The fruit that we eat, the food that we eat,
is born from nature, we would not be able to exist without nature.
So, it's the most sacred thing for me that there is.
For some people, nature is the most important thing,
humanity is a bit of a side story.
The most important thing is to protect nature above all else,
even if that means curtailing what we might see as
our immediate human interests to a large degree.
Well, basically nature's everything.
It's the building blocks of everything around us.
It provides every single one of our needs,
our clothing, our housing, our food.
It simply can't be underestimated.
Other people would still feel that nature is sacred,
because it's an act of divine creation,
and that's very much bound up with a religious way
of seeing nature as something to be nurtured,
because God has given that to us as a task.
It is clear that God has given us a role
to look after everything that God has created,
to be in relationship with everything,
and to understand that relationship is an important part
of who we are as individuals.
People demonstrate the sacredness of nature today
in a range of different ways, some of the most intense ways,
to do with things like eco-activism,
I think that's one of the strongest expressions,
most distinctive expressions,
but it gets bound up with everyday life as well,
just the practice of having a bath
becomes a sacred ritual with nature.
But today, when we take a bath or a shower,
it's about being in an environment that's contemplative,
that's peaceful, that's relaxing,
but we're also bathing with natural, organic products,
things that we imagine that we're reconnecting with,
something that's natural and good and healthy
even through such an everyday activity like that.
People do create a ritual about their bath.
It's sometimes the only time you can shut the world away,
you lock that bathroom door, you take off your clothes,
you submerge yourself in water and that's quite primal,
and it's sort of getting back to your start in life.
Again, everyday activities, like recycling,
becomes a kind of ritual activity through which people
express their commitment to the planet.
It becomes a way of constructing a particular kind of moral outlook on life.
So, you know, sometimes when we talk about the sacred,
and we talk about the profane, we think about the profane
as being like a pollution of what we hold sacred,
and in the case of things like oil spills, or global warming,
there's often a physical pollution that's going on,
as well as the moral pollution,
that because we see the physical environment
that we're living in as having a particular kind of moral significance,
it's good, it's healthy, it's natural, it's right;
that things that destroy that, that pollute it,
aren't just about chemical spills,
they're actually something that affect us morally as well.
The last generation have got us to this place,
and it's up to the youngsters coming up now,
to insist that those older people and those grown-ups,
and those people that are running the world at the moment
make some big changes and some big choices.
I think it's absolutely right and appropriate that
we all fear the power of nature, we all understand how fragile our lives are,
because that helps us also understand how to value our lives
and to value everyone's lives.
Perhaps Judgement Day might not be a god looking over us
judging our individual sins, but that it may be nature
judging us for our crimes against nature
and that kind of apocalyptic vision of what nature may do to us
if we continue to profane against it.