That is a glaring weakness of the alarmist position is it not – no wholeness, no attempt to link “stewardship” to the rest of man’s life. Only survival, and even that is not linked to the hierarchy of value as we are just supposed to assume that the world the alarmists would have us live in is better than the one we sinners live in now. Meaningful and moral work, not viewing the “environment” as a zero sum game, protection of the environment without deifying it and placing it as a greater value than the children of God, none of this seems to be taken in a serious or understandable way by these Christian alarmists. It really is a twisted and unthoughtful thing, a “green patriarch”…

Watch the video. Then reply with more specificity. Your objections are fuzzy and can’t be answered without descending into the same fog.

All your post shows is that you disagree with some positions. Fine, but not really relevant. You have to explain why you disagree.

Are you actually saying that native Alaskan Orthodox are a bunch of opportunistic watermelon poseurs? And that the Ecumenical Patriarch is an insincere phony liberal?

Sources?

(Caveat: On the AOI Blog we have little patience when moral posturing substitutes for clear thinking. This doesn’t mean you have to agree. It means that finger-wagging isn’t an argument.)

Anyone know what the unemployment rate in that area of Alaska is????

Not only am I conviced that the Green Patriarch is actually the Poverty-Promoting Patriarch but I am fairly certain that if you follow Green Orthodoxy down the path it is going that it kills jobs and promotes all of the pathologies that damage civil society.

All of this EP/Green Orthodoxy chatter is cotton candy feel good politics. Lets put people to work in a moral and productive way.

The best social programs for Alaska, New Orleans and the long suffering Native American people are jobs.

I haven’t watched the video, but the direction of your argument is the familiar and specious antinomy of man vs. nature. The issue of medivacs vs. automobiles is a typical iteration of this flawed rhetoric, the emotional appeal – making recourse to alarmism in order to bowl over the opposition.

The fact that several credible Orthodox voices resonate on the same frequency of environmental caution in the context of a traditional, uncontroversial reading of plain old Judeo-Christian stewardship principles, one would think, would elicit a positive response. But instead, we are disappointed to hear the notion of conservation dismissed out-of-hand, generally in these pages in a way which side-steps the actual issue: the real existence of humanity in the world, our physical dependence on God’s good creation, and our Adamic responsibility to the kosmos.

I am consistently let down by the intellectual squeamishness of these posts, which refuse to meet a crisis head on and instead take refuge in outdated political posturing. When leaders of the Orthodox churches speak out, we ought to give them a good listen, on their own terms.

Are you actually saying that native Alaskan Orthodox are a bunch of opportunistic watermelon poseurs? And that the Ecumenical Patriarch is an insincere phony liberal?

I’m happy that the Alaskan clergy have unanimously decided that the environment is a good thing, and to be honored and protected – but this is new? It is news?
There are many good projects in Alaska that are being held up by Greenpeace, Sierra Club and the like that help the people in Alaska and not pollute the environment.

For example, the proposed road from King Cove, so that vehicles can take the sick quickly to larger hospital facilities without a medivac. This will not adversely impact the environment in any conceivable way, and will help the community in a multitude of ways. Yet, for the sake of the sacred environment, it is not being permitted – FOR DECADES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHEea7DpCkM

I think that outside influences have brought about this resolution. If it were not so, why was it not written following the Exxon Valdez incident?

Oh, I forgot, the EP is in the house.