Newswise — Saving souls, getting to heaven, preparing for life in the next world. That's what a good number of religious traditions are all about — but in recent years, the world's religions are getting increasingly involved in efforts to help save the planet Earth as well.
"We are now at a point in human history where all living things and all life processes are at risk, due to the extinction spasm we are causing by destruction of the environment," said Mary Evelyn Tucker, a professor of religion at Bucknell University. "And religious leaders are beginning to discuss, debate, and respond publicly to critical and arresting questions about the shutting down of life systems around the world."
What the world's religions have to say about the environment has been the focus of a multi-year international project spearheaded by Tucker and by John Grim, also a professor of religion at Bucknell (and who's also married to Tucker).
The project got its start in the latter half of the 1990s, with a series of groundbreaking conferences at Harvard on religion and the environment. Now, as the conversation is intensifying and becoming more public, some major media outlets are starting to take notice.
This July, the Christian Science Monitor ran a major story about the spiritual leader of the 250 million Orthodox Christians who is calling for the establishment of marine protected areas and an end to overfishing.
"To protect the oceans is to do God's work," Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I said in the Monitor story. "To harm them, even if we are ignorant of the harm we cause, is to diminish His divine creation."
The Monitor story described the Orthodox leader's speech as marking the emergence of a new leader in the global environmental movement, and Tucker — who was also quoted in the story — called it "historic, unique, unprecedented, and critically important."
Also this summer, a CBS religion special was aired that focused on the active concern of many religious traditions for the environment. Called "A World to Share: Religious Perspectives on Saving the Environment," the program featured interviews with Tucker and Grim. It also quoted members of the clergy, theologians, environmentalists, and representatives of diverse religious groups.
In the program, narrator Ted Holmes noted that while nations have enacted laws to protect the environment, "a sustainable future, where all life can survive, is still a distant dream. Achieving it may require an act of faith, or even a spiritual revolution."
Tucker and Grim are working to spark that revolution. Since the late 1990s, they have been co-directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, an international group of scholars, religious leaders, environmentalists, economists, public policy experts, and government officials.
Tucker describes their work in this area as a "two-wheeled" project — interreligious and interdisciplinary. The first wheel is an interrreligious effort to "retrieve, reevaluate, and reconstruct" the teachings of the world's religions on human interactions with the environment; the second is to inform and to deepen the discourse on environmental issues by bringing religious perspectives into the ongoing interdisciplinary debate on environmental problems.
The Forum is structured to ensure that theologians and scholars of world religions are in dialogue with ecological scientists, public policy makers, economists, business people, health professionals, and educators.
Don Brown, director of the Pennsylvania Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy and senior counsel for sustainable development for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has participated in Forum for Religion and Ecology events. He believes that religious leaders and lay people can have a positive impact on public policy and governmental action.
"Where religious leaders are making a difference is when they turn to concrete issues that are actually in contention, in debate," said Brown, who during the Clinton administration was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's liaison to the United Nations on environmental issues.
The National Council of Churches and other groups have been "really effective" when they turn to concrete issues, focus on ethical and moral issues, understand elements of the debate, and are willing to assert the need for ethnical responsibility, said Brown. "That's been very powerful in the climate [change] debate, I think."
Religious groups are also "getting the attention of [United Nations] officials in global environmental affairs," Brown said.
An important outcome of the Harvard conferences that started the Forum project is a 10-book series on world religions and their approaches to human-environmental relations. The books are published by the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions and distributed by Harvard University Press.
Many of the books in the series — billed as the most comprehensive survey available on world religions and ecology — are the first in-depth and multi-author collection ever to be published on the ecological dimensions of a particular tradition.
Nine of the ten books have already been published, including a recently released study of Islam and the environment. Tucker and Grim are currently preparing an overview study of religion and ecology to conclude this series.
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