Religion must help protect planet, conference saysBy Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - God wants believers to be green.



That's the message emerging from a Vatican conference on climate change which was the latest sign of growing concern by religious groups around the world over the fate of the planet.

Scientists, environment ministers and leaders of various religions from 20 countries sat down for two days to discuss the implications of global warming and development.


While the scientists spoke of the dynamics of greenhouse gasses, temperature patterns, rain forests and exhaust emissions, the men and women of religion discussed the moral and theological aspects of protecting the environment.

The conference, organized by the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace, marked the most significant plunge to date by the Roman Catholic Church -- the world's largest Christian grouping -- into one of the hottest contemporary topics. (Continued)

Well as soon as the Roman Catholic church reverses its stand on contraception, thus reducing the biggest environmental destroyer (overpopulatoin), I will take this conference seriously

Not to mention augmenting contraceptive measures, including condoms, which at this point not only increases church population, but also diminishes it, as victims die of AIDS/HIV because protection is a sin, but being consumed by one's own immune system, is not. Thank goodness for heaven to look forward to after that pharmaceutical cocktail fails to keep one alive, through the AIDS suffering, huh!?

Well maybe they have it right... by banning condoms they are doing their bit for the environment by ensuring that overpopulation is halted by a massive fatal (preventable) epidemic. Mind you it doesnt explain their stand on items like the epill etc so maybe they are just stubbornly stupid. They did reverse the stand on limbo after 1600 years though so there is hope

I really wish more people cared about the value of unspoiled nature than the value of cash, and came to realize that would she have more respect for the planet that keeps us alive. A cleaner enviroment would mean healthier people, too

Agreed! One would think it's common sense, not to spoil one's only habitat.
And people think pigs are filthy animals because they eat and wallow in their own waste. What a metaphor for the whole human population corporate and material glut, trying to keep billions in population alive in a limited area of a terrestrial environment. Exploiting the resources, without refurbishing the take, just give give give, is all we expect of this one home world. It's heartbreaking to watch those science programs, where they show Earth , from an extra-terrestrial view. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful jewels in the darkness, if I do say so. How can it be seen as OK, as many staunch conservatives claim global warming to be a lie at worst or an exaggeration at the very least. What's happening to our air, our sea's , the ice flow, the rainforest's, the species that are suffering and disappearing, right down to honey bee's and frogs, is our responsibility.

What do we look forward to in our future, at this rate, to write the subtitle for the history book of human arrogance, thinking itself the smartest beastie on the planet, to have it say. This planets population, suicided in it's own waste!

No wonder Nations space programs are looking to inhabit another area. Be it space stations, the Moon or even Mars, at the foremost speculation.
Yeah! That's what we need to do. Go elsewhere and take the consciousness of good housekeeping, with us. Remember that news flash years ago, when a voyager explorer was seemingly shot out of it's landing path, by some sort of beam emanating from Mars surface? I watched it live time and I swear, it looked just like a scene out of Star Trek!
Well, anyway, can't you just see , if there were some ET community aware of our lack of consciousness for our own environmental state of affairs , start to sharpen their marksmanship, as soon as we start to put those off world occupation plans into action!?

" Oh no! Aren't those the life forms that made the grand canyon of their own planet into a sewer?!"

Well said, GoddessWhispers!

Re Vatican though, It beggers belief that it took them 2000 years to realize & promote that? IMO, any religion that on one hand preaches that the Universe ,and our planet, were created by a divine being, but doesn't hold that creation sacred is a big, fat, massive HYPOCRITE!



STEWARDSHIP, NOT DOMINANCE, I SAY !!! ......Jawoll !





PS: Your Avatar is brilliant!

Though for the pope to command unto obedience, billions of catholics, maybe this will help to invigorate environmental conservatism among that particular community. Being the foremost populace faith on the planet, if everyone of them took green energy to heart, and did their part to effect change in that regard, imagine what would be saved, by that effort alone.

If they can repeal limbo, if there's still a population left in another 2000 years, maybe they'll reconsider gay bias, birth control and abortion. Thinking once the Vatican saves the planet maybe then catholics can be entrusted to exercise free choice and end ordained bigotry.

