Joy into action

During my walking on the Jakobsweg, I read Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium. I found it inspirational. The joy of the gospel, it begins, fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.

It's a long document - more like a book actually: but don't let that put you off reading it. Because it's informally written and well-translated - and full of good stuff. One passage I particularly liked was this: An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better that we found it. We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells here, with all its tragedies and struggles, its hopes and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. The earth is our common home and all of us are brothers and sisters.

I was reminded of this when Mary Colwell came to Cheltenham last night, to speak at one of our regular, if infrequent, Christian Ecology Link meetings. Her title was "Surprised by Joy, Impatient for Change". We heard more about the first part than the second, but no matter. For one evening at least it was possible to be an environmentalist and not a killjoy.

What is joy? Mary began by asking, besides being one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Not the same as happiness! Do animals experience joy? Hard to say, but perhaps it's through nature alone that we can be truly surprised by joy. Sylvia Earle talks of discovering it when "dancing" deep in the oceans with an octopus: Mary herself, sitting on a Cornish beach, en-joyed a seal popping up amid the breaking waves. For her, it brought to mind the thought voiced by former slave, George Washington Carver: God speaks to us every hour about nature if we'll only tune in.

But John Muir was the figure who dominated the talk: even among the environment-minded, he is little spoken of. Born in Scotland in 1838, one of seven children of staunchly Presbyterian parents, he moved with the family to the United States, where they set up a frontier farm. Seeing the destruction brought to the wilderness by the advance Westwards, he became its advocate, his campaigns bearing fruit within the National Parks system.

Everywhere John Muir looked, he saw God, and joy in nature motivated him to wonder - and to act, in order to protect forests, rivers and birds. He died in 1914, the same year as Martha, the very last of the passenger pigeons whose fate he so much lamented.

For Muir as for us, joy isn't a passive emotion: it arouses a sense of injustice, and makes you want to do something: most people are on the world, Muir wrote: not in it... touching, but separate... I must get out into the mountains to learn the news. A prophetic voice.

In his "Surprised by Joy", C.S. Lewis says, Joy is never in our power, and pleasure often is; so if, in the face of adversity, we suffer a defeat, then we can never lose faith in humanity - just pick ourselves up for the next battle.

"The world we made"

Jonathon Porritt's new book envisions the world as it will be 37 years hence, in 2050. It's a fictional memoir, looking back to yesterday, today and the intervening years, and postulating that we have responded to all the warnings that he amongst others have issued to date: that unless we alter course sharply, our world then will not be a pleasant place into which to be born.

It is getting on for 37 years ago that I first met Jonathon, in the heady, fairly early days of the Ecology Party: with the eloquence and passion he showed at Party gatherings, he stood out from the pack. I admired, not least, the way he used his experience as a comprehensive school teacher for tackling conference hecklers; but more significantly he was amongst the first to join me and others in recognising that God and his creation were the elephant in the room. As a result, we went on to establish what is now Christian Ecology Link. (I took this photograph of him at our annual conference last year, where he was a keynote speaker.)

Nobody has worked more unrelentingly for the green cause. Not that we have always seen eye to eye. In sending me my copy of The world we made Jonathon expressed the hope that what he has written about population "won't be too infuriating." "Hostile to addressing population issues," the book says, "was a great army of environmentalists and left-wing politicians in Western countries," arguing "that the real issues were poverty, injustice and over-consumption in the West." Mea culpa. The book goes on, "This kind of approach was not just stupid, but cruel." As Jonathon envisages in his inscription, my question remains, does the end then justify the means?

Various turns in Jonathon's career have been marked by his publishing a new book, but none will - I guess - have brought great riches through royalties. The world we made may just be different. "For me," Jonathon says in his postscript, "writing this book has been a big deal." And indeed an immense amount of research and imagination has gone into it. As you expect from a Phaidon publication, it is beautifully produced and presented. Comprehensive, authoritative, easy to read, and aimed at an international non-specialist market, I foresee it selling well. The question here is, will it release the energies in its readers that are needed to produce the change it predicates? And as a supplementary, how much flying will the author have to do to promote those sales?

"The Art of Fielding"

I have a copy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, one of the Great American Novels, given me as a school prize. (I didn't win many.) As a ten-year-old, it was above my head, and indeed it remains unread. But I have just learnt a bit about Melville himself from Chad Harbach's debut novel The Art of Fielding, which I finished yesterday.

