So, does being ‘Green’ or ‘Christian’ have anything whatsoever to do with the economy?

Let's face facts, being ‘Green’ has nothing to do with lambs bouncing in a field, a combine cutting corn under a sunny sky or wearing wellingtons as one walks in dew soaked pastures.

Being ‘Green’ i.e. being sustainable, living today without losing sight of those as yet born is quite simply fundamental Christian belief and Christian economics.

We are totally addicted to growth, which is why the western World is in the state it is. Borrowing is seen by all major political parties as a necessity, a good thing, and yes we do need some form of economic stimulation and yet countless billions of pounds, dollars and euros have been printed or electronically created, via the quaintly named ‘quantitative easing', in order to stimulate growth in the West.

It has failed.

Constant growth is simply impossible. If you have a calculator handy start with 100 and add 5%, and continue doing this, this will represent the 5% year-on-year growth that economists are telling us is needed. By the 15^th year the figure is 207.89%.

There is no way that within 15 years we will be producing more than twice the number of cars, building twice the number of houses and twice the number of runways and growing twice the amount of food to be sold by twice the number of supermarkets.

Those that have, like me, been privileged to live and work in a farming community know one thing for certain; there are limits. The world’s economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment; our world’s economy is limited to what can be produced from our planet.

Christian principles should be focused upon the unavoidable fact that total addictions are wrong, and yet the Western World is addicted to growth. The attempts to outgrow the limits of our planet are now ever obvious, climate change and the disaster with the world’s weather while frantically drilling for oil at the poles as the ice melts. Feeding a seemingly ever growing population while droughts and floods and famines increase. The evidence of the ever larger land raise waste sites, or as most people think of them ‘away’, and so it goes on, and yet most imagine that recycling the odd bottle or sheet of cardboard is all that is needed in order to keep the status quo.

They are wrong; the unavoidable fact is that for the sake of those just born or as yet to be born, there is such a thing as enough.