Discussion

Brief descriptions of the contributors are provided at the end of the discussion.

Derek Burke

It seemed to me, in thinking about it, that there are three ways we might look at the relationship between the religious community (and I speak as a Christian), and the world around us. I’ll briefly say a sentence or two about each of them to open the discussion.

The first was picked up by Ghillean today and is the historic view where men and women were seen to be in a dominant position; the world was there to be "exploited". This is a view that was attacked by Lyn White in the 1970s and is now often seen as arrogant and dismissive. I’m old enough to remember when that was almost the natural way to look at the world and it’s worthwhile saying a word about that: growing up in the 1940s as a schoolboy the natural world was full of marvels, flowers, butterflies, birds, and it teemed with life: I collected butterflies and birds’ eggs - you never took more than one egg from a nest – but you didn’t hesitate about taking one egg because there were thousands of nests, nests in every hedgerow. So the world was like a garden, like an Edenic garden in some ways, though spoilt of course, where you walked and plucked and the taking of the odd flower didn’t do any great damage. And so we had no compunction about using the world for human prosperity or for the furtherance of human happiness. This was in fact the way most people have looked at the world as long as we have been hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.

So that’s one way of looking at the world and it goes back to Eden. We see the world as something to be used, used well of course, but you don’t seriously contemplate that you might damage the world. And then that changed, and I can remember that change:- I was in my middle twenties when at Yale in the early 1950s, I read the first Rachel Carson book which I think was called "The Sea Around Us". Suddenly we realized that the world was not totally elastic and that the numbers game was playing against us; that we could do damage that the system couldn’t handle and we began to see that the old relationships we had were no longer viable. The point I want to make is that, looking back, it’s very difficult historically to understand why people were so blind about a particular thing – why were the British so blind about slavery for so long and the Americans blinder even longer about slavery when it was clearly an insult to human dignity? But we were blind to the potential damage of the way we were treating the world for reasons I have tried to explain. So that’s the first way of looking at the world and Ghillean touched on this tonight.

The second is what has come to replace this, which is to see ourselves as stewards of the living world. Of course that’s a deeply biblical idea as Ghillean pointed out, and you’ll remember that Christ himself talked about giving us talents of which we were stewards. This idea lies very deep in western Christian thought, namely, that each of us has a responsibility for the talents that God has given to us and that we are to use them and to render account for them. I think the stewardship idea is a splendid one and I want to come back to it at the end, but I have some difficulties in getting to terms with it.

The third idea is to treat the world as a sacred object. This has sometimes been derived from the Gaia hypothesis which James Lovelock first formulated. The Gaia hypothesis sees the world as a self-controlling system with internal feedback which is more capable than we thought of handling insults to its stability. But that Gaia hypothesis developed into an idea in which the world itself became almost a sacred object, something that was to be reverenced for its own sake; personally I think this is Pantheism, that is seeing God in everything but not seeing God as separate. We spent a year in Colorado in the middle 1970s and this idea was very prevalent then. I remember the paper bags – the brown paper bag you take your lunch to work in at North American seminars – and the brown paper bags had "Recycle me to Mother Earth" printed on the outside. That was appropriate for paper bags, but my wife and I used to joke that it was perfectly appropriate for human beings also because we were also going to be recycled to Mother Earth. The idea still has force for there was an Earth Day last week in the US. I have a real uneasiness about this idea because it seems to turn the Earth, the system, the Gaia if you like, into something that replaces God. I think that’s a third way, a quasi religious way, of looking at the world.

Now you will be interested to know that this is not a new idea, and through Prof. Alan Cook, whom some of you may know and who has been here on previous occasions, I was told of a book by Robert Boyle – you remember Boyle’s law from Physics at ‘O’ level? – in this book, published in 1686, the scientist Robert Boyle attacked prevailing notions of the natural world which depicted "nature" as a wise, benevolent and purposeful being. In this treatise Boyle drew on his scientific findings, his knowledge of contemporary medicine, and his deep reflections on theological and philosophical issues, arguing that it was inappropriate both theologically and scientifically to speak of nature as if it had a mind of its own. So there’s the third way of looking at the world and Boyle attacked it in this marvellous book "A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature". If you ever want to read a book about what’s vulgar, here’s your chance; it’s £14.95 from Blackwells.