Harbach's book looked intimidating - for being ostensibly about baseball, another no-go area for me, though I doubt it's any more arcane than cricket (which I love). I don't often think either about tackling books more than 500 pages long, but I needn't have worried: the story swings along nicely, with some neat twists. Whenever it threatens to get too frightening, the plot veers towards grand guignol.

I particularly liked the author's inventiveness with adjectives ("clean, chromatic, shapely, sun-kissed" for "girl/women": "bread-based" for religions) and names: Opentoe College; Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist; Angela Fan; President Valerie Molina; Chef Spirodocus.

And then there are the philosophical riffs: “... the Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

Franzen evinces a genuine concern for the environment: Harbach, it seems to me, doesn't, even though one of the characters has a lyric comprimario role as the Green voice. Addressing the question of whether his lover should or shouldn't make a major property investment, he says: "Thoreau's Journals...When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside. He doesn't buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the Summer. Let's not even talk about air-conditioning... Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? ... Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn't count. If there's any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St Peter won't be asking questions at the gate. You'll just be lugging all the coal and oil you've burnt in your life, that's been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate, you're in. And the gate's not big. It's like eye-of-a-needle sized. That's what constitutes ethics these days - not who screwed or got screwed by whom."

"No Impact Man"

I don't photograph rubbish much, but this is a detail of a scene I took in April, when making a detour off my Camino to visit the Abbey of Oseira. The human-induced chaos of this far-away farmyard seemed strikingly at odds with the unspoilt beauty of the Galician countryside surrounding it.

"No Impact Man" is the title of a documentary made four years ago about a family who determined to see by how much they could reduce the impact they made on their New York environment over a period of 12 months. I asked Leo if he could get it for us to watch through "Love Film", and he came up with it on DVD this evening.

I can see that many would find the journey it describes tiresome, and perhaps trite, but it's lightly done, and raises some good questions en route to its conclusion - that whatever you do is best done as part of the community, rather than in an isolated fashion.

A couple of criticisms: the issue of needing to live without loo paper seemed to loom as large if not larger than restricting (or not) the size of the human family; and having a largish dog in the flat seemed to be a given, with never a mention of the ecological issues to which family pets should surely give rise.

"Sharing Eden"

Three Festival of Literature events today: near my limit! Two of them were sponsored by the splendid Coexist Foundation. On the platform for the first of these, a discussion took place between followers of the three great Abrahamic faiths, pooling insights which could secure a better future for our planet. As Rabbi Nathan Levy (2nd from left in my photograph) said, "Even if we don't all share the same vision of heaven, we share the same Earth."

A common Earth manifesto subscribed to by the world's great religions? It could give people of faith that credibility they often lack within our sceptical yet green-inclined society; but how can we hope to achieve such a thing when within each of our faiths there are those who question any commitment to the importance of global stewardship?

This said, I bought the book after the event, the first time I'd succumbed this Festival: I usually buy more, but I'm in a mean streak.

Rabbi Nathan, a co-author of Sharing Eden, reminds us that people of faith are uniquely placed to speak truth to power about a concern for environmental justice. Politicians work to a five-year plan, business people may adopt a ten-year plan, but we are used to thinking longer-term: only after seven times seven years do we celebrate jubilee: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

A lot – or sometimes very little – can change in 50 years. As I recorded last month, it’s that period since I started at university: had I instead, as destined, gone into articles in a solicitors’ firm in Birmingham, my life would have been very different. Yesterday was 50 years since the 2nd Vatican Council opened: some would say, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." More mundanely tomorrow will be 50 years since the last train went from Cheltenham to Kingham on the old Honeybourne Line, running 50 yards from our front gate: what would we now give to have back the comprehensive rail network, which Beeching axed?

Cheltenham's wasteful Ladies

In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev wrote, "A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound."

Only a couple of hundred yards from the Lansdown Community Composting base (now up and running at Well Close), this sight caught my attention yesterday as I biked past. The bins are at the back of one of the Cheltenham Ladies' College residential houses, Sidney Lodge. Not much attempt to separate waste there, I thought: what does the College say about recycling?

Looking at its website, the answer is "not much". There's an entry dating back 18 months or so: "The Sixth Form Environment Group has been trying to raise awareness about environmental issues to the younger girls in College... We hope through this system to make the girls take responsibility for their daily actions which ultimately shape our environment." And an Environment Week was held a couple of years ago. Could do better, I'd say.

