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The weather really has been all over the place lately hasn’t it? A few weeks ago we were sweltering in temperatures of 82f, hotter than it was in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. In fact those temperatures made it the warmest April since records began 348 years ago way back in 1659. So in went the summer bedding and out came the garden furniture! But May saw us back in winter again so out came the winter woollies and on went the central heating! The seasons do seem to be all over the place don’t they? Whether this is due or not to global warming I do not know and neither it seems are scientists in complete agreement about what is going on. But we are constantly being told about high carbon emissions, greenhouse gasses, renewable energy and recycling as ways of “saving the planet” and offsetting our “carbon footprint” to use the current jargon. And pollution is a growing problem isn’t it, although not a new one, as it’s been with us for hundreds of years. As the Industrial Revolution got underway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries iron production, coal mining, steam power and heavy engineering together left more than a “carbon footprint” on the landscape – more a cocktail of choking chemicals and soot! To add to the misery as farm labourers were driven from the land to seek work in the filthy, stinking towns that were springing up all over the place people sought to drown their sorrows in drink. In those days life was short, diseased and intolerable until clean drinking water and Victorian sewers began alleviating what must have been awful living conditions for many. In Hard Times Dickens paints a vivid description of what it must have been like living alongside heavy industry. Coketown was a town of red brick that is; if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. And when Dickens describes the water courses there he speaks of the canal as black and the river running; purple with ill smelling dye. At least we can breath the air today and fish are once again swimming and thriving in once polluted rivers. The difference today, however, is that pollution is a world-wide phenomenon in which many nations are recklessly belching out filth into the atmosphere with little or no regard for the consequences. It also means that practically every industrialised nation on earth, and every one of its citizens, has a responsibility towards the environment – to cut down and clean up! And this makes good sense for why would anyone treat as a dustbin that upon which we so utterly depend? We all have a responsibility to do something; and here the emphasis is upon the “all” including business. And just as it is important for all of us to recycle as much as we can it is incumbent upon legislators do so intelligently so that communities are not left infested with odours, flies, vermin or anything else that might endanger public heath. But something I do find irritating is that I am expected to dispose of “responsibly” the mountains of junk mail that flows like an avalanche though my letterbox every day, stuff I’ve neither asked for nor want, yet over which I have no control. The real responsibility, in my view, lies firmly with those who produce (and transport) this rubbish to my home - and I would like it to stop!
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So to help them get the message I’ve taken to removing my personal details from junk mail before putting it back into the system again hoping it will find its way back to the original source. The fact is we’ve strayed a long way from Eden and if we really are sincere in wanting to restore it again then “we,” the nations of the earth, will need to begin “loving” the world as much as God (its creator) loves it.
In Jesus’ name
Derek Marsh June 2007
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