The Pope is installing solar panels on the Vatican. Bishops are damning the tar sands. Islamic leaders have issued fatwas against illegal mining. Can religion save the planet (or at least offer some hope)?
Alberta’s tar sands operations have been labelled “the greatest climate crime in history” and “the most destructive project on earth.” Now, the bishop of the diocese that contains them says they “cannot be morally justified,” no matter how great the financial gain. “We’re all stewards of creation,” says Bishop Luc Bouchard, head of the St. Paul Diocese in north-eastern Alberta, “and creation is a gift from the creator to all of us. We all have a responsibility to care for it.” This past January, Bishop Bouchard published a thought-provoking letter critical of both our “wasteful consumerist style” and the destructive tar sands development, while suggesting that safeguarding the natural environment is a religious obligation.
Sir John Houghton, an evangelical and worldrenowned climate scientist, offers a similar sentiment: “There’s a very strong moral imperative for us to cut our greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible.” Houghton should know: an atmospheric physicist, he’s the former Chair of the Scientific Assessment Working Group for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Christians should recognize this, because it is our duty to care for creation.”
This recalibration of religious attitudes toward the environment isn’t just significant for people of faith; the shift could very well transform the entire world. In fact, it may be that religious leaders can do what scientists, politicians and environmental activists have all failed to accomplish: inspire humanity to truly meet the challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change. “The leadership that Christians can offer is not to be underestimated,” Houghton argues. “We are the largest NGO [non-governmental organization] in the world; if we take up the cause of combatting climate change on a global scale, the impact will be enormous.”
Such efforts are already well under way. Pope Benedict XVI has gone so far in his efforts to preach low-carbon living that he has been dubbed “the green Pope.” Last year, he oversaw the installation of 2,40 solar panels on the roof of the Nervi Hall and a Vatican bishop listed “polluting the environment” in a new suite of social sins. These efforts, combined with the Vatican Climate Forest—a new plantation of more than 100,000 trees in Hungary intended to offset the Holy See’s emissions—put the Vatican well on its way to becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral sovereign state. Benedict is actually following the example of Pope John Paul II, who warned of the dangers of greenhouse gases as early as 1990, and even then framed global warming as a moral issue— namely, one created by the rich countries of the world that will disproportionately affect the world’s poorest people.In the U.S., dozens of evangelical Christian organizations united in 2006 to form the Evangelical Climate Initiative, which is dedicated to urging followers to tackle global warming—especially significant, considering that many fundamentalist Christians denied the very existence of climate change for decades.
The U.K.-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences is working with Islamic communities worldwide in order to, in the words of founder Fazlun Khalid, “raise Muslims’ awareness of environmental issues, raise their sense of belonging to the natural world, and raise their sense of the responsibility that comes deep from the Islamic faith.” In addition to work in Zanzibar, where the IFEES convinced local fishermen to stop using coral-destroying dynamite, the group has been especially active in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation. In the summer of 2007, Indonesian Islamic scholars issued the first fatwas regarding the environment, forbidding illegal mining, logging and deforestation.
In Canada, Faith & the Common Good—an interfaith network devoted to shared values among different religious communities—has, through its Greening Sacred Spaces program, overseen the conversion and retrofitting of dozens of churches, synagogues and temples, including the Devi Mandir Hindu temple in Pickering, Ontario and the Baha’i Communty’s facility in Ottawa. “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to it, and what we do to it, we do to ourselves,” says Father Paul Cusack, Pastor of St Gabriel’s Passionist Parish in Toronto, one of Greening Sacred Space’s showcase examples and Canada’s first LEED Gold-certified religious space.
Scientists and secularists may be hesitant to grant too much power to religious leaders on this issue, particularly given evangelical Christians’ poor track record on environmental issues. They may also find it troubling, or even offensive, to realize that the very viewpoint many have deemed unnecessary for a meaningful and virtuous life—namely, belief in a god—can succeed where they have failed. But it’s undeniable that scientists, politicians and activists—regardless of their power or expertise—have failed to stir adequate action.
Scientists have known about global warming since the 1950s, and have generally acknowledged human responsibility for it since the 1980s—but until recently they did not succeed in seizing public attention. This is natural: scientists are trained to word their statements carefully, in terms of statistical likelihood, rather than in stark absolutes. This is forgivable: scientists are supposed to be cautious. It’s not their responsibility to shape legislation or determine political agendas but, rather, to provide the data that informs them.
However, the elected officials who are supposed to wisely shape our laws have failed to address what science has brought to their attention. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, yet global emissions have risen ever since. With terms lasting only a few years, many lawmakers lack the incentive to push through the drastic legislative changes required to reduce emissions, especially if they might lose votes by doing so. Even the most enlightened leader may be unable to effect real changes if voted out of office before a carefully crafted bill can be passed. More significantly, perhaps, a good portion of the voting public distrusts politicians and rarely looks to them for guidance— moral or otherwise.
As for activists, as hard as they may have tried, as irrefutable their positions, or as good as their intentions, they are still frequently perceived as shrill and alarmist doomsayers; consequently, their warnings often go unheeded.