EcoHab

This weekend, 16 Cheltenham buildings and/or gardens demonstrating a degree of eco credibility are open to the public - part of the National Heritage Open Days event. I've been there and got the t-shirt.

Numbers of visitors are a bit down from 2011, possibly something to do with a rival show on in the Promenade. Last year, our home and garden were open as part of the scheme, but having only just got back from holiday, we decided this time that the garden would be in need of attention. That meant I was free to go round other properties, which I've enjoyed doing.

There's been some good feedback: quality if not quantity (though one small garden attracted 55 in the day). A mother and young daughter, Charlotte arrived (by bike) at the open house nearest us, where there was an eco checklist available: Charlotte proceeded to go round ticking off what she saw - better than several science lessons, I'd say.

Royal address

‘Spirituality and the Earth Community: Responding to the Spiritual Challenges Facing People and Planet’. This was former Professor Ursula King’s theme for her Cheltenham lecture last evening. It deserved to be better attended. Possibly the title was what put people off, for after a somewhat analytical start, she took off in the latter part of her talk, and ended with several almost impassioned responses to audience questions. Not for a long time have I heard such a free thinker, open to so many differently stimulating channels of thought! “I was mighty impressed,” as a friend put it.

Amongst challenging questions Professor King herself raised were, “Are modern societies predominantly secular?” (Answer: “Pace Richard Dawkins, no.”) “Does spirituality only concern the needs of the individual?” (Answer: “Again, no.”) And, echoing Indira Gandhi at Stockholm almost 40 years ago, “Will the growing awareness of ‘one earth' and ‘one environment' guide us to the concept of ‘one humanity'?” (Answer: “We must sincerely hope so, notwithstanding the signal lack of progress to date!”) Finally, and she gave no answer to this, leaving us each to take up the quest for a response ourselves: “How do we live a good life?”

Stroud Coffehousing

I have not been a member of any political party since resigning, in the 1980s, from the Ecology Party. The Stroud branch of what is now the Green Party organises monthly Coffee House Discussions: I was invited along this evening, to contribute (on behalf of Christian Ecology Link) to a discussion on what different faiths teach about the environment. The Star Anise Arts Café was packed.

My two-pennyworth was as follows: Christianity is centred upon the person of Jesus Christ, born 2,000 years ago in a Palestinian town on the West Bank. We believe that Jesus was the son of God, who created the universe and all it contains. Jesus gave us two commandments: love God (and therefore his creation), and love our human neighbours as we do ourselves (and therefore live in justice). One of Jesus’ early followers, Basil, an Armenian, wrote: “The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry: the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the person who has no clothes: the shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot.” All around us in the world today, we see the hungry and the destitute, more often than not victims of environmental neglect or unjust exploitation of the earth’s resources. Christians have the responsibility, therefore, to defend earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone, and to protect mankind against self-destruction. Our tradition is to pray to God for strength, to see things as they really are; to judge what needs to be done, and to act in accordance with that judgment. As one of the oldest forms of our prayer is praise, I read – to conclude – Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun.

Seven others spoke. There was a presentation on behalf of Green Spirituality, “possibly not a faith at all”: its protagonist leads a monthly “no faith” service, usually attended by some two dozen “non-members”. A Celtic Druid was followed by a Shakamuni Buddhist. There was a Jewish doctor and Haroon from the Gloucester Mosque. One lady, a Quaker, assured us you don’t have to be a Christian to be a Friend; whilst another, a Bahai, spoke of consciousness, coherence, unity and cooperation. Tonight, she said, everyone is saying the same thing. Well, perhaps not quite, if you listen.

"Freedom"

In a family of cat lovers, it's hard to express anti-feline feeling; so I much enjoyed being able to read aloud a passage from Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" to the family during our holiday (on which Thomas even brought along his cat). The riff comes towards the end of this marvellous book, where our hero, Walter is seen as "a nutcase and a menace" for wanting to protect the songbirds around the lake - where his family have been coming over generations - from the domestic pets brought in by the households in the new development, Canterbridge Estates. "The older cat owners on the street did politely accept the [coloured neoprene cat] bibs and promise to try them, so that Walter would leave them alone and they could throw the bibs away."

