Anglican EcoCare Commission
EcoCare Reflection
The Revd Barry Moss and The Revd Bruce Hyde
In June 2025, a collection of helpers from the Friends of Bold Park and EcoCare arrived at Wollaston College to plant out a section of land with suitable native plants.
It was a busy morning and after a briefing on planting we excitedly got to work preparing the soil and planting the seedlings. With above average winter the rain last year; we had high hopes for a good survival rate.
June 2025 - Planting team; First seedling; Hopeful at end of the day
In early February, Barry returned to check on the planting and was shocked to discover that all but five plants had died! When this news was reported back to our little group, everyone was very disappointed.
After much soul searching and analysing what went wrong, our group decided that an article must be written for the Messenger, where we would engage honestly about why it is that some projects don’t work, or fail, and what we might learn from the experience.
February 2026 - Only five plants survived, disappointed but learning
We compared this unfortunate outcome from the planting at Wollaston with the planting undertaken at the Parish of Murdoch-Winthrop. The result was quite different; they only lost one plant!
Reflecting on this, two significant differences stood out:
- Community Participation. The parish community shares the corporate responsibility of attending to our grounds and caring for the planting. At one such meeting, after planting out, the parish tended around each plant with space and mulch and a good dose of water.
- Care and Wonder. It is important that both the individual and the community participate. At the individual level, the Warden added a new pipe to the existing irrigation system so drippers could be installed to water the new plants over summer. On a community level, a group of parishioners took turns watering the plants by hand while the irrigation system was being installed. Each week Barry would monitor the plants to ensure they were healthy.
In contrast, the planting at Wollaston received very little care and attention, besides from a contractor that hand watered during August and September. We had failed to arrange for regular monitoring of the plants during the summer months.
In the grander picture, while both the planting at Wollaston and the parish are a micro issue, they do help shine a spotlight on a macro issue; the need for humans to become aware of their responsibility to nurture and care for the whole eco-system. Our human-constructed systems are now encroaching upon the finite eco-systems of our planet which are placing life threatening pressure on other non-human animals that depend on it.
Human beings, us, have so altered the planet that there is very little ‘wild’ left, and we are in the process of creating the sixth mass extinction event. The need to nurture our natural world is now more critical than ever.
A helpful way to see this may be what the controversial ecologist Garrett Hardin described as the ‘tragedy of the commons’.
Imagine a field shared by many farmers. Each farmer decides to add one more cow because they get the benefit, while the damage to the field is shared by everyone. If all farmers do this, the field becomes overgrazed, the grass dies, and eventually all the cows starve.
By acting in their own self-interest, they destroy the resource they depend on.
This idea presents two key problems:
- Unlimited access: this drains the limited shared resources which sustains all life until every creature becomes worse off.
- Lack of responsibility: when no one is clearly responsible for maintaining a shared resource, it can fall into neglect and collapse.
Hardin presents a tragedy, but it is one that can be prevented and to do so raises two important questions that may help us:
- How can we encourage responsibility for the natural world?
- In what ways can we protect the natural world before it is destroyed?
As Christians, we might ask whether there are any spiritual disciplines that could help us to address this ecological crisis in our daily life?
Episcopalian priest and spiritual theologian, The Revd Matthew Fox, has developed a four-fold path in his Creation Spirituality that offers a devotional practice for living in harmony with creation.
The four paths are:
- via Positiva: Awe, delight, gratitude, joy.
- via Negativa: Uncertainty, darkness, suffering, letting go.
- via Creativa: Birthing, creativity, passion.
- via Transformativa: Justice, healing, celebration, rebirth, resurrection.
This four-fold path operates like a dance where we can move freely between the different paths. However, typically, the first begins with awe and delight for God’s gift of a beautiful and provident creation.
On the first path, we are filled with a sense of wonder and gratitude that we have been birthed into this wonderful universe and are loved by God. One might take a stroll through the natural environment, sit in a garden, or gaze into the night sky as they spend time communing with God.
The second path invites us to acknowledge all that is not well in God’s creation. We confront the damage humanity has already done and continues to do through our voracious appetite for a greater share of the world’s resources, be they land, minerals, forests, seas. This path involves genuine repentance and metanoia, a desire to let go of our past mistakes and a passion to change.
The third path awakens the Spirit’s creativity that has been gifted to each one of us. God has called and equipped us to be co-creators, and as we allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, we will bring forth new ways to help heal and restore creation, so that ‘we humans become present to the planet in a manner that is mutually enhancing’ (Berry 1999, p11).
The fourth and final path reminds us that the fruits of our creative work should bring justice and healing to the whole earth community, not only to sentient beings. Reflecting on Meister Ekhart’s teachings, Matthew Fox writes,
‘Our spiritual life is not ended with creativity but rather we are to employ creativity for the sake of personal and social transformation. Justice and compassion are the tests of this authentic deployment’ (Fox 2004 cited in Hall 2025).