Prayer Guide
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
“In the beginning… God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness.” Genesis ch 1 vv 1, 3-4
Scroll down for September’s prayers, or download them below.
To Subscribe:
1. Email Monthly Have an email sent to you at the end of each previous month announcing when the monthly guide is online.
2. Arrange to have emails sent approx. daily Email for daily prayers/meditations
Older prayer guides: Prayer Guide Archive
September 2025 downloads: Small print Doc Small Pdf Large print Doc Large Pdf
Thursday 28th August
The global switch to renewable energy has passed a “positive tipping point”, according to two United Nations reports released [in July]. Write Rosie Frost continues: Solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive and fastest option for new energy generation, according to the UN. In 2024, data reveals that additions to global renewable energy capacity reached 582 gigawatts – a nearly 20 per cent increase from 2023 and the highest annual expansion since records began. Almost all new power capacity built around the world came from renewables, and almost every continent on Earth added more renewables capacity than fossil fuels last year. Nearly three-quarters of the growth in electricity generated worldwide was from wind, solar and other green sources, according to the UN’s multiagency report, called Seizing the Moment of Opportunity.
Friday 29th August
In a recent opinion piece, a group of international researchers says that by barring specific genetic engineering techniques, the European Union is missing a critical opportunity to advance organic agriculture, writes Emma Bryce. If embraced, these techniques could help the bloc to meet its 25% organic farmland target by 2030, and close the roughly 20% yield gap in organic production, they say. What they’re referring to are ‘new genomic techniques’ or ‘NGTs’. These aren’t conventional plant breeding methods, but nor do they strictly fit the definition of ‘genetically modified organisms’ or ‘GMOs’. As such, plants that are created using NGTs currently exist in a kind of regulatory limbo in the EU, where plant breeding is a contentious issue that has led to strict legal controls on how it is used.
Saturday 30th August
A 2023 study found that people in England are concerned about climate change but struggle to identify its health impacts, writes Amber Sawyer. Where health impacts are identified, they are linked to extreme weather overseas. Few people seem to understand how climate change impacts health in Britain…
- Extreme heat has already killed people in Britain and will continue to do so as temperatures rise. 2022 was the UK’s hottest year and one of the hottest years globally. There were almost 3,000 heat-related excess deaths in England that summer (June-August), when temperatures exceeded 40°C for the first time.
- The Environment Agency’s National Flood Risk Assessment (NaFRA) found that over six million properties in England are currently at risk of flooding from surface waters, rivers, the sea or a combination. However, because of climate change, they predict this will rise to eight million, or 1 in 4 properties, by 2050.
- The UK is at risk of at least four new vector-borne diseases –dengue, chikungunya, Zika and West Nile Virus (WNV) – as higher temperatures will enable invasive mosquitos to survive here.The government’s Food Security Report 2021 said climate change was the biggest medium to long-term threat to the UK’s food security.
https://eciu.net/analysis/briefings/the-health-impacts-of-net-zero
Sunday 31st August
Loving God, we thank you for the beauty of your creation, especially the gifts of summer. We ask for the wisdom and strength to be good stewards of this earth, to protect its resources, and to live in harmony with nature. May our actions this summer reflect our gratitude for your creation. Amen.
Monday 1st September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
1st Station: The Goodness of Light
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:1, 3-4): In the beginning… God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness.
A reading from the Book of Creation: About 14 billion years ago, there was a bang – a very Big Bang. A sacred flaring forth. The universe began as the primordial flaring, a dramatic outburst.
God saw that the light was good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Tuesday 2nd September
Brazil’s antitrust regulator suspended a key mechanism for rainforest protection, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, on Aug. 18, less than three months before the nation hosts the COP30 climate summit., writes Shanna Hanbury The Amazon Soy Moratorium is a 19-year-old voluntary private-sector agreement to not source soybeans from areas deforested after 2008 in the Brazilian Amazon. It is estimated to have kept at least 18,000 square kilometers (6,950 square miles) of rainforest standing. Environmental NGOs, including Greenpeace Brazil and Imaflora, warn that suspending the soy moratorium could put huge areas of the Amazon rainforest at risk of being deforested and replaced with soy farms. “Dismantling an effective, internationally recognized agreement built over nearly twenty years, in the name of unchecked deforestation, would be a shot in the foot,” Cristiane Mazzetti, Greenpeace Brazil’s forest coordinator, said in a statement. “It opens the way for soy to become a major vector of Amazon deforestation, burying Brazil’s chances of meeting its climate targets.”