As serious, religiously- inclined people, we have to think through the way we look at the world and the question I want to leave on the table is the question of stewardship. Stewardship sounds a splendid idea, but what does it actually mean? What do I have to do? What do you have to do when you are told that you are a steward of the world’s ecosystem? What do I do politically, socially? How does it alter the way I behave? Because, and this is my final point, unless what we believe affects what we do, I think as James says in his epistle, it’s not all that it could be. So my question is "What does stewardship mean?

Brian Heap

Joe, you’ve got a particular rôle these days in stewardship of the environment – Joe’s an ecologist.

Joe Perry

What Derek said rang several bells. I think it’s interesting to explore the way that the public perceive ecology. To start with it’s an enormous problem in that when the public thinks of an ecologist in general they think of an environmentalist, not an academic ecologist. They do not think of someone who studies the discipline of ecology, the interrelationships between living organisms. That has caused a lot of confusion in the past and I think still causes confusion when people think of, for example, the Ecologist magazine published first by Edward and now Zac Goldsmith as being about ecology, when it’s not about ecology, it’s more about environmental issues. The two are separate. Environmental issues can be non-biological; for example ozone depletion by CFCs. Environmentalists are often highly politicized folk with an agenda; ecologists are those who pursue field work and have an interest in some academic branch of natural history.

The other thing that Derek touched on is the attitude of people towards the way that they think about the natural world. I think it’s worth remembering that the modern discipline of ecology has become much more of a hard science over the last fifty years, so much so that ecologists in my department used to say: "Well, I’m not going to subscribe to the Journal of Animal Ecology any more because I can’t understand it – it’s full of mathematics, and the American Naturalist journal is virtually unreadable because that’s also full of formulae and not much about natural history". But at the other extreme of environmentalism are those post-modernists, whom Derek referred to as pantheistic worshippers of Nature, who argue that science is socially constructed, lacking objective 'truth', and that natural systems are more than the sum of their parts. For them, reductionism should be replaced by an all-embracing holistic approach. This fails, both from the Christian and the scientific view. Scientifically, although ecology is a discipline of inter-relationships, one doesn’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater if one’s going to study our environment. One doesn’t have to leave the tools of modern science behind. For example, the Government ex-Chief Scientific Advisor, Lord May of Oxford, has built his career on taking particular components of ecosystems and characterizing them through mathematics in a reductionist way. There are many examples of ecosystems being studied very well through the usual tools of hypothesis testing.

A lot of the stewardship arguments seem bound up with the conflict and tensions portrayed in the Bible regarding our transition from hunter-gatherers, through a nomadic phase, to farmers. The transition to agriculture seems to play a crucial role. The Genesis 2 phrase to tend the Garden implies intervention and husbandry; the Fall in Genesis 3 has God telling Adam that by the sweat of his brow would he now eat of the soil; in Genesis 4 Abel kept flocks while Cain worked the soil; The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. In Genesis 8 God promises Noah to maintain seedtime and harvest, and then in the other books of the Pentateuch the Children of Israel are given, through Moses, detailed laws concerning farming and crops, despite the fact that as a nation they had at that time never yet settled in one place nor practised agriculture. In our own time, we continue to face ethical arguments about agriculture, concerning the effects of intensive farming on biodiversity, which pose challenges for the way we interpret stewardship.

The other thing I want to say relates to Sir Brian’s introductory remarks where he stressed the importance of humility in our approach. It seems to me that we have quite a lot of difficulty, not only with the public, but also with Government, in explaining just how much we understand of the natural processes we study on our planet. Let me give you an example. I’ve got a post-doc who’s looking at the Garden Tiger moth. Larvae of The Garden Tiger moth are what you might have called "woolly bears" when you were young. The moth has declined in the UK over the last 30 years. We know quite a lot about its decline – we know where it’s declined, and we’ve got some ideas of why it might have declined – it might be something to do with climate change – as it tends to like rather cool dry winters, and under climate change it’s getting warm wet winters. But we don’t know the precise mechanism responsible because, although we’ve got statistics concerned with its abundance in various sites across the UK, there’s been no really intensive study of its natural history. So if we were to present that to Government or to the public, we would have to say to them yes, we know quite a lot about the Garden Tiger, we’ve published four or five papers on it in the last couple of years, we’ve got data that goes back 30 years, and yet they would quite rightly be able to turn round to us and say "well, how much do you really know about it" and we would have to admit that actually we know very little.

