Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin
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| Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of
Constantinople releases a falcon rehabilitated by Anima in Spetses,
Greece. (Sean Hawkey) |
ABOARD THE SHIP MORE SPACIOUS THAN THE HEAVENS —
Off the island of Spetses, the leader of 300 million Christians
worldwide told a group of nearly 200 religious leaders, academics and
activists that they needed to move beyond intellectualism when it came
to the environment.
“What remains for us is to
preach what we practice,” said Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
I of Constantinople. “Now we must begin the long and difficult way from
the mind to the heart . . . May God guide you in your service to his
people and the care of his creation.”
The environment has defined 78-year-old Bartholomew’s tenure for more than a quarter-century: The gathering at sea this month
was
the ninth he has organized since the mid-1990s. This one focused on
Attica, the peninsula surrounding Athens that juts out into the Aegean
Sea, and Bartholomew brought together scientists and clergy to examine
the state of bodies of water including the Danube and Amazon rivers, the
Baltic and Adriatic seas, and the Arctic Ocean.
In
November 1997, he had delivered an address in Santa Barbara, Calif.,
where he officially classified crimes against the natural world as sins.
“For
humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological
diversity of God’s creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of
Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its
natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for humans to injure other
humans with disease, for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its
land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances,” he told a crowd
that included then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. “These are sins.”
Pope Francis has likewise
drawn global attention
to
environmental
activism: On the same day Bartholomew was concluding his conference in
Greece, the pope brought the leaders of multinational energy and
investment firms to the Vatican to discuss the path forward on climate
change.
At a time when some political leaders
have become more cautious about — or have outright rejected — policies
aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, several major faith leaders
are making environmental care a top spiritual priority.
But they have also struggled to inspire some of their congregants to action.
“Even
when there’s a will, there is not always a willingness to act,” said
Nigerian Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, one of two cardinals who
traveled to the patriarch’s conference. “The spirit is willing, but very
often, the flesh is weak.”
Still, Onaiyekan
and others who had journeyed to Greece for the three-day “Green Attica”
conference emphasized that they would persist in raising the moral and
ethical dimensions of climate change.
In
Nigeria, Onaiyekan said in an interview that “there is a kind of
ambiguity about climate change” because it is “a nation largely
dependent on oil revenue.” But those living on the Niger Delta have
experienced the damage associated with oil production firsthand, he
said. It would be naive, he said, to expect oil companies and
governments to shift their practices on their own.
“If
you are waiting for them to change, you will wait till Jesus comes back
again,” he said. “We feel the only area where we can actually make an
impact is to constantly keep challenging our leaders to stop killing us.
Stop killing your people.”
Francis — who issued the first papal encyclical focused solely on the environment,
“Laudato Sì,”
in 2015 — pressed this message during his private audience this month
with executives from ExxonMobil, Eni, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Equinor and
Pemex.
Calling climate change “
a challenge of epochal proportions,”
the pope said that the private sector had taken modest steps toward
incorporating climate risks into its business models and funding
renewable energy.
“Progress has indeed been made,” he told the group as he wrapped up the two-day session. “But is it enough?”
Former
energy secretary Ernest Moniz, who attended the meeting, said in an
interview that participants discussed “the moral and ethical dimensions”
of climate change, as well as ways to shift to a low-carbon path.
“Everybody was there trying to find a way to go forward,” Moniz said.
The
patriarch, who resides in Istanbul, has spent years bringing together
unlikely allies while also seeking to reorient the Orthodox Church. In
1989, his predecessor, Patriarch Dimitrios I, designated Sept. 1 as a
day of prayer for the welfare of all creation, and Bartholomew has
expanded upon this initiative.
Jane
Lubchenco, who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration during Barack Obama’s administration and served as the
scientific co-chair of most of these conferences, said the patriarch had
worked to “position the Orthodox Church as a very stewardship-focused
religion.”
Back in 1995, she recalled, he
convened a meeting on the meaning of the apocalypse in the modern world,
to commemorate the 1,900th anniversary of the Book of Revelation. In
that context, Lubchenco said, Bartholomew warned that the apocalypse
could be underway if humans did not reassess their impact on the Earth.
This
month’s gathering — which included stops on the islands of Spetses and
Hydra — included similarly dire warnings from researchers. Hans Joachim
Schellnhuber, who directs the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research, described the current changes arising from fossil-fuel burning
as “disruption on a global scale.”
Without a
sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, Schellnhuber told the
audience, large swaths of Nigeria, the Philippines and elsewhere “will
become uninhabitable” because they will be too hot for humans to live
in.
Some of the most fiery rhetoric came from
Columbia University Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs, who spoke to
the group in Greece before departing for the Vatican to participate in
the papal climate conference. In an impassioned speech, Sachs charted
the historic development of the global capitalist economy,
arguing that its foundation upon the idea of “limited liability” has
meant that corporations will not take responsibility for the economic
damage they have caused.
“What we’ve proved is greed unleashed has no boundaries at all,” Sachs said. “That is the modern economy: Unleash the greed.”
The
patriarch, who sat in the front row for the entirety of the conference,
opened and closed the proceedings. Speaking in English, he framed
conservation as a cause inextricably linked to both his faith and the
broader cause of social justice.
“Any kind of alienation between human beings and nature is a distortion of Christian theology and anthropology,” he said.
Even
small details of Bartholomew’s itinerary carried symbolic significance.
His top environmental adviser, the Rev. John Chryssavgis, asked the
conference hotels to avoid plastic straws and nixed a planned blessing
for Hydra’s fishing fleet that was sponsored by an oil company.
With
his free-flowing white beard and braided ponytail — high-ranking
Orthodox officials eschew haircuts on the grounds that the practice
smacks of vanity — the patriarch stirred an outpouring of affection as
he visited two small islands during his tour. Church bells pealed as his
yacht came into the islands’ harbors, and local residents thronged him
as he made his way into town.
But it is unclear
whether that reverence has translated into an embrace of his
environmental mission, especially in the United States.
The Rev. Terence Baz, an Orthodox priest in Clifton, N.J., said his parishioners are “blue-collar workers, mostly Republican.”
He
added that many conservatives from the Episcopal Church and other
Protestant sects have recently switched to the Orthodox Church in search
of a more tradition-bound faith, “So there is a resistance against
recognizing the reality of what is going to come.”
Chryssavgis
said the patriarch has plans to “reach out to parishes in a more
systematic fashion” on environmental issues through the church hierarchy
but added that “it’s a real struggle.”
American
religious conservatives such as E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, wrote in an email
that “many Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants” share his
skepticism of the idea that burning fossil fuels will cause major
environmental damage.
“The abundant,
affordable, reliable energy generated from fossil fuels has been
indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty,” he
said, adding that these benefits “far outweigh their costs, whether to
individuals, to specific nations or regions, or to the entire world.”
But
as the hydrofoil cruised toward Athens, the bishop of Salisbury, Nick
Holtam, said leaders such as Bartholomew and Francis can bolster
policymakers’ convictions.
“Churches don’t look
like campaigning organizations,” Holtam said, but when it comes to
politicians, “they do need the legitimacy of people who will support
them in doing hard things.”
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