Franzen's gift is to be able to see the funny side of any serious argument. And so the book cavorts along through its nearly 600 pages treating all manner of particularly green issues in a highly entertaining way. I enjoyed it even more than his earlier masterpiece, "The Corrections".

Ash Wednesday

On Monday, I mentioned The Times were doing an article featuring the Davis family and its "ashcan". How appropriate that its publication should be today! (There is even a second photograph in the print version.)

It's been quite surprising how many people have telephoned and emailed: The Times is evidently still the paper for many - in spite of the impossibility of such an article appearing in The Times as it was when I was first introduced to it. Our headmaster promised a Mars Bar for any boy who managed to have a letter printed: one did, but the promise seemed by then to have been forgotten.

Meanwhile, at my former office, a petition is circulating to save the family dog...

Rubbish photos

The Times has been interviewing Agnes, Caroline and me for an article about ways in which families argue over what it is to live the green life. It's been rather interesting, and today they sent a photographer along to try and secure an appropriate illustration for the forthcoming feature. We happened to be going over to Herefordshire to visit Agnes anyway, so it all fell into place.

And what more photogenic than Agnes on top of a rubbish bin?

"Called to be a people of hope"

This is the title of the pastoral guidelines issued by the Clifton Catholic Diocese fairly recently. It promised that a committee would be formed to review existing deanery and parish structures and make recommendations.

Well, a draft report has now been issued, on which we are invited to comment. And so I have commented as follows:

1. I note the Committee interpreted its brief to mean "laity and clergy will work together to implement whatever plan is ultimately agreed after consultation." In the light of my past experience (during 35 years living in the Cheltenham Deanery), this would mean a radical turnaround. Laity and clergy have not - to any significant extent - worked together in the past. Lay members have occasionally been asked to carry out some fairly minor tasks, but there has been no real spirit of community of endeavour, as the clergy have always "run the show" their own way. Letters sent to priests (and even the Bishop), however politely couched, are routinely ignored - not even acknowledged.

2. "This report thus seeks to make recommendations for the future organization of parishes taking into account the resources of people, clergy and buildings that we currently have, and are likely to have in the foreseeable future."

2.1 I don't believe the draft report does genuinely take into account the resources of (lay) people. There has never been any significant effort made to analyse the strengths of the lay members of the parishes I have been in: many varieties of talent might be placed at the service of the Church if such an analysis were to be undertaken.

2.2 Even allowing for a priest being a necessary pastor for each parish, that doesn't prevent lay people also having pastoral roles; and yet we see very little sign that this possibility is being embraced. We don't even know, except accidentally, if there are fellow-Catholics living in our immediate neighbourhood.

3. There is no word in the draft report about the possibility of cooperation with other Christians, to enhance the pastoral care of the whole community.

4. Nor is there any mention of the environmental impact of what is proposed: a significant increase in car use is inevitable.

5. Generally, I look forward to the time when the Church recognises that it is not essential for priests to be celibate - or male.

Anyone for an iPilgrimage? - continued

My post of 10 days ago on this theme, which I repeated on the Christian Ecology Link forum, has created quite a few responses there, some of which seem worth republishing here, to urge on the debate.

Mike Monaghan: "An excellent idea. I find it sad (scandalous!) that in religious publications one can read on one page an article about the need for Christians to take the issue of climate change seriously, accompanied by several adverts for pilgrimages all involving long journeys usually by air."

Tony Emerson: "Totally agreed - we should not even think of pilgrimage as involving air flights, given that one air flight to Knock or Lourdes would use up your total sustainable carbon ration for a year. Let alone to the Holy Land or further afield. Another alternative: in my childhood in the West of Ireland we used to have 'the stations' every Lent in one house in each street, with different households taking turns each year. In the process, I think we built a better sense of community. I don't know how long the practice lasted - but could it not be revived?"

Pam Cram responds "as someone who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land last November! This is was the first time I have flown anywhere in maybe 10 years. While I agree there can be a problem of hypocrisy, there are also complex issues here. Peace and justice in Palestine are possibly as central an issue to all our futures as is climate change. The Palestinian community is begging us to go to see for ourselves and stand alongside them - which was why I went, though it was also a pilgrimage to the holy sites. I would very much like to go again in the future to be involved in some practical peace-making project, and, yes, go on pilgrimage again. Although it is possible to get there without flying, the reality is that because of timing I would probably have to fly at least one way. Similarly, last year my husband went out to Kenya on a mountain trekking holiday in which he also met the local people and has made personal friendships he wants to follow up. He too is looking for ways to return to make a difference in people's lives there. Of course, he will have to fly. These are all complex juggling acts with which I struggle!"

