Martin Henry

Planet Earth is in deep trouble. While we here were busy debating the new environmental levy introduced by the Government, another Earth Day rolled by almost without any public notice Sunday gone, April 22. Earth Day websites say some 500 million people in 175 countries worldwide now celebrate Earth Day. Earth Day was an initiative of US Senator Gaylord Nelson and was first celebrated in 1970.

The UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) in its 2007 report has all but offered as settled fact the view that human action is driving a general climatic warming of the planet. You have probably noticed some little things like an earlier blooming of the famous yellow poui. Mango season seems to be starting earlier as well. In the magazine, just called 'Planet Earth', of the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), British scientists have documented, among others, that ladybirds and butterflies are waking from winter sleep some three weeks earlier than 30 years ago. Some 157,000 volunteer observations last year in an annual springwatch survey generated the data.

Most inportant report

Prime Minister Tony Blair has described the Stern Review of the economics of climate change, which his government commissioned, as "the most important report on the future published by the government in our time in office. A U.S. research corporation has just released a major report on 'National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.'

Some little startling things are showing up the integrated wholeness of planetary systems - and their at risk condition. Whole Earth Science, still in its infancy, is making rapid strides, powered by major computing power. Polar ice north and south bears the signature of lead from automobile fuel showing the long-distance impact of human action. Arctic ice has recorded Europe's switch from leaded to unleaded petrol.

In the face of the growing crisis of global environmental sustainability, scientific and evangelical Christian leaders met on the matter earlier this year, in January. In the face of a common threat science and religion are ready to abandon their largely contrived hostilities. According to a report picked up by the e-newsletter Rachel's Democracy and Health News, "The meeting was convened by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and the (US) National Association of Evangelicals."

Interestingly, 'the creation' was a non-controversial starting point. The meeting was "envisioned as a first exploratory conference, based on a shared concern for the creation, to be held among people who were in some ways quite different in their world views."

Show more passion

The two groups said, "We clearly share a moral passion and a sense of vocation to save the imperiled living world before our damages to it remake it as another kind of planet. We agree that we share a profound moral obligation to work together to call nations to the kind of dramatic change urgently required in our day."

The language of their "Urgent Call to Action, sent to President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi", plus numerous other political leaders and organisations, waxes sublime: "We agree that our home, the Earth, which comes to us as that inexpressibly beautiful and mysterious gift that sustains our very lives, is seriously imperiled by human behaviour."

The group saw their meeting as the "beginning point of a major shared effort among scientists and evangelicals to protect life on Earth and the fragile life support systems that sustain it, drawing on the unique intellectual, spiritual, and moral contributions that each community can bring. There is no excuse for further delays. Business as usual cannot continue yet one more day," they declared with "one voice."

How much wiser and better off would we be today if a century and a half, at least, had not been foolishly squandered in a contrived faith-science war?

Science and its applied results, without its moral moorings with which it began in a 'Christian' West was bound to make shipwreck and drag the planet with it as its power multiplied. Religion, failing to engage scientific understanding of the natural world, was bound to lose moral influence in a world increasingly powered by a recklessly successful science. Let the belated dialogue continue. The hiatus of the past has seriously contributed to the damage done to the planet.