landscape!” Which is exactly what they're proposing to do here in the North West. An 80 square-mile off-shore wind farm is being planned on the Wirral Coast in the spectacular Liverpool Bay.

Battle lines are being drawn. In one corner the irrepressible David Bellamy calls the Turbines ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction' and doubts the impact of Carbon Emissions, believing, instead, that Global Warming is down to natural fluctuations in weather patterns.

Greenpeace, in the other, quotes the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, saying that climate change is ‘the greatest threat we face, greater even than terrorism'.

This scientific argument, which is dividing even the green movement, leaves the lay person baffled.

One of Liverpool's famous poets, was a priest – Gerard Manley Hopkins – and in one of his poems ‘God's Grandeur' he writes ‘and for all this, nature is never spent'. I wonder if he would have written so optimistically today.

We're living at a unique moment in the history of the planet. Until very recently human actions were trivial when compared with the great forces of nature. But now in an age of genetic modification, nuclear energy and carbon emissions our relationship with the earth has changed fundamentally. We now have the power to influence the forces of nature in a way previously unimaginable.

One of the first to bring this to the public's attention was the Prince of Wales. Ahead of his time, he also made the serious point that our relationship with the earth is a spiritual one.

You don't have to go any further than the Lord's Prayer to hear Jesus making connections between Heaven and the Earth. Unfortunately this is lost on most of us by the way we pray it. We say, ‘Thy will be done'; then we pause and add as an afterthought ‘on earth as it is in Heaven' The only time I've heard it prayed as it should be was in Nairobi Cathedral when 3000 people prayed without pausing: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven'.

Living nearer the earth, the people of Africa are more conscious of how dependent we are upon it, and how much we should therefore care for it.

As the environment moves up the political agenda, people of faith will add their voice to the debate. For, it's not just about the future of the planet, but because, as the Bible says, ‘The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it.'