Tony Emerson replies: "Let's start with the data: from the Choose Climate website. I've got the following CO2 equivalent estimates: England to Holy Land return - 2.6 tonnes; and England to East Africa return - 4.7 tonnes. Now, given that the safe, sustainable per person ration is about 1.5 tonnes a year, that creates a problem. I do not deny that good may come from your and your husband's trip. But is the good worth the increment in climate damage that may be attributable to your trip? Given that people in places like the Middle East and East Africa are much more vulnerable than we are to the effects of climate damage, in the shorter term; and that in the longer term of course we all may pay the ultimate price. There are also shorter term cultural consequences of richer European people visiting poorer communities. Now I'm not saying that particular trips are not justified. But I do think we need particular ethical criteria for assessing this particular activity, air travel, which is largely a modern luxury engaged in by more well-off people (very much contrary to what our government claims) and which has a very high carbon footprint. Any views on what these criteria should be?"

From Fr. Peter Doodes: "Last year I flew for the first time in 20 years (and perhaps for the last time) to Belfast, for religious purposes. I had only two days,
start to finish, in order to carry these out and so flew short-haul from nearby Gatwick to Belfast City Airport, a few minutes away from my destination. Aircraft are like any other form of transport, some are economical, and some are the SUVs/stretch Hummers of the air, and so I chose Flybe, whose Bombardier and Embraer aircraft are among the most economical and quiet aircraft available today. I did look at the website mentioned above and wondered what aircraft they based their figures on. I agree that flying is wrong as a mass movement industry and that carbon offsetting is Enron Accounting, but if there is no other option, and at times of emergency there may not be, then choose carriers the same way as you would choose a car. PS If you want to see the Flybe figures then click here."

"The Age of Stupid"

Last weekend, Caroline and I went to Malvern, to see Waiting for Godot, a marvellous production with a set to echo some of the scenes described in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. A dazzling performance by Ian McKellen too. His character, Estragon, has the line: "People are bloody ignorant apes." And on my visit to the cinema this evening (the first time I've been to a film premiere), I came out thinking: who can disagree?

"We live in the age of ignorance, the age of stupid," concludes one of those portrayed in the film (a former oil man from New Orleans), and indeed "The Age of Stupid" is its title. Having driven down to Bristol for this event, I became acutely uncomfortable during the film that I was going to have to drive an otherwise empty car all the way back again. Did I need to travel all that distance for another lecture on climate change? Don't I have all the information already?

Well, there was an aura of gesture about Vivienne Westwood cycling - rather uncertainly - along the green carpet, as relayed to us direct from Leicester Square before the showing; but the film itself is quite nicely nuanced in some ways. The character I mentioned - despite seeing the light after losing all in the Katrina disaster - seemed to go on living a lifestyle many of us here would now not wish to emulate. A Nigerian aiming to qualify as a doctor aspires to an American way of living, "and then you would never want to die." The Indian launching a new low-cost airline seeks to take his people out of poverty. Who shall throw the first stone?

So, yes do go and see it for yourself if you can do so easily, and take others with you. It's on from Friday this week (20th) in Glasgow, Inverness, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Bristol, Belfast, Sheffield and various London cinemas - and at others you can find via its website. If the film is not shown in cinemas near you, you can rent the DVD and arrange a screening for yourself and friends, from 1st May: not expensive.

Its subject is after all the single most pressing issue of our age.

Three cheers for Hoggart

Simon Hoggart sometimes infuriates me, but at others he hits the nail on the head. As in today's article, which includes this, about Pope Benedict's recent speech to the Curia:

...I know he was trying to make a more subtle point: that we should worry about human frailty as much as environmental degradation, but it didn't half come out wrong. Maybe someone should point out to his holiness that the human race will survive since the great majority of people are still straight, and being gay isn't just a lifestyle choice, like where you live, or whether you pick turkey or goose for Christmas. It's a decision made for you - you may think by God.

What the Pope may need is someone to live with, of either sex, someone who treats him as an equal, and is able to tell him, "but, dearest heart, that is sheer blithering idiocy! Please don't say it. And you did promise to peel the potatoes ..."

As it is, working it out on his own this one seems to be roughly as infallible as a 30-year old Hillman Imp.

