Tag: ecochurch

Planting a dead hedge

Having taken advice from local experts, Alex Melson and Tim Hill, as part of St Mary’s Eco Church initiative, a dead hedge has been started next to the wild flower area and the bug church. Rustic Sweet Chestnut stakes were kindly donated by the Tarmac company for this purpose.

Dead hedges are piles of branches and twigs arranged to form a barrier. They provide hiding places and nesting habitats for all sorts of creatures, as well as food for insects. As the hedge rots down, the nutrients are recycled back into the earth below, meaning garden ‘waste’ needn’t go into garden bins or bonfires.

St Mary’s Bug Church

St Marys bug church was filled up with twigs, leaves and other materials at our outdoor Simply Worship service. We found some caterpillars, and moved one into the bug church complete with his favourite leaves!

We added the Please and Thank you prayers to the prayer board in church. We are proud to have received our Eco Church silver award.

Ecochurch: Taking Action for Future Generations

The Church of England wants churches to take a stand on the ecological challenges we face. The diocese is encouraging all of us to better support our church as stewards of God’s creation.

We can do this by participating in Ecochurch, which is an award scheme that recognises the work done by churches to care for the Earth. Churches complete a survey covering a wide range of questions such as how well they are caring for the wildlife in their churchyards or how environmentally friendly their church buildings are. Depending on the answers given by each church, they can work towards an award, and All Saints Church and St. Mary’s Churches already have Bronze Awards. We are not doing this just as a box-ticking exercise to get an award. The award scheme is a means of motivating us as a church to bring about ecological change in our daily lives.

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COP26 – Repair and Reuse

Countdown to COP
Sustainable St Albans

Unless they’ve been living under a rock, it can hardly have escaped anyone’s notice that the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 is happening in Glascow in November. Locally, Sustainable St Albans is running a series of blog postings entitled “Countdown to COP” to raise awareness of how we can all do our bit to counter perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.

Electricals and electronics constitute the fastest growing waste stream, and the carbon footprint of manufacturing replacements for all those gadgets is horrendous. Surely this isn’t good stewardship of this beautiful planet God has entrusted to us.

In the Sustainable St Albans blog this week, Philip Le Riche (All Saints’) shares his passion for fixing things, so avoiding or delaying throwing them away. You can read all about it on the Sustainable St Albans website, and maybe even get inspired to fix one or two things yourself! (Philip also gave an interview on Radio Verulam but unfortunately the link to the recording is no longer available as of Aug ’22.)

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