Reader Writes July 2021

His Royal Highness the King, enjoying the early morning summer sun, reached forward and pulled his spaniel’s silken ears with affection. It was time to explore his gardens together and look for the tell-tale signs of rabbits in the flower beds and badgers digging up the lawn. Good Heavens, he thought, draining his mug of strong tea, I’m in my 90th year and it’s already almost 20 years since the pandemics started sweeping the world. How ignorant and how reckless we were then, stretching the natural environment beyond its natural capacity to renew and heal. Whether lethal viruses or cataclysmic weather patterns, we were counting the costs. Yet, things had changed. Many of the King’s cherished environmental projects had been borne on the rising tides of realisation and good will. Politicians had at last been made to listen. Prevailing free market doctrinesthat had driven so much self-harming economic change had veered towards broader human values and sustainable living. Just look at farming in our own country he thought. Welsh sheep had left the uplands, deer had come in, “rewilding” had happened naturally. Native forests were establishing, softwood plantations emerging, beavers were well established, slowing upland drainage, and wonderfully he even had pine martens in the garden taking the squirrels. It should also be added that some idiot allowed a pack of wolves to escape from a nature park; they too were spreading. He placed his bible beside the empty mug and enjoyed some final prayerful moments. He’d always loved that passage: “Do not be anxious about your life …..Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Matt6:25. Yes, I must book a call with that young Archbishop; she was putting environmental stewardship of God’s creation right at the centre of the Church’s mission. But isn’t the Church about people, many had asked? Well yes, but the whole of creation had been reconciled to God by Christ, people and all of life. At last the Church itself was being rewilded, but of course not always in ways that thrilled the traditionalists. At last the spaniel was racing across the dewy Cotswold lawn on the trail of an overnight fox, and the King was heading for the veg patch to see what the pigeons had been up to. Bugling calls above made him look up; oh glory he muttered, bee eaters! They were now breeding here which was exciting even if the reasons were worrying. We all have to change; he had refused to fly for many years now, and indeed his travelling and official engagements were mostly digital. How slow we had been to learn; but at last aircraft overhead were a rarity. The King’s big focus had always been on the sequestration side of the carbon equation. The soil itself, when regenerativly farmed, was swallowing up carbon and growing in fertility. And other more radical changes were underway, a sort of reversal of the Enclosures. Most of his agents were apprehensive but now there was permitted access to all Crown estates; ‘fewer pheasants, more peasants’ as one of those scurrilous papers put it. Some things don’t change, but that includes God himself who values us and commands us in turn to care for his creation.

Robert MacCurrach