After what I said about agriculture, I think it’s no coincidence that we know most about pest species, about species that are particularly noxious to us and eat our crops or spread plant diseases. So, we have to tell the public that yes, as scientists we know quite a lot about the natural world, we’ve been studying it, many of us, all our lives but that there is still an enormous amount left to know. If we go to Indonesia and collect all the insects living in a single tree in the middle of the forest, there is a relatively high probability that we might find a new species previously unknown to humankind, and by definition, we know absolutely nothing of the life cycle or natural history of that species. So in one sense we have to have the humility before God to say we actually know very little. Our failure to fully describe and to understand complex ecosystems is no reason to restrict research funding in this area and certainly does not invalidate anything that Sir Ghillean has said concerning the need for urgency in any initiatives to promote stewardship. But I would be very interested to know whether Sir Ghillean agrees or disagrees with that portrayal of how much we actually know as scientists.

Brian Heap

John, you’re in a key position, you run a large university botanical garden and you know a lot about what we do know and what we don’t know.

John Parker

Well, thank you, maybe, I know a tiny amount about nothing I think. Can I reorientate the discussion. I should declare first of all that I’m not a Christian, I’m a Buddhist, so it makes a slightly different perspective for me, listening to what’s been said by Ghillean. Of course I’ve heard Ghillean before and have enjoyed hearing his views and talking to other people.

Can I reorientate you all a little bit to see the world from the perspective that I see it? Many of you will have travelled to London no doubt and while waiting for the train on Cambridge Station, you’ve gone to that little stall and bought a cup of cappuccino, which is the coffee of the decade, I think. When you buy a cup of cappuccino you get three components: you get a serious cup of coffee with milk, then you get a layer of froth, and then you have a shaking and they ask you whether it’s cinnamon or chocolate or whatever you want on the top. And that for me is the analogy of what we’re talking about when we discuss the world: the serious cup of coffee with the milk are the plants, the froth on the top are the fungi and the little tiny shakings on top of that are the animals.

Now you laugh at that, but in fact how do you assess what the world is actually made of? You’ve talked about the garden tiger moth – well that’s one of the tiny shakes of chocolate, it’s irrelevant. Humans are to a large extent irrelevant because 97% at least of the world’s living material is plant. So when you take away that 97% you are left with 3%; when you have taken out another 2% at least which consists of the fungi, you’re left with 1%; and when you consider the 1%, part of that is human, most of it is not, so what we’re actually talking about from our own perspective, is that we’re actually not talking about anything serious at all; it’s lost within the experimental error of any scientist’s approach. So the concentration that we have on this anthropocentric view that has been proposed is, to me, a very difficult one.

So I approach the world I suppose from a sort of Buddhist philosophical perception in a different way. I suppose what I would say is that my way of interacting with organisms, whether human organisms or others, has to be one in which I view that organism with respect and what I try to do is to interfere as little in the life processes of all other organisms as I possibly can. And that puts you in a different position with respect to the world: it actually puts you at the bottom and it means that everything else is more worthy, if you like, than you are. So I can’t see myself that I can treat a plant any differently from an animal.

There was a wonderful letter I read from a confirmed vegetarian. I think it was in the Big Issue, which I regularly purchase. She said the world will only be a better place when human beings stop eating living organisms. I thought that is absolutely right – the only chance that the world really has is if humans stop eating living organisms, then the world at least could get on with its own business without this interference from humans. I agree with you, Derek, I don’t quite know what stewardship means. But what I do think it includes is respect for life, and that as humans we should respect life whether it’s of our fellow men, as we heard the very eloquent lady talking about Malawi, or whether it’s respect for all organisms including these things called plants, which make up the rest because of course the world will function totally without the benefit of any animal indulgence in this world at all. We are simply parasites, all of us, so in that way I think I would reorientate the discussion and I would look at the world from the point of view of thinking about how little we can interfere with the processes that go on, in the evolutionary processes on the face of the earth. We should try and minimize that – we should tread lightly. The old adage says "leave nothing behind but your footprints", and I should say that for humans, we’re not even able to leave behind footprints, we should leave behind on the face of the earth less than footprints.
And so for me it’s very interesting hearing you talk, because I don’t have an external source of reference. In Buddhism you are god - pantheism, I think you might call it; I don’t think that it’s pantheism, but I think that it’s life that’s important, and so for me it’s a different thing. I am part of that universal existence, I will go back to that universal existence in another guise and be – not a reincarnationist Buddhist, you don’t have to be – but I realize like anything else from a physical scientist’s point of view, I will be recycled in some other guise; maybe I will be eventually be a cockroach - but I won’t mind.

