Environment

Do you want to understand why the Ecumenical Patriarch’s coddling of environmentalism is not only wrong-headed but dangerous? First read Environmentalism as Religion in the New Atlantis magazine. Then recall that His All Holiness threw the full moral weight of his office behind of the Geneva Protocols, a crown jewel of environmental activism, during the Mississippi River Boat cruise last year.

Fortunately the UN sponsored protocols were dead on arrival when the East Anglia fraud was exposed a month later. But the Ecumenical Patriarch has yet to explain why he supported them. Why employ such a reckless political strategy that could easily boomerang and undermine an already fragile moral authority? (We tried to warn him.)

So why did he do it? And why does he persist in defending global warming as legitimate science and, even more troubling, build moral exhortations around it? Why insist on continuing the defense — the sanctification really — of the ideology?

Could it be that the plan all along was the self-investiture of the Ecumenical Patriarch as the titular head of environmentalism? Do his advisers envision a convergence between the religious dimension of the movement and the international prominence they so desire? If anyone has a better explanation, I’m all ears.
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It’s too bad that Constantinople won’t dispense with the Progressive rhetoric (first paragraph) because it creates the impression that Orthodoxy endorses the shabby thinking behind the ideology. (On the other hand, perhaps Constantinople does buy into the Progressive world view given that we were told global warming is established fact and were exhorted to work for passage of the Geneva Protocols.) Greed is certainly a factor in spoiling the natural world, but to attribute all despoiling to the greed of developed countries is, well, misinformed. Deprivation, ignorance, economic insecurity factor into it as well. In fact, environmental care is largely the province of the developed countries while underdeveloped countries (China, India, etc.) are the world’s worst polluters.

Finally, the exhortations taken from scripture and the fathers that complete the exhortation are worth heeding. They don’t, however, justify in any compelling way the unfocused exhortation of the opening paragraph.

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June 5, 2010 | Source: The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

Inasmuch as, at the Ecumenical Patriarchate, we have long been concerned about problems related to the preservation of the natural environment, we have ascertained that the fundamental cause of the abuse and destruction of the world’s natural resources is greed and the constant tendency toward unrestrained wealth by citizens in so-called “developed” nations.

The holy Fathers of our Church have taught and lived the words of St. Paul, according to which “if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these” (1 Tim. 6.8), adhering at the same time to the prayer of Solomon: “Grant me neither wealth nor poverty, but simply provide for me what is necessary for sufficiency.” (Prov. 30:8) Everything beyond this, as St. Basil the Great instructs, “borders on forbidden ostentation.”
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Theology is an unwelcome guest at international symposiums on environmental concerns which are largely occupied by data crunching in the service of politicians, international corporate interests, and environmental celebrities, says Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, in Part 1 of his podcast This Holy Earth – Ecological Vision In The Cosmic Cathedral. But without a vision, the people perish, and data crunching cannot create vision. A technical “objectivized” approach to the environment where we understand creation as something detached from inner meaning and human participation — as something extrinsic to the human person — is impoverished Fr. Andrew argues. Sometimes the prescriptions are framed in a moral framework which gives the work an illusion of meaning, but fear is the engine that drives that machine.

There is a lot to listen to in this podcast and Fr. Andrew has obviously has given this question a lot of thought. The ideas he weaves together (solid and coherent, btw) need to be expanded, amplified, and put into a book.

Listen here: