It’s clearly in the air. Today I listened to an interesting programme on Radio 4 – Beyond Belief, about the Papal Encyclical on the Environment and Climate Change. You can listen again here.
I’d already read this comment from Bhikkhu Bodhi:
Pope Francis reminds us that climate change poses not only a policy challenge but also a call to the moral conscience. If we continue to burn fossil fuels to empower unbridled economic growth, the biosphere will be destabilized, resulting in unimaginable devastation, the deaths of many millions, failed states, and social chaos. Shifting to clean and renewable energy can reverse this trend, opening pathways to a steady-state economy that uplifts living standards for all. One way leads deeper into a culture of death; the other leads to a new culture of life. As climate change accelerates, the choice before us is becoming starker, and the need to choose wisely grows ever more urgent.
More from him here.
Then this popped in my inbox. I can’t go as I’ll be away on retreat but if you’re down that way, it might be worth taking a look and supporting them. There’s no more pressing issue.
And this eery poem by Alice Oswald from The Guardian:
Vertigo
May I shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain
Starting right now lips open and lidless-cold all-seeing gaze
When something not yet anything changes its mind like me
And begins to fall
In the small hours
And the light is still a flying carpet
Only a little white between worlds like an eye opening after an operation
No turning back
each drop is a snap decision
A suicide from the tower-block of heaven
And for the next ten seconds
The rain stares at the ground
Sees me stirring here
As if sculpted in porridge
Sees the garden in the green of its mind already drinking
And the grass lengthening
Stalls …
Maybe a thousand feet above me
A kind of yellowness or levity
Like those tiny alterations that brush the legs of swimmers
Lifts the rain a little to the left
No more than a flash of free-will
Until the clouds close their options and the whole melancholy air surrenders to pure fear and … falls
And I who live in the basement
one level down from the world
with my eyes to the insects with my ears to the roots listening
I feel them in my bones these dead straight lines
Coming closer and closer to my core
This is the sound this is the very floor
Where Grief and his Wife are living looking up
Botanical 
Terrific poem. Thanks for posting it.