Love of wisdom

It's rare to hear two quite different lectures in the same day, each so full of wise words, and so well delivered. I would have been glad to read either "The Choice of Hercules" by A.C. Grayling, or "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" by Jeffrey Sachs, but knew realisticaly that it was unlikely. The appearance of their authors - both renowned speakers - therefore made them easy choices out of the 26 events on offer at our Literature Festival yesterday.

The philosopher Grayling had virtually a full house at 10 a.m. in the Everyman Theatre. Though he spoke from the lectern on stage, such is his fluency that it represented no sort of barrier. The success of a lecture can often be judged by the quality of questions posed to the lecturer at the end: all were good, and Grayling answered with skill and humour. But he was flummoxed when asked, "Were you assuming we had come along as a duty or for pleasure?"

Hercules chose duty above pleasure, but, Grayling asks, where is the conflict between them today? What do we think about reading novels in the morning? Conventionally, the answer is "guilty", but insofar as they are an excellent way of our learning much-needed toleration - allowing other people to do things you don't like - maybe we should look upon a couple of hours with our novel as our morning duty.

From Jeffrey Sachs' viewpoint as a development economist, working for the Earth Institute, our car is careering towards the cliff edge. Even if the road turns out to bend a little away from the precipice, our alarm increases when we realises that Dick Cheney is at the wheel. (A McCain victory next month is too grim for Sachs to begin to contemplate.)

The three horsemen of Jeffrey Sachs' apocalypse are environment, poverty and population. Each can be reined in, but not by a self-regulating market. Global, co-operative, science-based mechanisms are needed. They don't at present exist, but they could be established - at a cost of about three per cent of world income. Trillions have been made available to save the banks, so in principle the money is there. Can we sit back and allow the aggregate of a year's Wall Street Christmas bonuses to continue to exceed the entire world's annual aid to Africa? "I'm a PhD beggar," proclaims Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs spoke for 50 minutes without any notes from the Town Hall stage, an astonishing tour de force.

WALL-E: spoiler alert!

Caroline and I went to the cinema together last night, a relatively rare occurence. Based on a favourable review and recommendations from Edmund and Thomas, our choice was the latest Pixar offering, WALL-E.

Its hero/heroine -arguably - is not the lovable, sentient robot of the title, but the last, or rather the first, plant on a planet Earth that has been overwhelmed by consumer waste, and whose inhabitants have mass-migrated to Space Station Axiom. The film is the story of their fight to recolonise Earth, which of course they do.

Caroline and I had a good laugh at the choice of the space station's name: her time with the Axiom Centre of the Arts here in Cheltenham was spent making a place full of opportunities to help people be as creative as possible: the computer running WALL-E's Axiom was intent on making its inhabitants as docile as possible.

Coincidentally, yesterday morning's email from Christian Ecology Link read as follows:

Conventional food production incurs the following hidden costs:
· 1,000 tonnes of water are consumed to produce every tonne of grain;
· 10-15 energy units are spent for every energy unit of food on our plates;
· With processed foods, more than 1,000 energy units are used for every energy unit of food;
· 12-15 energy units are wasted for every energy unit of food transported per thousand air-miles;
· 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, which produces 60% of all methane emissions and 70% of nitrous oxide;
· Nearly 90% of all agricultural subsidies benefit corporations and big farmers, while in the USA alone 500 family farms close down every week; and
· Subsidised surplus food dumped on developing countries creates poverty, hunger and homelessness on a massive scale.

Axiom, here we come?

WALL-E, the verdict? A dazzlingly clever film, crammed with an immense amount of imaginative detail, some of it genuinely funny and touching; but a film made with a budget of $180m, trailing movie-related merchandise, advertising, not to mention popcorn in its wake - all those things that give rise to the opening hypothesis, that we are heading towards environmental disaster. The end of this film is to entertain and make money. It is therefore, in my view, ultimately making light of our greatest challenge, its "bold" theme ironically causing filmgoers to become numbed to the possibility of overcoming that challenge.

Pictures fail me

There was quite a full house yesterday evening for mass at my Catholic parish church, St Gregory's here in Cheltenham: the celebrant was Fr. Tom Smith, the parish priest's assistant, ordained three years ago. In his homily, after a few words on the readings, he told us he had spent last week in residence at Merton College, Oxford. An anonymous donor had, he said, paid for him to attend the Latin Mass Society's course on learning to say what I once knew as the Tridentine mass. (I note the fee was £150 for the week – which is itself acknowledged on the Society's website as being "heavily subsidised".)

