|PIC1|The environmentally themed Advent calendar will present daily green challenges and thoughts.

Launched today, the Ready Steady Slow videocast is available on the website www.whywearewaiting.com and on YouTube. It is the first of a number of Ready Steady Slow events, including a stand at this weekend’s Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham.

Dr Williams says in the two-minute videocast: “There’s plenty to be afraid of at the moment and among the many things that are making us unsettled and uncertain, at present, is of course the crisis in our environment - the effects of climate change, the effects of pollution, the long-term anxiety about whether we as human beings actually have a future on this earth.”

The Archbishop continues: “The answer to this is, in large measure, in our hands. It’s about our lifestyle; it’s about the ways we are prepared to go with the grain of God’s creation, rather than fighting against it and trying all the time to overcome it.”

Dr Williams adds that our aim should be “to live patiently, to live respectfully, to live in a way that takes our material environment seriously, with all its possibilities and all its limitations.

“And that, of course, is simply our human response to God’s hope for us. God creates us so we may be part of His creation – not something separate, not some alien power manipulating it to our own ends, but part of a creation working together harmoniously.”

Filmed at Lambeth Palace, the videocast also features footage of Operation Noah’s Ark Campaign event in Westminster led by the Bishop of London in July 2009.

Another videocast with the Archbishop will follow on the first Sunday of Advent on November 29.