Special places?

Recently my church has been studying the opening chapters of Genesis, and although the focus was on male and female relationships, I couldn’t help noticing again the commands to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen. 1: 28) and to work the garden and care for it (Gen. 2: 15).

Taken together, this has given humanity a cultural mandate to develop society, using the resources provided by the earth, but also a creation-care mandate, to nurture the earth that provides our God-given home.

So, later in Genesis 4, we find that people start building cities, raising livestock, playing music and working metal. As a town planner I’m more interested in building cities than raising livestock. You could argue about whether cities are a good thing or not and whether, had it not been for the effects of Adam’s sin, we’d still be living in a garden. Yet given the heavenly-city imagery of Revelation 21 I’m inclined to think that cities are not intrinsically bad, and at the very least are capable of redemption. As someone once said, the Bible starts in a garden and ends in a garden city.

The same goes for everything that makes up urban life – houses, businesses, roads, railways, power stations, and so on. Building these things is for the good of society. And yet, the Fall in Genesis 3 not only broke our relationship with God and with each other, but with the rest of creation as well.

The way we plan for built development often abuses our responsibility for creation care. We destroy special places and we build in a way that excludes nature from our lives.

Take High Speed 2, for example, the railway that was going to usher in a green transport revolution, slashing the travel time between London and the north of England as well as Scotland, and getting people out of polluting cars and planes. It’s a sorry tale of poor project management and ballooning costs, which led to its controversial truncation last year. Now it’s stopping short at Birmingham and there’s some doubt about whether it will even get to Euston.

But financial costs aside, there was also a huge cost to wildlife, despite claims to be the greenest of railways. Train enthusiasts will know that the faster you go, the straighter the route has to be, which makes it very inflexible when it comes to natural features that lie in its path. Last year I visited Calvert Jubilee, a small nature reserve in Buckinghamshire and home to rare butterflies, which had the edge of the reserve sliced off by HS2 construction works (the contractors initially entered the site without permission, but that’s another story).

Not far from where I grew up, the Cubbington Pear Tree, which was a sapling at the time of the American War of Independence, was felled to make way for the Warwickshire section of HS2 despite widespread protests. It epitomised the many veteran trees and ancient woodlands which have been lost and are impossible to replace. No amount of new tree planting can ever really compensate.

I’ve been reflecting on a lot of stories like this recently while researching for a book about saving special places for nature from inappropriate development. It covers everything from airports and wind farms to housing and golf courses. There are also going to be some examples of building in harmony with nature. Aimed at a secular audience of nature-lovers, there’s nonetheless much that Christians can learn from when it comes to creation care.

Which brings me to tell you that I’ll be signing off from this column for some months to write the book as I’ve got a deadline to meet. I hope you’ve found it helpful, and I look forward to returning in due course. In the meantime, keep on caring for creation.