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Good morning.

Amidst the heavy dose of news gloom, I think it is probably permissible to allow ourselves a momentary smile at the story of the council worker who was caught strimming the plastic grass on a Somerset roundabout. The local Council provided the reassurance that ‘additional training will be offered’.

A failure to distinguish what is man made from what is not, has here a funny side, but arguably it is a failure to respect this distinction which accounts for our environmental crisis.

The story of creation in the first chapters of the book of Genesis is not of course – let’s get this out of the way - in any sense putative science. It is rather a sustained reflection on the natural world and humanity’s place in it.

I think I was taught, way back when in some rather dreary lessons for O’level religious studies, that the creation of humankind on the sixth and final day of God’s activity symbolised that humans are the pinnacle of creation, that at which it all aims. And since it is humans who are telling the story, from a human point of view, it would be unsurprising if this were indeed the takeaway. But it seems to me that this take on the story misses something important. After God has got the preliminaries out of the way on the first and second days, making day and night, dry land and deep waters, he turns on days three, four and five to trees and grass, sun, moon and stars, birds and beasts and so on. And on those days we hear the repeated refrain ‘And behold God saw that it was good’. There is no suggestion that ‘it was good’ for humans specifically – just that it was good.

Human invention and ingenuity has, from the very beginning of our history, applied itself to the natural world and adapted and molded it to our ends. But it is perhaps only in the most recent period that these human capacities threaten to overwhelm the natural world and leave nothing – not even the highest mountains, the deepest oceans, or the very coldest regions – unaffected by our interventions. The determination to turn everything to our purposes threatens to bring about the demise of our species and all our purposes to nothing. Our technological capabilities have vastly expanded, but not the wisdom with which to govern them.

A failure to distinguish plastic grass from the genuine article is one thing; a failure on a bigger scale to respect that and other genuine articles is another. But it might be that in the latter case, as well as in the former, we all need some retraining – if it’s not already too late.

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