The Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon on Sunday reveals insights that may not be what the Pope wanted, and definitely not what the Dominionists in the US had in mind about the future of their destructive greed.
Too often in recent decades, the two big "e" words - ecology and economy - have been used as though they represented opposing concerns. Yes, we should be glad to do more about the environment, if only this didn't interfere with economic development and with the liberty of people and nations to create wealth in whatever ways they can.
Or, we should be glad to address environmental issues if we could be sure that we had first resolved the challenge of economic injustice within and between societies. So from both left and right there has often been a persistent sense that it isn't proper or possible to tackle both together, let alone to give a different sort of priority to ecological matters.
But this separation or opposition has come to look like a massive mistake. It has been said that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic activity works.
That is why economy and ecology cannot be separated. Ecological fallout from economic development is in no way an "externality" as the economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.
Religious commitment becomes in this context a crucial element in that renewal of our motivation for living realistically in our material setting. The loss of a sustainable environment protected from unlimited exploitation is the loss of a sustainable humanity in every sense - not only the loss of a spiritual depth but ultimately the loss of simple material stability as well. It is up to us as consumers and voters to do better justice to the "house" we have been invited to keep, the world where we are guests.
