THINGS WE ALL SHARE

By Julian Duckworth

Today, care for the world around us comes high on everybody’s list. This is something we all share and must take responsibility for. We’re learning fast that the world’s resources are not endless and we must clean up the planet and conserve our use of virtually everything.

This stark fact can help to remind us of a number of important things. One is that the human race lives in one community around the globe and none of us can afford to live in isolation or stay unaware of the effect we may have on everybody else. Today it is becoming possible to ‘seed’ rain clouds above heavily populated cities to provide water, but the effect is to lessen the amount of rainfall in the surrounding region.

We have been – and still are to some extent – greedy in terms of consuming resources and taking so much for granted. We are slowly realising that the world works in a very balanced way and to take too much not only deprives others from having enough to survive on but harms the overall harmony of the planet.

At the beginning of the Bible there is the story of the Garden of Eden, obviously a statement about a world that is functional as well as beautiful. It says that God put human beings in the garden to tend it and take care of it. This is how we need to be viewing the world around us, basically as a garden in need of tending.

The present generation are not the ones primarily affected by the longer-term consequences. We need to conserve and sustain the living planet so that our children and their children can look at green trees and blue skies and live safely and healthily in this world which is still a remarkably beautiful and richly-resourced world in which to live.