BBC Radio 4 2016-09-03

Good Morning. The family who lived in our place before us, cultivated a great vine over forty years, bursting, about now, with the bitterest grapes.

The grapes enriched our compost bin until a neighbour ticked us off for wasting resources. She carted off several bags of grapes and returned with a bottle of dubious looking liquid.

Overnight it exploded, painting the kitchen ceiling purple… but at least we didn’t have to drink the stuff.

I remembered this, among a series of bodged experiments in sustainability, as I picked misshapen tomatoes from plastic pots this week and collected ripening plums before our cocky city squirrels can nick them.

The meager harvest of an urban garden is gone before you know it. Autumn is on us and the sunlight already losing interest but still … there’s something miraculous about eating food you’ve grown yourself.

It will never compete on quantity with the supermarket but you tell yourself it trumps it for quality. It’s also a faint sign of a world it would be good to live in.

At one time, when it was a 1970’s sit-com with Tom and Barbara Good, that world was known as The Good Life - the search for self-sufficiency in Surbiton.

But the comic tension with sniffy neighbours Margot and Jerry was more sustainable than the eco-life.

Times have changed. Last year renewables - like wind, solar, hydroelectric and biomass - made up a quarter of the UK’s electricity generation.

People can now practice what they preach. A report this week found that several thousand churches have switched their electric from fossil fuels to renewables. Some have solar panels on the roof – in a kind of parable they have harnessed the light to become an energy source for all.

Instead of talking about it, they have decided to become the world they want to see. A world in which the whole creation, to use a strange phrase of the early Christian writer Paul, is no longer groaning. A world, as Pope Francis puts it, which we all look after as a shared home.

Critics will say this is a drop in a rising ocean, that it’s only symbolic - but there is no only symbolic. Symbols can be more powerful than words.

Politicians, columnists, campaigners and business leaders love to describe the world they believe we should live in - but the wisest of them begin to live in that world too.

They practice rather than just pontificate.

And this morning we hear that the US and China will ratify a joint decision on climate change to move the world towards a first international legal agreement.

The American academic Brene Brown puts it like this: ‘What we know matters, but who we are matters more.'

As any parent or carer will testify - we have to walk the talk.

We may forget every word of what someone has said to us, but still recall vividly the example they were to us.

Or as Francis of Assissi, the C13th saint of sustainability, told his friends, ‘preach the good news at all times… and if necessary use words.’