Wednesday 3rd September
Church Land For Nature? – Green Christian/CCA Workshop, 7pm – 8.30, in collaboration with Christian Climate Action. Most UK churches own land. Some, just the churchyard surrounding their building, and for some denominations, thousands of acres. There are two important campaigns that are trying to help the church use their land for the good of nature and climate: Wildcard’s Rewild the Church and Operation Noah’s Land Use campaign. This workshop will inform you about the Wildcard campaign:
https://greenchristian.org.uk/wildcard-online-workshop/
Thursday 4th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
2nd Station: The Goodness of Celestial Bodies
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:14, 16, 18): Then God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the sky… God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day, and the lesser one to govern the night, and the stars… God saw that it was good.
A reading from the Book of Creation: A few million years later, the materials released by the Big Bang – mostly hydrogen and helium – gradually cooled down and began to cluster, pulled by gravity. Eventually, the first stars were born.
God saw that the stars were good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Friday 5th September
The UK economy could shrink by almost 5% by 2030 unless businesses play a greater role in reversing nature’s decline, a new report has warned, writes Sidhi Mittal. Research from the Green Finance Institute (GFI) and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), published in the “Business Investment in Nature” report, found that nature degradation, compounded by climate change, threatens to reduce the UK’s GDP by 4.7% within the decade… The projected losses in the UK, estimated with contributions from the University of Oxford, University of Reading, UNEP-WCMC and the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, would outweigh all gains from current growth initiatives. The study highlights how a degraded environment is already disrupting sectors as diverse as housing, agriculture, energy, manufacturing and tourism, with rising costs undermining productivity and regional resilience. Risks identified include water shortages, soil degradation, flooding and resource scarcity.
https://www.edie.net/private-sector-action-on-nature-can-prevent-uk-gdp-drop-of-5-say-wwf-and-gri/
Saturday 6th September
Wildfires devastate nearly 10,000 km2 in 2025 with Spain and Portugal hardest-hit. Spain’s civil-protection chief warned that the fires continue to pose a direct threat to populated areas, while Defence Minister Margarita Robles described “airborne action” as difficult because of thick smoke. Spain and Portugal are at the epicentre of one of Europe’s most destructive wildfire seasons on record. Data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) show that by 19 August, about 9,670 square kilometres of land had burned across the EU this year, almost three times the 2006‑2024 average. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Portugal, is facing one of its worst wildfire seasons in two decades.
Sunday 7th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
3rd Station: The Goodness of the Sky
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:6, 8): Then God said: Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other. God made the dome, and it separated the water below the dome from the water above the dome. And so it happened. God called the dome “sky.”
A reading from the Book of Creation: In parallel, about 4.44 billion years ago, a dome started to ensemble, stretching as a thin blanket covering Earth. The primeval atmosphere was made mainly from gasses escaping from the planet’s boiling core.
God saw that the sky was good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Monday 8th September
After two years of Global Plastics Treaty talks, ministers in Geneva faced a historic choice during the final hours of what was supposed to be the last round of negotiations: deliver a treaty that truly tackles plastic pollution, or give into the petrochemical industry’s lobbying. Graham Forbes, Greenpeace Head of Delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations and Global Plastics Campaign Lead for Greenpeace USA, said: “The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wake up call for the world: ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head on. The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground. We cannot continue to do the same thing and expect a different result. The time for hesitation is over. The plastics crisis is accelerating, and the petrochemical industry is determined to bury us for short-term profits…”
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/77955/
Tuesday 9th September
Ms. Karenna Gore, the eldest daughter of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said [in August] in Brasília that tackling climate change is a matter of knowing how to distinguish between right and wrong, writes Laura Marques. She is a co-organizer of the Global Ethical Stocktake for North America, [and visited] at the invitation of Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Ms. Marina Silva, and the founder of the Center for Earth Ethics. This institution works to integrate the world’s faith and wisdom traditions into the discussion of the moral and spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis. “This crisis is about who we are as human beings, how we manage to make collective decisions, and what we deeply care about. In a way, it is about knowing the difference between right and wrong and understanding what that means for our behavior,” she emphasized. She is visiting Brasil to participate in the “Faith in Climate” interfaith event in the federal capital. It is a symbolic, spiritual, and political gathering that contributes to building Brasil’s ethical participation in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), by gathering religious leaders from different traditions, Indigenous peoples, youth, scientists, authorities, and activists to reaffirm spirituality as a mobilizing force. “[The climate crisis] calls us to seek strength in something greater than ourselves,” Ms. Gore stressed.
