I struggled with a surge of anger last night as I listened to President Trump announce the withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate agreement. Like millions of others, I’m trying to work out how to direct my outrage constructively.

Beneath the anger lies pain.

From my earliest memories, I’ve experienced the world as a place of wonder.

That nature is a sacred gift is not merely some intellectual idea which makes sense to me after due consideration. I feel it viscerally, intuitively, in my very bones. It’s not a thought, but a command. It calls out from every tree, river, bird and animal. I hear it as God’s voice throughout creation. It has the eloquence of the wind and the waves; the vast sky is its articulation. It speaks in the tiny eyes of baby animals and the urgent cries of fledgling birds. Its voices are the silence of hungry children and the sickness of families with no source of clean water, and the hunger of men and women whose land, the earth which fed their ancestors, has turned to desert, or lies beneath the rising waters.

This voice penetrates the consciousness more powerfully than any form of merely human words. But if I must translate it into language, what it says is simple, brutal and commanding: ‘I am life; do not destroy me’.

I am often ashamed of my own existence, fearing the damage I may inflict on what I reverence, the woodlands and fields, the animals and birds, children. I’ve long ago resolved to be a planter, not an uprooter, of trees, and not to kill for my food. But still I feel faithless to this great world of sanctity and beauty.

It was with these thoughts of wonder and shame that, alongside hundreds of millions, I welcomed the Paris agreement and felt great relief in its wake. Whether the 2 degrees centigrade limit on global warming is too high and should be 1.5 degrees; whether the accord is enforceable; whether signing was for certain leaders no more than an act of public show; how the accord relates to social justice: all these remain vast areas of uncertainty. But Paris was a huge move in the right direction.

Now one man has made what may be for him a small, almost casual step backwards, but it is a vast leap in the wrong direction for all humankind.

Part of the reason I’m angry is because of the contempt shown towards the 195 nations who signed in France. The agreement was the result of a vast international effort, supported by the leaders of all faiths and none, headed by Pope Francis in his magnificent encyclical Laudato Si.

But I am mainly angry because of the cause itself. President Trump’s claim that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” is indeed true. But what good can global warming do to Pittsburgh, or Chicago, or Detroit? Research and industry are themselves already (finally) moving towards renewable energies and different technologies. Is the aim to penalise his own country?

Closer to home, doesn’t the President of the United States represent his own children and grand-children and their future on this earth, not to mention my children and yours, and all the children yet unborn who will inherit the wrongs on which our generation turns its back?

The hope is that the President doesn’t represent the USA, let alone the globe, and that his intentions will be challenged in states, cities and courtrooms. Perhaps he will yet experience a change of heart.

The hope is that we will not agree to let this wonderful, breathing world be asphyxiated by our own indifference or negligence, that we simply love it too much, that we will do more because others threaten to do less.