Prior to joining A Rocha, Chris had wide experience of science teaching and schools’ management in the UK and the Middle East, attending Bible College and learning Arabic (in Jordan) along the way. He joined A Rocha in 1997 working, until 2009, as Lebanon Director where he cofounded the work. He oversaw the habitat restoration programme at the Aammiq Wetland, the development of the environmental education project and the field research programme, identifying 11 new Important Bird Areas. Since April 2010 he has been Executive Director of A Rocha International and is based in Oxfordshire. His book Postcards from the Middle East: How our family fell in love with the Arab world was published by Lion Hudson in March 2015.
I needn’t have worried about persuading my audience [of medical personnel]. The group showered me with symptoms of environmental malaise from their own experience: unreliable rains, floods, failed harvests, changing disease patterns and communal strain as natural resources start to fail.
Despite the ordered, lovingly-tended beauty of the cemetery on a sunny autumnal day, and the perfect brick-by-brick recreation of pre-war Ypres, a heart-breaking heaviness hung in the atmosphere. It seemed more than collective memory… it goes deeper. Nature herself seems to react to the horrors of bloodshed and war. Biblical Christians should not be surprised by this.
Sometimes people tell me they think A Rocha is only about the environment. It’s not. It’s about all of us. It’s about transforming people and places by being a community where people and places thrive together.
Recently, I was in Kathmandu, speaking on creation care to a group of about 90 Christian leaders from across Nepal, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. They were really receptive… until I got to God’s future plans for creation. Surely we’re all going to heaven? What about the Rapture? Won’t there be a new creation? Won’t the earth be destroyed by fire?
A report from the World Conservation Congress, 1–10 September 2016: ‘Until recently, the conservation movement has been overwhelmingly secular. But the sense here is that this is a moral and even a spiritual crisis…’
This August, over 1,000 young Christian delegates from more than 140 countries convened outside Jakarta for the Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering. A once-in-a-generation event, the theme of this YLG was ‘United in the Great Story’, and the program built on the rich heritage of the Lausanne Movement with its stated vision of ‘the whole church, bringing the whole gospel, to the whole world.’
A week or two on Bardsey may teach me some important things, but the challenge is how I live out what I learn in my everyday life.
Some would say that Debbie’s transformation and impact aren’t the stuff of ‘planet-saving’ but at A Rocha we think they most certainly are.
It will not be technology, but a fundamental change in our deepest desires that will be how we can help the earth’s species and habitats survive the devastating assault to which we are subjecting them. But we need to think carefully if we hope that we can simply learn to ‘love nature’. What might that actually mean – what is love, actually?
The Jungle Book: What a fabulous world it would be if we could feel safe with a pack of Wolves, sing with Sloth Bears, ride on a Leopard and talk to Asian Elephants. But the sad reality is that most of us face a dilemma which is the opposite of Mowgli’s. In the UK, where I live, most of us feel safest in our villages, towns or cities and react with fear or even aggression when nature threatens our security, our income, or our convenience in some way.