Brian Heap

Somebody asked a question about contributions from other faiths, so that was an interesting contribution from you. Who would like to pick up the stewardship angle and have a go at what we mean by it, what is meant by stewardship? Would anyone like to address Derek’s challenge on how we see stewardship and what it means in a practical sense?

Denis Alexander

Yes, I think the term stewardship has some rather anachronistic connotations which are perhaps unfortunate – one maybe thinks of people in coats on cruise ships serving you drinks. Stewardship is delegated responsibility from God given to humankind to care for planet Earth. This is the sense that I took from Ghillean Prance’s lecture (Ghillean touched on Genesis Chapter 1). It’s interesting that the teaching about humankind being made in God’s image which we find in Genesis Chapter 1 is given in the context of God’s command to be responsible and to care for all living things on the earth. So in the Christian view being ‘made in God’s image’ is very much wrapped up with these stewardly responsibilities with which we have been entrusted by God. So we have a serious responsibility to care for the world and to return it to its Maker better than it was before. Stewardship implies not just being passive and allowing the rest of the created order to exist in independence from us, but to recognize that we are indissolubly part of the created order and that we have a duty to care for it in a sustainable way.

The concept of stewardship resonates with evolutionary biology, because it is a simple fact that humans, with their big cortex and cognitive abilities, have greater potential for controlling their environment than any other species. So there is a sense in which we humans are stewards whether we want to be or not – the question is not whether we are stewards, but whether we are good stewards or bad stewards. Unfortunately, historically we have often been pretty bad stewards. In a different context stewardship also resonates with my own field of biomedical research, because a driving motivation of our research programmes is to subdue viruses, bacteria, cancer cells and so forth, thereby improving on the world around us and reducing the load of human suffering.

I find John Parker’s view that we can somehow tiptoe through planet Earth leaving no traces impossibly romantic. It does not cohere with the reality that in practice we humans have an enormous impact on our environment, for good or ill.

John Parker

Well I find yours full of value judgments, very strange to me –

Denis Alexander

Yes it is certainly a value judgment, but the Christian would wish to point out that the values are those that God has established, not those that we have made up. It is of the essence of stewardship that the authority to care for the Earth lies not in us but in God. In this view, the real damage to the environment has come when humankind has arrogantly lorded it over creation, putting themselves in the place that is rightfully God’s. In contrast, the idea of good stewardship is that the steward will one day have to give account to God as to what s/he has done with the Earth. So there is no room in stewardship for complacency – nor for arrogance. I think this view may be rather different from that being expressed by John.

John Parker

Can I come back on that? That’s completely wrong, you’ve misunderstood absolutely. What I said was that I am at the bottom and the whole world is on top of me: in other words I am responsible for every single organism. No, you’re absolutely and completely misunderstanding what I said.

You’ve already expressed to me an extraordinary concept, which is that you’re trying to give back something better, which means that you are already seeking, as far as I could see from a Christian perspective, to improve on the work of God. I can’t understand how you can think that for something to be better must imply that it needs improving. But I think you totally misunderstood what I was saying. What I was saying was I am responsible for all interactions with all organisms. We do need to tread lightly because it is only in that way that we can be responsible for the organisms which surround us, because we have this peculiar ability and I think we’re the only animal that has the capacity for destroying the world. That is something that gives us an enormous weight on our shoulders and no other animal can do that; the plants are completely impervious to animals other than humans – that’s why there are so many and so much of them – so I think it is too simplistic to try to reduce me to a simplistic, romantic view.

