A report published yesterday urges the government to adopt a more environmentally friendly energy policy, by way of more heat efficient homes, and a greater use of renewable energy sources like the sun, the wind and the waves.

I must say that at this time of the morning and the week I could do with some renewable energy, but the point is serious and urgent.

We're using up our coal, oil and gas, at a prodigious rate; and in the process we're not just polluting the environment and damaging the earth's atmosphere. We're also buying the present at the cost of the future. Unlike wind, solar and tidal energy, the fossil fuels we burn now won't be there for our grandchildren not yet born.

And it's here, I think, that a biblical perspective is helpful. In Genesis 1 we read of how humanity was told to fill the earth and subdue it, our mandate for science and technology. But in Genesis 2 we're told that man was placed in the garden to serve and protect it, meaning that nature has its own integrity that we must respect and preserve.

The line that always resonates with me is that remarkable verse in which God says, The land shall not be sold in perpetuity for the earth is Mine; you are only temporary residents. What this means is that we don't own nature; at most we hold it in trust on behalf of God who made it, and the future generations who will inhabit it. Hence all those laws in the Bible - don't work the land on the seventh day and the seventh year; don't mix different species; don't destroy fruit trees in the course of war - possibly the world's first environmental legislation.

It took the modern prophets of ecology, the green activists, to make us go back to the Bible and realise what it was whispering to us all those centuries ago. We're the guests of nature, the guardians of creation; not the owners who can do with it what we like.

There's a lovely rabbinic comment, dating back at least fifteen hundred years, that might have been made for yesterday's report. When, at the end of creation, God made man, he showed him all the glories of nature. See the beauty of the world, he said, and I have handed it over to you. But be careful that you do not damage it, for if you do, there will be no one left to mend what you destroyed. Don't use up what you can't renew.

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