“Have dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth.”  Gen 1. 28

As I am writing in the middle of August I am struck, as I am sure you are by what our weather forecasters keep calling “unseasonal weather.”  The fact of the matter is that the seasons are changing and have been for the last few decades.  We were told they would change and that our climate in this country would become both warmer and wetter and so it is doing.  I write after a warm day yesterday during which is poured down much of the day (in August!) and after a weekend where we had to relocate our Silver Wedding celebrations from the garden party we had planned into church because the large tent we had borrowed to keep the sun off people had blown down in the gales we had!  The bough of the tree in our driveway that fell down and narrowly missed my car is still to be cut up and dealt with and today I am wearing a fleece as in my study because I refuse to even contemplate putting the heating on in the house despite others saying they are feeling chilly.

It’s all going horribly wrong!  The climate is changing and we are the ones who are responsible for it getting worse.  I don't think the words of God in Genesis above were meant to be taken in the way we have taken them.  When we were told to have dominion over the earth it was to have some sort of control, yes, but it was, I think to be good stewards of it and to look after it.  God left it in our care.  The question we have to ask ourselves is, “How well are we doing that?”

As I write, Greta Thunberg, the 15 year-old school girl who spoke so well in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on climate change is crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing boat to bring attention to climate change and to lobby President Donald Trump to do more to tackle an issue that he has denied even exists.  But then we are all guilty of denying what is going on around us.  We may believe in our heads that changing climate is a reality, but our hearts are taking a while to catch up.  If they had, we would be thinking very hard about everything we do and how we live, from the transport we use, to what we eat, wear, how warm we keep our homes, the products we buy, the kinds of holidays we take. Everything we do has an environmental impact and it is up to us to do what we can to keep our footprint as small as we can.  More than all that, we also have a voice and the power of the vote.    

It is looking increasingly likely that there will be a General Election later this year.  With so much arguing going on politically over Brexit it seems that the environment is being pushed to the back burner.  Perhaps we seriously need to be thinking of voting for parties that have a clear environmental focus if the right kind of legislation is going to be put in place to accelerate the take up of renewal energy supplies, the use of electric vehicles etc. rather than the cut in incentives for those things that have happened in recent years.  

For a nation that is obsessed by the weather and loves talking about it, we seem to have forgotten that it’s our climate that drives the weather and where the climate is concerned we are now in the driving seat.  So, if we are going to have the right kind of dominion that God gave us, a beneficent one over our climate, it will mean that we are going to have to change and not simply, like a rain cloud, hope that it just passes by…

With every blessing 

Tim

A Song of the Weather

January brings the snow, Makes your feet and fingers glow.

February's ice and sleet, Freeze the toes right off your feet.

Welcome, March, with wint'ry wind, Would thou weren't not so unkind. 

April brings the sweet spring showers, On and on for hours and hours. 

Farmers fear unkindly May, Frost by night and hail by day. 

June just rains and never stops, Thirty days and spoils the crops. 

In July the sun is hot: Is it shining? No it's not! 

August, cold and dank and wet, Brings more rain than any yet. 

Bleak September's mist and mud, Is enough to chill the blood. 

Then October adds a gale, Wind and slush and rain and hail. 

Dark November brings the fog, Should not do it to a dog. 

Freezing wet December, then... Bloody January again!

                                                                        Flanders and Swann