Ideas for follow-up activities

1. Draw or paint a picture of a landscape that you would like people to love.

2. Imagine that there is a plan to cut down some woodland near you to make room for a motorway. Write a letter to the editor of a newspaper saying what you think about this.

3. Think about the importance of water to all living things. There are many references to water in the Bible. You might read:

a) about the river that God provided the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2: 8-14.

b) about Moses, guided by God, producing a spring of water in the desert. Exodus 17: 1-7.

4. At harvest time many churches have special services to thank God for the fruits of the earth. Read the instructions given to the Israelites for celebrating their barley harvest (the day of first fruits) and, fifty days later (Pentecost), the wheat harvest. Leviticus 23: 9-22.

5. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins felt that industrialisation had come between us and the natural world and that man was spoiling his environment, but he reminds us of nature's capacity for renewal in his poem God's Grandeur. Read it:

6. Visit the Earth Centre, Denaby main, South Yorkshire. Or to visit the web site click HERE

God`s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

You might read some other of Hopkins's poems which celebrate nature as a revelation of the divine, eg. Pied Beauty, Hurrahing in Harvest.