Wednesday 10th September
Tonight is online workshop, Inspiration from Nature Writing, 7 – 8.15pm. We are excited to welcome the poet and spiritual director, Adrian Scott, to our second online workshop in September, as part of our Season of Creation series. We will seek to grasp the way that St Francis, arguably a few hundred years ahead of the green movement, found healing, solace and God in the natural world. We will explore St Francis’ poem to creation, The Canticle of the Creatures, alongside one of Adrian’s poems emulating this, called A Canticle to Creatureliness. He will also look at how writing about nature can also be very curative. Free, but register to get the link.
https://greenchristian.org.uk/inspiration-from-nature-writings-online-workshop/
Thursday 11th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
4th Station: The Goodness of Earth and Sea
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:9-10): Then God said: Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear. And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared. God called the dry land “earth,” and the basin of water he called “sea.” God saw that it was good.
A reading from the Book of Creation: Soon after, about 4.43 billion years ago, Earth gradually cooled and its surface of molten rock turned into a crust of rock. A beautiful shell of sacred rock.
God saw that the Earth’s crust was good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Friday 12th September
Clean-energy growth helped China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fall by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024, writes Lauri Myllavirta. The CO2 output of the nation’s power sector – its dominant source of emissions – fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand. The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that record solar capacity additions are putting China’s CO2 emissions on track to fall across 2025 as a whole…Even if its emissions fall in 2025 as expected, however, China is bound to miss multiple important climate targets this year. This includes targets to reduce its carbon intensity – the emissions per unit of GDP – to strictly control coal consumption growth and new coal-power capacity, as well as to increase the share of cleaner electric-arc steelmaking in total steel output.
Saturday 13th September
Giraffes are a majestic sight in Africa with their long necks and distinctive spots, writes Christina Larson. Now it turns out there are four different giraffe species on the continent, according to a new scientific analysis released Thursday. Researchers previously considered all giraffes across Africa to belong to a single species. New data and genetic studies have led a task force of the International Union for Conservation of Nature to split the tallest mammal on land into four groups — Northern giraffes, reticulated giraffes, Masai giraffes and Southern giraffes. Key studies have emerged in the past decade highlighting significant differences between the four species, said the IUCN’s Michael Brown, a researcher in Windhoek, Namibia, who led the assessment. Naming different giraffes matters because “each species has different population sizes, threats and conservation needs,” he said. “When you lump giraffes all together, it muddies the narrative.”
https://apnews.com/article/giraffe-species-africa-a9cd75169f3d5b6122decb9a5e8493dd
Sunday 14th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
5th Station: The Goodness of Plants
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:11-12): Then God said: Let the earth bring forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it. And so it happened: the earth brought forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree that bears fruit with its seed in it. God saw that it was good.
A reading from the Book of Creation: About 3.5 billion years ago, water enabled the stupendous to happen: life emerged. The first single-celled microorganism was born in the sea. The miracle of life burst forth.
God saw that life was good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Monday 15th September
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) have jointly launched the Fortifying Infrastructure for Responsible Extinguishment (FIRE) project, which aims to phase out the use of toxic fluorinated firefighting foams and replace them with safer alternatives at major airports in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. FIRE – a $82.5 million initiative with a $10 million grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and $72.5 million in co-financing from partners – will phase out firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), hazardous “forever chemicals” linked to serious environmental and health risks.
