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Good Morning. It is exactly twenty five years since the botanist David Bellamy and David Shreeve, his colleague at the Conservation Foundation, asked me to assist in launching their Yew Tree Millennium Project. Dr Bellamy, whose death was announced by his family this week, was hugely enthusiastic about distributing cuttings from ancient Yew Trees to parishes up and down the country to mark a new millennium. It was a mammoth undertaking. But the most vivid memory I have of David Bellamy was at the opening of the project as he accompanied myself and my two children around the gardens of Bishopthorpe Palace in York, explaining with great simplicity the origins and characteristics of every plant we came across. [He was astonishingly knowledgeable with that infectious popular touch and great sense of humour.] The UN Climate Change conference which concluded in Madrid yesterday reflects, in our own day, how the climate change argument has developed. But as obituaries of David Bellamy have underlined, although he saw his task as raising awareness of how important the natural world was, he described early siren warnings of climate change as “poppycock”. The arguments for urgent action were yet to be stepped up. When I rang David Shreeve at the Conservation Foundation on Thursday to pay my respects, he reminded me of how important faith was to David Bellamy, who was the son of a church minister. “His faith”, said Mr Shreeve “played a part in him wanting to develop the millennium project as a sign of community and a symbol of creation”. And it’s true that in my own conversations with David Bellamy, he had the air of a kind of modern day Old Testament prophet both in looks and manner. He was an impressionists’ dream. His message was that we needed to know more about the soil and the plants and that we must understand the dynamics of creation better because of our faith as good stewards of the environment. Psalm 64 – you provide for the earth and you bless its growth is a perfect example of how so many of the Old Testament psalms reinforce the notion of stewardship as being at the heart of how we are to look after the planet. So much has changed since then. And it’s a coincidence that we say goodbye to Dr Bellamy in a week when the modern face of Climate Change, Greta Thunberg, has been unveiled as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Prophets emerge in every generation. Each makes their own voice heard. In David Bellamy’s case, his attempts to make environmental issues more accessible and popular have certainly been built on by a new generation with a stark, updated message which as stewards we can no longer ignore.