Denis Alexander

Thank you for your clarification - I think that now you are expressing something much closer to the Christian idea of stewardship, so I suspect that we have a lot more common ground than your cappuccino example might have suggested! If I might say so, I think the Cambridge Botanical Garden represents a wonderful example of good stewardship in practice. If the rest of the planet was cared for as well, then I don’t think we’d have much to worry about.

John Parker

I think it is – I see a common view in this – I don’t refer to a God in that context but I think there is a lot of common ground there in what you’re saying. Maybe I shouldn’t use the romantic expressions, I’m sorry.

Stephen Plant

I want to just add a coda to the viewpoint we’ve just heard expressed about the Christian faith. It’s in fact a deist view to suppose that the creation has been made and left to humankind to be solely responsible for. The Christian view, it seems to me, has something to do with providence, the ongoing control of God, the sovereignty of God in creation and God’s plan for it. Christians believe in a goal for creation and that goal is to some extent encapsulated in the person of Christ and his salvation history. So I think it’s certainly true that an understanding of creation, of ecology, and environmentalism needs to take account of human responsibility. It’s also true to say that humankind does have dominion, I think, over the Earth according to the Genesis narrative but that does not mean unrestricted lordship, as was made clear this evening. It’s also important to underscore that God’s eternal decree is bound up in predestination as a theological teaching and that God is essentially responsible for the preservation of biodiversities in the language we heard this evening.

Brian Heap

That’s an interesting idea. I must say that when I saw those slides Ghillean showed at the beginning of his talk there’s a particularly striking slide of Brazil - was it ten years ago – followed by one of what it’s like today, showing an enormous reduction in forests. One is left with a terribly depressing feeling – how do you reverse that destruction, particularly when you think in terms of the growing population that we face globally? I find that a very dismal, a very bleak picture.

Denis Alexander

I think Stephen has brought out an important point that our care for the Earth as good stewards has important theological implications. Arguably this is what Paul is alluding to in Romans Chapter 8 when he says that the creation, which is in "bondage to decay" is waiting "in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed". One understanding of this passage is that as people are redeemed in Christ so they are restored to being the kind of stewards – earth-keepers – that God originally intended. So no wonder the created order is "happy’" when it is liberated from decay by now being looked after properly!

I also agree with Stephen that stewardship does not involve ‘sole responsibility’ for creation by any means – that would indeed have deistic connotations. Clearly God has an ultimate plan for the created order that nothing will stop. But this certainly does not let humankind off the hook in allowing us to therefore be complacent. If Romans Chapter 8 tells us anything it is that God’s purposes and delegated human responsibilities are closely intertwined.

Brian Heap

I’d like now to turn to the engineers – we have three civil engineers here tonight – because you’re giving quite a lot of thought to these ideas of stewardship and sustainability and the way in which humankind wreaks havoc with its environment these days. How do you see what we’ve heard tonight on the stewardship issues, Peter – you’ve been lecturing on this?

Peter Guthrie

Well, I have to say that I have three angles and they’re all completely different from everybody we’ve heard – you’ll have to forgive me because you would expect an engineer to reduce everything to the pragmatic, but I’m almost completely convinced by what John has been saying and I think it actually accords quite closely with my Presbyterian upbringing. But I think the sort of Buddhist philosophy that you describe has this kind of element, it’s a sort of fundamental humility which sits very comfortably with Presbyterianism. However, I would be prepared to put money on it that you don’t have a dog, because I think as soon as you have a dog, this idea of putting yourself at the bottom of the heap immediately is called into question! I had a conversation with Bob White as to whether we’re worth more or less than a cabbage – there is a sense of denial of what is our innate humanity if we pretend that there is not, at least at one level, a sense in ourselves that we are superior and we do have control. My interpretation of that is that we then take on the responsibility that goes with that power; but to deny that we have, I can barely use the word superiority, but to deny that we have something akin to that, I think makes us fallacious in our approaches.

