Good stewardship demands that far greater efforts are made in dealing with the transportation and disposal of toxic and radioactive wastes. Chemical, nuclear and other dangerous waste should not be exported to Third World countries. Where waste can be recycled we should load the tax system to make this a desirable and viable proposition. If our common European home is not to resemble a slum we should also consider what will happen to waste products well in advance of their production. We should withdraw the deemed consent to pollute which allows many industries blithely to treat rivers such as the Danube, the Rhine and the Mersey as a huge toilet flush. The burning of chemical waste and the dumping of poisons in our rivers and at sea is a European scandal and should also be ended.
Eco-Fascism
Good stewardship is not simply a policy for governments. It is an issue for everyone and gets to the heart of how we perceive ourselves and our relationship with the created world. For Christians and others the Green Movement poses challenges and dilemmas. In Green Christianity10 Tim Cooper says that Christianity has failed sufficiently to address ecological issues and that consequently: 'In the recent past a more significant religious influence among Greens has been the New Age movement.' Dr Margaret Brearley, a Christian academic, speaking at Westminster to the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, warned that the Green Movement had become dominated by New Age thinking: 'The jackboot of totalitarianism is hidden within the New Age agenda', she said. Certainly I find the emphasis placed on draconian measures to reduce population and support for the abortion ethic inconsistent with a total respect for life. Good stewardship and responsibility must logically extend to our own species and in the use of our own fertility. Measures which either force or destroy can never be acceptable. Ninety per cent of the expected global increase in population will occur in lowincome countries, where food production cannot keep pace. Although the industrialised world has less than a quarter of the world's population, we consume seventy-five per cent of the world's energy resources, eighty-five per cent of the wood, and seventy-two per cent of all steel. We have depleted most of the world's energy and minerals; we have devastated the ecology of the planet; yet, we say the under-developed world is to blame in producing too many children. My mother came from a family of eight in impoverished rural West of Ireland. Families tended to have more children as an insurance against poverty. My mother emigrated to