Clearly, the course had made a great impression on our young priest. He spoke at length about the beauty of the "extraordinary form". Further he announced that he had, immediately upon his return to Cheltenham, sought (and obtained) the parish priest's permission to celebrate the old mass publicly this coming Saturday. He urged us to come.

Any priest making such a significant statement and plea will no doubt influence his congregation. Plenty of people are, therefore, likely to be there on Saturday. But I will not be one of them.

I grew up in the Catholic faith, and in about 1950 became an altar server. I learnt by heart the Latin responses, rattling them off, as did any good member of the Guild of St Stephen in those days. At school I studied Latin up till A level, so came to understand and appreciate the words for their meaning – not just as mantras.

Vatican II coincided with my university years: thanks to a remarkable chaplain, my generation of undergraduates became rapidly familiar with its teaching, and in particular its liturgical reforms, which made good sense. Moving to London, I was in parishes with priests who likewise embraced those reforms.

In the Seventies, I found myself in a small, rural parish, with an Irish priest still saying mass with his back to the congregation. I struggled to understand how this good old man's ways could help us interpret for all The Church in the Modern World, let alone Populorum Progressio. I read the magazines he left at the end of the church, published by the Society of St Pius X, and found them full of vituperation. Many times I recalled my grandfather's words: God works through very human instruments.

My Sunday sadness was alleviated when a new priest took over. We became encouraged to take a part in the decisions affecting the parish, including the way its liturgy was celebrated. A generation has since passed, and I can't conceive of a return to the blessed mutter of the mass (as it is in its extraordinary form). Attendance at (I could not call it "participation in") the funeral mass of a Tridentine stalwart last December confirmed me in my opinion.

The Archbishop of Birmingham's address to last year's Merton College course included these words: No matter the language of the celebration, no matter the form … the liturgy must be set forth clearly. The celebrant, acting in the person of Christ and in the name of the Church, needs to ensure that his actions enable the souls in his care to participate in this saving mystery, to take part in each of its steps. This participation has to be profound, spiritual, informed by understanding – an active participation and not passive, not ‘leaving it to the priest to celebrate the Mass for us.’…The Tridentine mass remains the extraordinary form of the celebration of the Mass, for, as Pope Benedict says, its use ‘presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often.’

From next month the two St Gregory's priests will be responsible, not only for our large town parish, but also for the adjoining St Thomas More's parish – also large, with its own distinct and very considerable social problems. For years, our priests have been too busy to visit parishioners, or offer house blessings. The degree of ecumenical – let alone inter-faith – activity in Cheltenham involving its clergy is negligible. There is no Justice and Peace activity, and no apparent concern to address as a Christian challenge the environmental crisis facing our world today.

I am forced to ask, how is it that a priest of my son's age comes to decide to take the time needed to study and prepare for regular celebration of mass in the extraordinary form, when there is so much else that needs doing?

Is the Pope green?

Leo Hickman raised this question last weekend, in the Guardian. It followed Pope Benedict's words in Australia: gazing out of the window on his flight there, he had, he said, been filled with introspection about the plight of the environment.

Benedict is getting something of a reputation as a green Pope. Solar panels have appeared on Vatican buildings, and the Apostolic Penitentiary numbers ecological offences amongst new forms of social sin.

Moreover, Vatican City boasts it is the only sovereign state to have zero carbon dioxide emissions - thanks to the Vatican Climate Forest in Hungary. But, as a theologian from Louvain University points out, where is the justice in this "indulgence-type" method of offsetting one's carbon footprint?

As expected, Hickman's crunch point is to home in on the population consequences of the Church's opposition to contraception - much the same as I reported Jonathon Porritt had concluded in a blog I posted last month.

The Vatican hosts, amongst very many other organisations, a Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, headed up by a Cardinal. Travel lightly, it urges: use public transport, carry less luggage and do everything you can to make your holiday environmentally friendly. But what about Vatican Airlines, launched last year to ferry pilgroms back and forth to the world's shrines? Given that a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life's journey, shouldn't we be thinking more in terms of making virtual pilgrimage these days?

Those who may have been gazing down from the two planes in my photograph could also have been "filled with introspection," but it is only we who gaze upwards that see the damaging vapour trails.