I settled down on my ‘day of rest’ and read Chris’s book almost at one sitting.  This is an excellent book and will be a useful resource for the future.  Chris deftly weaves together a diversity of Christian ecological spiritualities.  His Christian stewardship perspective is soundly based on an evangelical (in the best sense of this term) interpretation of a plethora of biblical texts, that brings us a positive and clear vision.  But he is also catholic (again in a non-denominational sense) in his holistic truth telling of the human story.  His creation spirituality aims to reorient humans to see and understand with humility our place in a panentheistic creation (the world present in God and God present in the world).  There is also a thread of ecojustice woven into his narrative that rightly shines a light on the justice issues in climate change that affect already vulnerable peoples.  I also detected a Franciscan influence in his homage to the polar bear.  A canticle would have been nice!
I particularly liked his decision to bring in the often neglected Book of Job.  Try to imagine God whispering to Job out of the whirlwind instead of the usual bellowing caricature.  One quibble in the otherwise comprehensive list of action points in the last chapter.  No plug for the vital Freecycle network! But I was glad of his acknowledgement of the wildness of God.  Having just completed a research project on wilderness spirituality I can attest to something that perhaps we are a little to afraid to admit.  One aspect of modernity that is thankfully disappearing in this postmodern age is the objectified God we foolishly claim is quite easily known and consequently try to possess as ‘our’ God, with all the terrible outcomes that this has brought.  We would do well to return to the wild places not for escapism, sport or therapy, but as a repentant people. Here we might be met by Job’s gentle desert whirlwind voicing to us, urging us to seek out the Way.  Annie Dillard made this encounter as a ‘Pilgrim in Tinker Creek’, ‘A wind from noplace rises.  A sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way.’