Tuesday 16th September
India fears a planned Chinese mega-dam in Tibet will reduce water flows on a major river by up to 85% during the dry season, according to four sources familiar with the matter and a government analysis seen by Reuters, prompting Delhi to fast-track plans for its own dam to mitigate the effects. Sarita Chaganti Singh and Krishna N. Das continue: The Indian government has been considering projects since the early 2000s to control the flow of water from Tibet’s Angsi Glacier, which sustains more than 100 million people downstream in China, India and Bangladesh. But the plans have been hindered by fierce and occasionally violent resistance from residents of the border state of Arunachal Pradesh, who fear their villages will be submerged and way of life destroyed by any dam.
Wednesday 17th September
Britain needs a new comprehensive UK–EU Energy, Climate and Environment Partnership – and we need it now, writes Caroline Lucas…Historically, the UK has been a leader within the EU on climate policy, championing more ambitious targets and offering pragmatic diplomacy. British influence was instrumental in securing the EU’s commitment to reducing emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels as part of the EU’s 2030 Climate and Energy Policy Framework. The UK was widely recognised as one of the most influential member states in shaping European Union international climate negotiations. Today, however, that leadership risks being lost. Since leaving the EU, our environmental and public health protections have fallen behind and the UK has become increasingly disconnected from crucial environmental discussions and decisions. At the same time, there are troubling signs that the EU itself may be tempted to weaken future commitments – adding to the urgency for renewed and strengthened cooperation. The momentum from the May 2025 UK–EU Summit marked a significant shift in tone and ambition. For the first time since the UK’s departure, both sides signalled a willingness to reset the relationship and a shared ambition to tackle common challenges together.
https://theecologist.org/2025/aug/21/we-must-tackle-common-challenges-together
Thursday 18th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
6th Station: The Goodness of Water and Air Creatures
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:20-21): Then God said: Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures, and on the earth let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky. God created the great sea monsters and all kinds of crawling living creatures with which the water teems, and all kinds of winged birds. God saw that it was good.
A reading from the Book of Creation: In parallel to the emergence of aquatic plants, about 600 million years ago, worms and jellyfish appeared in the seas… They then evolved into all sorts of sacred invertebrate creatures, with growing complexity and intelligence – molluscs, sea snails, trilobites, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, squids, octopus, and more.
God saw that aquatic invertebrates were good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Friday 19th September
Emotions around climate change—grief, fear, hope, guilt, anger, and so on—are becoming a more frequent topic of conversation among the public, as well as a focus of interest among researchers, writes Sarah DeWeerdt. Of these various emotions, anger has received relatively little research attention until now. Anger can be a destructive force, inspiring vengeance and punishment, but it can also be a force for good—inspiring people to work together to overcome and redress injustices. Does that hold in the case of climate change? To find out more about climate anger and its effects, researchers analyzed data from 2,046 people in Norway collected as part of an ongoing survey of Norwegian public opinion. Survey participants were asked to what degree they experience anger, sadness, guilt, fear, and hope related to climate change. Of the participants, 960 or about 48% reported feeling anger, the researchers report in the journal Global Environmental Change. Anger was among the least common climate emotions; only guilt scored lower.
Saturday 20th September
A new mission to bring nature to towns and cities across the UK has been announced (Friday 18 July) to benefit millions of people living in urban neighbourhoods in the UK over the next decade. Nature Towns and Cities is a coalition of organisations united by the ambition to enable everybody to experience nature in their daily lives, particularly those places and communities currently lacking access to quality green space. The first of its kind, this new programme announced by Natural England, National Trust and The National Lottery Heritage Fund aims to help at least 100 places across the UK to become greener, healthier, happier places for people to live and work. Across these 100 towns and cities at least five million more people will gain access to green space a short walk from home, and one million children will have the opportunity to play outdoors in nature every day, as well thousands of existing green spaces being improved for communities and wildlife.
Sunday 21st September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
7th Station: The Goodness of Land Creatures
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:24-25): Then God said: Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature: tame animals, crawling things, and every kind of wild animal. And so it happened: God made every kind of wild animal, every kind of tame animal, and every kind of thing that crawls on the ground. God saw that it was good.