There was one thing that I felt was an unanswered question in the talk this evening and this goes back to the stewardship question. Ghillean’s first slide was of a burning rain forest or a tropical forest and what was not addressed was the question of whether that was being cleared for agriculture by large conglomerates, or whether it was cleared by a family to provide for subsistence farming. I don’t think that the issue is being sufficiently addressed of the immediacy of some people’s needs against what we now can afford to regard as ecological protection on a global scale. I think that we can be unbearably arrogant in the way that we regard ecological and environmental protection globally, just at the point at which we become industrially mature and deflect all our industrial activity elsewhere.

I know that the lady who discussed African population pressures after the lecture is not here to defend herself, but I would like to comment on her argument that Malawi is somehow unable to feed itself, and that Africa is somehow unable to feed itself because of population increases. Neither of those arguments is true, and the increase in population is not the cause, and the social breakdown is not the cause. It would be very sad to go away from this evening feeling that the population explosion was somehow an underlying cause of environmental degradation when we live in a country that is consuming the Earth’s resources at such an immoral and alarming rate, whereas 52 countries in Africa are consuming virtually no resources. I think it is self defence and self aggrandizement of the worst kind. I feel that we need to correct our global positioning system to make sure that we are looking at this in a truly global sense. Because we have some intellectual capacity (limited in the case of engineers of course), we have an additional responsibility to take a more responsible view than such a narrow view as was taken there.

Henrietta Mojapelo

What I always question is how unfair we are, not only to the environment, but to ourselves. As Peter was saying, in the Amazon forests there are people who have hardly anything to eat or to live on and they want to farm it and yet you find big trans-national companies going through everywhere from South America to Africa destroying the environment. In a way they are doing a good thing by bringing development but, at the same time, I think they are more or less being very selfish because they don’t put back what they have taken and that leads to all the poverty. I think it very much defeats the purpose of Christianity and other religions of actually being a good person just to the next person next to you, because the goal of trans-national companies is all about making as much money as you can. This whole business of globalisation I think personally is a bad thing.

I sometimes think we are being unfair to ourselves also in the sense that we want to make our lives more comfortable and want to live longer and to defy the laws of evolution. We want to find ways of living to 130 when we should be dying at probably 70; we want to find a treatment for everything, but I think some of these epidemics that are coming up are a result of what we’ve brought upon ourselves. We can’t say, "Oh, it’s a plague" or "We’re very unfortunate this is happening" – but I think most of these troubles we’ve brought upon ourselves, with not only the food that we eat, but even the air that we breathe and all these resources and the energy that we use, the pollution, the waste. You get water pollution and yet we still complain that we want to live longer.

Brian Heap

I hope you’re not talking about St. Edmund’s College! I think we should perhaps turn to Ghillean and particularly could we link with it the question of how was it – from your personal point of view, why did you go into this area of biodiversity yourself – from your Christian position or because you moved into the academic realm in this field and then related it to your Christian convictions?

Ghillean Prance

That’s the easy one. Some of the other things that have been brought up are not quite as easy. We’ve had some disparate views around the table. I certainly was interested in plants and I endorse what John said about the importance of plants. I’m glad we’ve got a botanist there to show that plants are winning. I have been interested in plants since I was a very small boy and I had two aunts who were very keen amateur botanists. They encouraged that interest, and by the time I was about ten I wanted to go to University to read Botany, so what Derek said was very reminiscent of my collecting one bird’s egg from every nest and collecting butterflies – I took over a whole room in the attic of my mother’s house and turned it into a museum. She got quite frantic with the things I was doing, boiling up any dead animal I could find to take its skull and study it, so I was a naturalist from the start.

The link to Christianity came a lot later. After I had done my degrees I went to the Amazon and did a lot of intensive work over several years. When I first went, I went, both as a Christian and as a biologist, but my interest in the Amazon was as a plant taxonomist initially and as an ecologist, to study the flora and I was fascinated by all that. Then I took a leave of absence from New York Botanical Garden to teach a course, to set out the first graduate programme in botany in the Amazon region, and one of the modules I put in that course was environmental impact. So I asked a colleague of mine, Robert Goodland, who was working for me at that time and soon became the first ecologist in the World Bank, to come and teach the course. We took the students to the trans-Amazon highway where that photo that you commented on was taken of a massive industrial development, needing the land. We took the first thirteen Master’s students, Robert Goodland and I, and all of us were appalled by what we saw, the devastation, the unsustainability of everything we were seeing. That project turned out to be one of the biggest failures economically in Brazil too, so it didn’t really work.

