Recycling the rubbish, scaling back on air travel and other "green" changes to our lives are good for the soul as well as helping save the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury said.

Recycling the rubbish, scaling back on air travel and other "green" changes to our lives are good for the soul as well as helping save the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury said.

Dr Rowan Williams said fears about individual actions being too late to reverse global warming meant we could "easily fall back" on saying it wasn't worth trying to make environmentally-friendly changes to our lives.

But he said changes to our behaviour and consumption patterns would help us make a step towards "liberation" from a cycle of behaviour that was "dangerous" to our human dignity and self-respect.

In an address to an audience in Southwark Cathedral in London last night, Dr Williams said one of the "foremost casualties" of environmental degradation could be said to be the human soul, in that environmental damage both reflected and intensified a "basic spiritual malaise".

"Many of the things which have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we're part of," he said in a lecture sponsored by the Christian environmental group Operation Noah.

"Our response to the crisis needs to be, in the most basic sense, a reality check, a re-acquaintance with the facts of our interdependence within the material world and a rediscovery of our responsibility for it.

"And this is why the apparently small-scale action that changes personal habits and local possibilities is so crucial."

In his address, Dr Williams highlighted the story of Noah and the Flood in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

He said the story laid out a "clear vision" of the human vocation as including the care and preservation of the conditions of all life, and care for the future of life.

Dr Williams said the current ecological crisis was part of a "general process" of losing a feel for what was "appropriately human".

This loss has shown itself in a variety of ways, he said - with "monumentally apparent" results in the form of the financial crisis in the last 12 months.

He backed pressure on national governments to halt global warming but he said pressure needed to be kept up on ourselves to learn how to work better as "civic agents".

He said: "When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the surest foundations for change at the national and international level.

"They are not two alternative paths but aspects of one essential impulse, the restoration of a healthy relation with our world.

"So whatever we do to combat the nightmare possibilities of wholesale environmental catastrophe has to be grounded not primarily in the scramble for survival but in the hope of human happiness."