stewards of the earth

I cannot resist commenting on the BBC article yesterday questioning whether it was time to eat our pets. Of course this was a little tongue in cheek but there was a serious question at the bottom of it all which was about our carbon footprint. I went ahead and calculated our household and then my own. It was a little depressing. Long haul flights really added to my total and I was told by the calculator that if everyone lived like me we would need four earths to house everyone.

Whilst I can improve our recycling - I currently have weeks where I do very badly - and try to remember the re-usable bags - to really improve my footprint I have to look at our lifestyle. We have just fitted a programmable thermostat which will help but the simple fact of the matter is that we are greedy for resources. Our house is too big to ever be fair to the rest of the world, our car is an everyday feature of our lives, I have made three international flights this year (all of them necessary but all of them carbon emission rich).

For me, thinking about these things and trying to rectify them is important - it is part of being a Christian - looking after our world. I do not do as well as I should but as changes in life approach I am thinking very hard about how to establish the next phase of life with better parameters for environmental stewardship - living close enough to amenities not to use the car and having good public transportation links.

I realize that this, in many ways, is a luxury. I also know that if I was staying in this house there would be many things I could do to minimize my footprint. More than that I know in my heart that I am taking too many of the world's resources and simply saying that I am somehow trapped into that and I can't help it, is not good enough.

Many things in life do not sort themselves out overnight - this week I will make an effort to put ALL the recyclables in the blue boxes and remember those reusable bags for the store. But I will have to do more, we all will, to fulfil our role as stewards of God's wonderful Earth.