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Maybe it's because in Glasgow we are increasingly aware of the climate change conference happening in a few weeks that I have become more alert to information concerning the care of the earth. In this context I discovered that if you have a spare £100,000, you can buy a robot which will milk your cows. I'm not presently contemplating such a purchase partly because I don't have that money to spare and also because it would be of little use in inner city Glasgow. But it would have implications in the part of rural England where I was working at the weekend, an area of exceptionally clean air, lush vegetation and authentic farm cooking. Cattle farming is something about which like most urbanites I know nothing. I never knew how many times a day cows are milked or how supplements are added to their feed according to the milk yield. I asked the farmer with whom I was staying what he thought about robotic milking. He said it could be highly effective but it couldn't assess the health of an animal in the way that the human eye could. Or, to put in other words, it couldn't care. That word 'care' is being used more and more with regard to the natural world as the COP 26 draws closer. It's not just an environmental concept. It is also a theological injunction. Humanity, according to the Bible, is not called to dominate creation but to care for it. Indeed the report of a government inquiry into the proposed demolition of a mountain in Harris revealed an even more pertinent theological truth. For at that inquiry the Gaelic speaking biblical scholar, Donald MacLeod, noted that when the Bible encourages humanity to till the ground, the more common usage of the Hebrew verb means not to till but to serve. This perception is later developed in the Law of Moses where it becomes compulsory every seven years to give the earth a rest. And the breach of that injunction leads prophets like Jeremiah to say 'your wrongdoing upsets nature's order and keeps her bounty away.’ (Jer 5:25) We should not presume that the health of the globe is primarily dependent on the care of those who daily till the soil and herd the cattle. The bigger issue is how those of us who live comfortably in urban communities can own our responsibility for the health of the planet not just in what we purchase or avoid but in how we actively care for creation.