The Rev Dr Michael Spence

Good morning.
I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land’, mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.”

Reflecting on nature ‘under control’ as opposed to ‘out of control’, I wonder if this notion of ‘control’ isn’t exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff’ to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control’ has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control’ than ever before.

The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control’ but of ‘authority’, of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control’ nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can’t. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country’, limit the occurrence of more devastating fire.

Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.