A reading from the Book of Creation: About 500 million years ago, in tandem with the colonization of land by plants, the first insects appeared as well. They gradually evolved into all sorts of sacred landbound creatures: tiny ants and giant stick insects, communal termites and solitary mantids, colorful beetles and stealthy leaf insects, silent shield bugs and musical cicadas and crickets.
God saw that terrestrial invertebrates were good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Monday 22nd September
Two decades ago, Hurricane Katrina spun up like a massive atmospheric engine, using warm ocean water as fuel, writes Matt Simon. Making landfall as a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph, it devastated New Orleans — surging seawater over levees, killing nearly 2,000 people, and causing more than $150 billion in damage. Even though engineers have since significantly bolstered those levees, their ability to withstand climate-supercharged cyclones remains uncertain. In the past 20 years, researchers have gotten ever better at determining how much human-caused climate change has contributed to extreme weather — a field called attribution science — thanks to more data and better modeling. On the 20th anniversary of Katrina, a new report from the research group Climate Central looks back and crunches the numbers, finding that the monster storm fed on waters made 0.9 degrees Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter by climate change. That boost of fuel accelerated the maximum sustained wind speed by 5 mph.
https://grist.org/science/we-now-know-just-how-much-climate-change-supercharged-hurricane-katrina/
Tuesday 23rd September
In Brazil’s Amazonian state of Pará, families live in fragile wooden homes beside potholed dirt tracks, just metres from deep copper mines that have multiplied in the scramble to supply the global energy transition write Nicholas Pope and Emily Iona Stewart,. “It’s a future that never arrives,” one miner explained – a bitter refrain in a region promised prosperity by the clean energy boom. This is the same state that will host the UN climate summit, COP30, in November. Leaders will gather in Belém to speak of “just transitions”. But the “green economy” here looks much like the old fossil fuel-based one: concentrated profits, displaced communities, polluted rivers. Some of these operations have been linked to slave labour and environmental violations. The situation in Pará reflects a much broader issue. Governments are racing to secure lithium, copper, manganese, rare earths, and other minerals – the building blocks of clean energy – spurred on by geopolitical rivalry, tariff wars, and supply chain fears. China’s growing dominance and surging demand have triggered a wave of industrial policy and extraction. But in the rush to secure supply, the questions of who benefits and who bears the costs are too often ignored.
Wednesday 24th September
Thirteen communities with concessions in the Maya Biosphere Reserve are working with Guatemala’s protected areas authorities to conserve the forests and wildlife on their lands, writes Monica Peliiccia. Community members use drones, camera traps, phone apps and satellite data analysis to track changes in the ecosystem and the movements of species. Their involvement has helped conserve the local jaguar population by drastically reducing forest loss in the central zone of the reserve. Further north, on the border with Mexico, jaguars are under threat from drug trafficking, illegal ranching and hunting, timber and wildlife trafficking, and illegal encroachments to build new villages.
Thursday 25th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
8th Station: The Goodness of Humans
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:26-27): Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
A reading from the Book of Creation: After a long journey of over 3.5 billion years, the miracle of life eventually turned into the miracle of humans. After an incredible journey in the sea, of microorganisms, bacteria, invertebrates and fish, and an equally incredible journey on land, of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and primates, the first human ancestors walked on Earth. Over 2 million years ago, in Eastern Africa, the Homo lineage began.
God saw that early Homo creatures were good.
For the goodness of all Creation, praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Friday 26th September
President Donald Trump vowed to combat drug trafficking organizations and the opioid crisis, but a new report details how his extensive cuts to staff and programs targeting environmental crimes are hindering those efforts, writes Katie Surma. Illegal gold mining, one of the most ruinous environmental crimes, is filling the coffers of transnational drug organizations, generating more money than the drug trade in some countries, according to research from the nonpartisan Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition. The report warns that the illegal gold trade in the Americas threatens the integrity of the U.S. financial system, undermines regional security and provides funding for drug traffickers and other criminal organizations. That allows these groups to carry out operations that endanger Americans, especially with drug overdoses being a leading cause of death in the United States. Yet, since taking office, Trump has reassigned top environmental crime prosecutors at the Department of Justice to other issues; reduced staff at the Department of Homeland Security’s Wildlife and Environmental Crimes Unit, the top agency fighting illegal gold extraction; laid off personnel at the Department of State working on the issue; and cut U.S. funding for programs to combat illegal gold mining and prosecute perpetrators.
