As Creation Tide starts (1 September until 4 October) the Bishop of Oxford shares an example of how we can engage with the wonder of creation: It’s fascinating to watch a small child interact with a very small discovery in a garden path or a flower border. There’s enough miracle in that tiny patch of ground to keep a child entranced. Whatever happened to that quality of wonder in us?
The Big Tree Plant is a campaign to encourage people and communities to plant more trees in England’s towns, cities and neighbourhoods. It is a partnership bringing together national tree-planting organisations and local groups working with Defra and the Forestry Commission to plant trees throughout England. Anybody can get involved by planting and caring for [...]
New book ‘For Creed and Creation: A simple guide to greening your church’ is now available and is full of practical suggestions for making your church more energy efficient. With simple ideas and advice from the way the building is run, to how rubbish is recycled and the light switches used, the guide will help to reduce bills and put your church on the right track to tackling your carbon footprint.
How can you combine growing your own delicious food, making new friends, learning a natural growing method, and the opportunity to reconnect at a deep, spiritual level with creation? The answer is Grow Zones, a community growing project.
As church bells ring out today to mark the start of international talks on biodiversity at the UN General Assembly you can listen to the latest Church of England podcast from Dr Bob Bloomfield of the Natural History Museum as he talks bells, biodiversity and how the Church of England in every diocese has played [...]
I was recently at Lambeth Palace for a day meeting with other green fanatics and agencies. These included Russell Ball from ‘The Ancient Yew Group‘. Apparently, Veteran Yews are 350-1000 years old, and Ancient Yews are 1000-5000 years old, which by any standards is staggeringly old. Yew trees have had a troubled life in the [...]
A couple of weeks ago I attended Lambeth Palace for the annual ‘Shrinking the Footprint’ day (The Church of England’s Environmental Campaign). They have a new website which I would recommend visiting. This year we are particularly looking at the subject of biodiversity. Estimates vary, but it is thought that currently we are losing species [...]
Manage, don’t mow your churchyard and give space to endangered plant species. That is the message from Shrinking the Footprint, the CofE’s national environmental campaign, which has signed up to the United Nations’ International Year of Biodiversity (IYB). In many urban areas the churchyard is often the only ‘green lung’ for the community and the [...]
The first of a series of case studies from churches around the Diocese of Oxford has just been published. Supporting biodiversity in a churchyard is a case study from St Mary and St John Church in East Oxford. It is the story of turning a churchyard that had become a forest of overgrown trees and [...]