Robert Goodland wrote a book "Amazon Forest, Green Hell to Red Desert" and I wrote a chapter on the vegetation – it didn’t go that far at that time – but it set me and my students really thinking and from then on I changed the emphasis of my research a lot, instead of working just on taxonomy, pollination and all those sort of things that really still fascinate me more than anything. I had to do something about it and so I started working much more on economic botany and ethnobotany to address some of those problems and how you can use the ecosystems sustainably. If you look at the graduate students I’ve had, you’ll see that the first ones did their PhDs in pure taxonomy, then you move on to ones whose work was on the ethnobotany of this, that or the other tribe; and then to ones who have worked on the economics of various things in the Amazon etc. You can see that that really influenced the pathway of my research, but it also brought together my Christian belief and my work, because I began to see the real connections; they were rather isolated, quite frankly, before that as was my interest in what the Bible said about the stewardship of the environment and many other things like that.

I want to answer Derek though with two other points. You mentioned the Gaia hypothesis and Jim Lovelock – I know him too, he’s a good friend – but it is wonderful how creation works, because at the moment one of the things that really impresses me is the recent work that shows how the Amazon rainforest – and other rainforests, not just the Amazon - is the missing sink where a lot of the carbon is going. What has happened is that C02 has increased in the atmosphere and so carbon fertilisation is causing those trees to grow more and put on more biomass, and there we have the planet adjusting itself. So Jim Lovelock was just showing us a little bit of how the planet works and it’s just a pity he named it after a Greek goddess, because that way some good science and some more understanding of creation has been unduly criticized and misinterpreted. There are a lot of good things in the Gaia hypothesis and we’re seeing more and more of that as we mess with the planet. We’re taking the planet too far, beyond what it can adjust to.

After the lecture, one of the people in the audience asked me what I can do about all this. I’m sorry that there wasn’t a question in public about that. I think from your sense of stewardship you were asking that question and I think that is very important, that we don’t just try to make a theoretical ethic, but that we practise what we preach. This lady was asking me what can she do, but I discovered that she’s doing almost everything I could think of and that was good to hear. But I hope you are thinking about what fuel you consume, because the old adage to think globally and act locally is very important. What we do makes a difference – it makes a difference in the local environment, but it makes a difference to the world as a whole. I think John Parker was talking about interconnectedness in the way he brought things out. The small things count and so I don’t think that you personally or any of us have to really change the world, but we must be practising in every way we can, and it’s hard to be consistent.

I take public transport when I can and I’m glad we walked across to Emmanuel College and didn’t take a car, Brian, that was the sort of thing we should do. But on the other hand on Monday I’m flying off to New York and Hawaii and using a lot of fuel to do that and it is very difficult to be consistent – that worries me too about the way we behave.

When I put solar hot water in the house it made a huge difference to my heating bills and so it’s sometimes personally beneficial as well to do the right thing for the environment. So do act locally, but it’s more than just our behaviours, it’s also acting locally being politically active writing to the council about issues in the community, writing to MPs, etc. and the meaning of stewardship is really to be behaving as a steward and not as a destroyer, I think.

What else? Someone was talking about humility versus superior attitudes of humans. I think we have an example perhaps that has been suggested, in fact it was suggested by Lyn White amongst others, in St. Francis, - and I wonder what, as a Buddhist, you think of St. Francis - (I think he was a Buddhist actually!) - but this came out of his Christian belief. The canticle of St. Francis is a wonderful praise of all these organisms but it’s a praise of creation and not a worship of creation, it’s quite obvious in that fact. There’s a very good article on St. Francis that I read yesterday in this latest edition of the journal Science and Christian Belief.

I too have a Scottish background and I think the two of you are coming out of the Celtic church and that has influenced the Scottish Presbyterian. If we really want to learn a lot about it we need to go back to some of the Celtic traditions and look at their attitudes, which are much closer to St. Francis in what they think.