Saturday 27th September
A heritage dairy brand best known for its English Cheddar is rolling out birdsong monitoring technology enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) across farms, in a bid to monitor and boost biodiversity, writes Sarah George. Wyke Farms has partnered with Chirrup.ai to add bioacoustic monitoring technology to ten farms across South West England, which collectively supply a quarter of the milk used in its cheesemaking. Monitoring devices will capture bioacoustic data evidencing bird activity across the farms – primarily birdsong. Each device is attached to a tree or pole, and can ‘listen’ across at least a 100-metre radius. Advanced AI is used to analyse the data and calculate an overall ‘biodiversity score’. Farmers will see how their score changes over time from the original baseline… “Birds are brilliant indicators of ecosystem health,” Wyke Farms said in a statement. “With Chirrup’s bioacoustic technology, we can now listen to the land and gather real-time data on species richness and environmental wellbeing. It’s a simple, science-backed way to understand how our farming practices support nature – and where we can do even better.”
https://www.edie.net/somerset-cheesemaker-wyke-farms-turns-to-ai-for-biodiversity-monitoring/
Sunday 28th September
The Season of Creation runs from 1st September to October 4th. The theme this year is Peace with Creation. We will contemplate and pray throughout September, with excerpts from the 9 stations from the Via Creationis, written by the Laudato Si’ Movement.
9th Station: The Goodness of Everything
We adore you, O Creator, and we bless you.
Because by your holy Word you have created the world.
A reading from the Book of Genesis (1:31, 2:3): God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good… God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation.
A reading from the Book of History: A few thousand years ago, the love story began between God and the People of Israel. Among other things, we were taught about the goodness of the whole cosmos and the importance of contemplative rest. We were invited to enjoy and be thankful for this created world that is “very good”.
As God saw, we also see that everything is good, very good.
All Creation is good, very good. Praise be to God!
https://seasonofcreation.org/resources/
Monday 29th September
Asian elephants were once widespread across the continent, from the Persian Gulf to China, writes Whitney Kent. Today, they only occupy around 5% of their original range. Within this range, particularly in Southeast Asia and southern China, Asian elephants are sharing space in some of the most densely populated countries. This is putting even greater pressure on these elephant populations as they are increasingly finding their habitats fragmented or disappearing entirely. Infrastructure development can pose a significant threat to Asian elephants as roads and railways intersect with important elephant habitat and become barriers to movement. A recent traffic accident on a Malaysian highway that led to the death of an elephant calf was a tragedy that highlighted the need for improved measures to enable safe elephant movement. Launched In August 2023, WWF’s “Elly Allies” initiative has been helping to build momentum across elephant range countries in Southeast Asia and China to prioritize sustainable and wildlife-friendly infrastructure, among other elephant conservation priorities. Last year, experts from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN’s) Asian Elephant Transport Working Group, which includes WWF experts, co-authored the first elephant-specific guidelines to help countries reduce collisions and provide safe passage for elephants.
Tuesday 30th September
An uptick in heat extremes, driven by human-caused climate change, has caused tropical bird populations to decline by up to 38% since the 1950s, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis, writes Daisy Dunne. The study combines ecological and climate attribution techniques to trace the fingerprint of fossil-fuelled climate change on declining wildlife populations. It shows that an increase in heat extremes driven by climate change has caused tropical bird populations to decline by 25-38% in the period 1950-2020, when compared to a world without warming. The findings could help to explain why tropical bird numbers have declined even in pristine rainforests, a phenomenon that previously mystified biologists, the scientists say.
Sources:
Text and links compiled by Emma King. Links accessed August 28th 2025.
Since December 2017 we’ve not been distributing the Prayer Guide as hard copy except under very special circumstances. (We encourage people to print out the Prayer-guide themselves and put it in their local churches.) If you think your circumstances qualify as very special please contact the webeditor
To have the Green Christian prayer guide emailed to you (free), please complete this on-line form