As a paper presented last year at the Sixth International Conference on Ethics and Environmental Policies put it: “Faced with the limitations of science to motivate change, it is natural to consider what the other great knowledge system, religion (defined in its largest sense), can contribute to the response to climate change… Religion has traditionally been a major source of motivation and ethical guidance. As the debate over climate change has intensified, and the scientific evidence has become overwhelming while action has not followed, it is apparent that a broader approach is necessary.”
Powerful and influential religious leaders may yet succeed where secular ecologists have failed, mobilizing humanity before it is too late. The vast majority of the world’s people follow one faith or another—Catholicism and Islam each claim more than a billion followers. But religion has much more to offer the environmental movement than sheer numbers. All faiths offer guidance that even atheists can value: simple and timeless moral,ethical and practical lessons—from the Buddhist emphasis on treading lightly and being kind to all living things, to the Christian denunciation of greed.
University of Toronto Associate Professor Stephen Scharper, author of The Green Bible, believes that the re-examination and reinvention of faith traditions will be extremely useful—even crucial—in reconfiguring our lifestyles to prevent an ecological disaster: “Just as during a power outage we go up to our attics to find the old candles to light our way—finding something useful from an old era—now we can dust off these early traditions like the notion of the Sabbath, and see how they speak to the environmental movement.”
“Judaism offers 4,000 years of wisdom to draw upon,” echoes Michael Kagan, founder of the Jewish Climate Initiative in Jerusalem and author of The Holistic Haggadah. “And a lot of it can be understood to relate to our relationship to the planet and to nature. Judaism has as its core tenet the principle that we have free will—so if you mess up, you must clean up. You can always come back to the right path.”
On a practical level, the world’s faith communities also own more than seven percent of the earth’s habitable land surface. The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, controls more than 18 million hectares of Siberian forest. And it’s unlikely the Vatican would be able to cover the roof of the Nervi Hall in solar panels were it not for its prodigious wealth. “Religious groups bring a lot of financial investments to the global economy,” Scharper says.
Climate change needs to be dealt with immediately to avoid disaster. Some experts believe we have seven years to halt the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, others say as little as a year. This intense urgency may at last bring science and religion together for a common cause. E.O. Wilson, one of history’s most important evolutionary biologists, turned away from the Baptist faith in which he was raised, but nonetheless wrote in The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth that “Religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today.… If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved.”
Indeed, science and religion may not be as irreconcilable as so many contend. Kagan holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and is the CTO of Algaenesis, a company devoted to the production of benign biofuels with micro algae (dubbed by many as the green fuel of the future). “The union of scientific awareness and religious wisdom is a very powerful lever that needs to be used,” he says.
Moreover, there is one way that religion can help in the climate change fight that no other belief system can. Because what scientists, politicians and environmental sts often fail to offer— and what most world religions, in some shape or form, do—is hope. “I find hope in the darkest of days,” the Dalai Lama famously said. And with the global economy in a crippling recession, the biodiversity crisis worsening, and our climate inching towards an irreversible tipping point, these are dark days indeed. It is easy to feel pessimistic and resigned to a hot and impoverished future.
But religious faith, and its emphasis on hope, could provide the impetus for another kind of faith: in humanity’s ability to prevent runaway climate change. Hope and optimism are essential for humanity to make the kinds of changes and sacrifices needed to prevent global catastrophe. If we don’t legitimately believe we can succeed, we might not bother trying. “You need inspiration,” Khalid says, “and you need hope. Bringing a profound sense of positivity to mobilize the world could be our saving grace.”
And hope need not only be for the religious. “I have received emails,” says Bishop Bouchard, “from people who say they are agnostic, saying ‘Thank you for your message of hope.’ That gives me hope.”
“I also remain hopeful,” Houghton says, “thanks to my work with the IPCC. The best scientists in the world worked on those climate change assessment reports, and we would argue at great length—and yet we reached consensus. Because when everybody realizes that one task is absolutely paramount, they will put aside their egos. People from a wide variety of backgrounds, cultures and religions worked together—and I found that very heartening indeed.”
We need not view it all as entirely sacrificial either. This is a chance to see the convergence of devastating climate change, the energy crunch and the global economic downturn as a triple opportunity to reconfigure how the entire world is run—to be less wasteful, more egalitarian, healthier and happier. “This is a time of great possibility and the chance for a new life,” Cusack says. “We can begin the process of healing both our planet and ourselves.”
The support of the world’s religions for action on climate change underscores the fact that the need to avert environmental cataclysm is one of the very few things that all of humanity can agree upon. We may disagree, violently at times, about how to structure our political and economic systems, justice and morality, the separation of church and state—but we can all agree that we need a healthy planet to survive. This fact is unequivocally not up for debate. Global warming threatens not only biodiversity, but the stability of the climates and ecosystems required for our very survival. We may not all agree on the origins of life today, but we can all believe in the need to preserve it.
If anything can give us reason to have hope, surely this can.