Brian Heap

In the current issue of Science and Christian Belief there’s a paper by Jan Bersino which is called "Why is St. Francis of Asissi the Patron Saint of Ecologists?" and there are an interesting couple of sentences from where he says "The key to an understanding of St. Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility not merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy of creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures" and so on: I’m just whetting your appetite. Some people won’t agree with this article, but I think it is quite an illuminating one of Francis of Assissi and perhaps we might close on that note at this stage. Ghillean’s going to be here and I’m sure will be very happy to continue perhaps long into the night, although he has to go back to the West Country tomorrow and then just a short trip to Samoa on Monday.

May I thank you all very much indeed for coming this evening. Thank you to Ghillean for stimulating us and for giving us an excellent lecture and for joining together some interesting discussions we’ve had around the table.

Bob White

Can I also say that I’m very conscious that a few people round the table didn’t have a chance to say anything because of time limitations: I would love you to write down a paragraph or two on anything relating to this general topic and send it to me – including questions as well.

Charles F. M. Kingdon and Stephen Evans

What price a soul? We are guardians of God's many gifts and should strive in grace, fellowship and a righteous spirit to protect and nurture these blessings. It is also our duty and joy, with the talents God has given each and every one of us, to bring our fellow man to know His saving grace and eternal life.

If spreading the gospel involved an impact to the environment, particularly the loss of another species, would the end justify the means?

Ghillean Prance

We should spread the gospel in a way that does not impact upon the environment. Christ is Lord of all creation and we have no right to destroy His creation. The spreading of the gospel in the past has not always been sensitive to creation and it is our duty as Christian earthkeepers to be sensitive to this issue, which is really a question of balance of the whole teaching of the Bible and not just part. Creation is part of God's revelation to us and it also helps people to come to know Christ.

Dinner/discussion attendees

Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, (speaker), President of the Institute of Biology, Science Director of the Eden Project (Cornwall), Visiting Professor Reading University, McBryde Professor of Botany, National Tropical Botanical Garden, and formerly Director, Royal Botanic Kew Gardens.

Dr. Denis Alexander, Fellow of St. Edmund’s College and Chairman of the Molecular Immunology Programme, The Babraham Institute, Editor of the journal Science & Christian Belief and writes/lectures on science and faith.

Jared Bakuza, Chevening Scholar in Biodiversity attached to the UNEP-Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) at the WCMC (World Conservation Monitoring Centre), Cambridge.

Professor Derek Burke, Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund’s College, former Vice-Chancellor University of East Anglia, Molecular Biologist, Former Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons and the Anglican Church. Member of European Group on Life Sciences.

Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Cook, Vice-Master St. Edmund’s College, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biologist and Biochemist.

Dr. Stephen Evans, Biologist.

Mrs. Moira Gardiner, Bursar, St. Edmund’s College, affiliated lecturer in Land Economy.

Professor Peter Guthrie, Fellow of St. Edmund’s College, Civil Engineer, first Royal Academy of Engineering Professor of Sustainability, Cambridge.

Sir Brian Heap FRS, Master of St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, former Vice-President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, former member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, member NATO Science Committee, Brussels, endocrine physiologist.

Professor Colin Humphreys, FREng, Materials Science & Metallurgy, Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Materials science interests range from electronic and photonic materials to high-temperature materials for aerospace engines.

Professor David Ingram, Master of St. Catharine’s College, Chairman of the Darwin Initiative, former Regius Keeper, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

Dr. Charles Kingdon, CK Associates, Consultant, Biochemist.

Henrietta Mojapelo, St. Edmund’s College MPhil student in Engineering, Botswana.

Professor John Parker, Director, Botanical Gardens, University of Cambridge.

Dr. Joe Perry, Rothamsted Experimental Station, Harpenden. Ecologist, jointly responsible for the design and analysis of the Farm Scale Evaluations of GMHT crops.

Rev. Dr. Stephen Plant, Senior Tutor and Research Fellow, Wesley House, Cambridge.

Mr. Will Rogers, Civil Engineer, Elder at Queen Edith Chapel, Cambridge.

Dr. Paul Shellard, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cosmologist working on the early universe, Physicist.

Cara Wall, St Edmund’s College PhD student studying Evolutionary Anthropology and a member of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies.

Professor Robert White FRS, Fellow of St. Edmund’s College, Department of Earth Sciences, volcanoes and earthquakes, writer on science and religion.