I really hope so. I would love to see that.

Enviroment <3 has any one watched Planet Earth? The Earth is SO GORGEOUS. Far more beautiful than any building we can create, and all we do is develop it for money, it seems.

Love that mini-series. The visuals are breathtaking. The cinematography in just the commercials makes us buy the DVD set for our library. I imagine our current environmental condition, thinking of how beautiful this planet is , and what we're consciously doing to exacerbate the chronic suffering on every level of it's existence, and I liken it unto putting a perfect pearl on a slab of cement and then stomping it into dust and chunks of it's former self.

We really are depraved, if we kill ourselves and this planet, being addicted to arrogance and capitalism.

I knew this was going to happen. For as long as I can remember, the staunchest christians were always touting that "God put us on this earth to dominat it, use all it's resources, and kill off all the animals. That is how we will receive the second comming." thing.


And now that the human arrogance and ego have been driving the habbitates and such into the praverbial ground.. the main christian churches are all now starting to say that "God wants us to change our ways, protect the earth, and go green." Just to save face it would seem.

We should have canned the "Control and use all" mentality centuries ago... Maybe we wouldn't be having these issues now.


I still say it's to little to late. But hey.. better late then never, right?

I never understood that dominion over the Earth thing. We had a conference in Hawaii some years ago and the client gave us a helicopter tour of Kilauea erupting and making what is essentially more commercial ground, in the years to come, as Hawaii becomes more and more occupied by industry.
What a sight! Dominion? When something deep inside this earth can belch out and consume the latest model high end car, not to mention the condo, in the path of what precedes eruption, as a pyroclastic flow, and then comes the lava, one realizes rather quickly, we have dominion over nothing compared to that consuming us alive so that nothing remains sustained within the embrace of molten rock.

Then I went surfing on Waikiki. Big mistake! I got cut off about the second run, I thought my eyes were going to burn right out of their sockets. Stinging like you would not believe. I wash up to shore, straddling the board, trying to see past this film that seemed to attach right to my retinas, because even when I blinked, it wouldn't clear. I doused my eyes with remedy drops, finally, and was able to see, but my nostrils were on fire and mucous , well never mind. Anyway, this girl paddles up beside me, just as I'm starting to recover a bit more. I kid you not, her eyes looked like cowry shells. Swollen lids, swollen underneath the eyes as well, making her actual eye peek through what was essentially a squint. It's typical, she said. The eye problem, burning nostrils thing, when someone wipes out or even swims in the waters there. Turns out the chemicals from the farming wash into the ocean, and are reworked back into the surf. Saturating the shallows with this veritable stinging soup of fertilizers, pesticides, and the like. I knew I'd not smelled water like that before, but being a volcanic area I figured maybe I just was smelling the residue of that.

I got out and called it quits for my surfing experience there. I couldn't believe how bad that was, being in the midst of it. When , for months before the trip, the surf magazines, travel brochures, touted the waters and surfing like crazy. Must have been an edit, to mention that little issue about toxic waters. Snorkeling isn't even do-able, until you get past the break, in most places. There's something tragically wrong, with that.

Uh? Really thought when I was going to church as a child, that was the message in Genesis. Dominion, as in the supreme authority doesn't imply ruining the planet. As a good steward why would you?
Granted, not all see it that way and some segments feel; if God created it then God can fix it. Again fail to see the logic when it states in the Christian KJV bible that God gave humans that task. To me it doesn't matter what faith you practice or if you practice any kind of faith at all. Pooing in/up your own space is just crazy!

Regards,
Mabon.

Oh my gods...

That is just HORRIBLE! I thought that kind of crap was being banned? *sighs* We don't need religion to stop this, we need common fricken sence. Which is usually lost to the all mighty dollar, arrogance, and egotism. There are better ways to keep pests off of the crops that would NOT harm the eccosystems. The problem is, it's to expensive... thus not easy to get. >.<

I wouldn't think organic farming would be a rarity, I would think, given farming of food crops and domestic livestock, that organic would be naturally preferred to insure a healthy consumer base. There are actually predator insects that will consume weevils, etc... from harvested grains in storage. However, from what I've heard, the Federal farm subsidies are revoked, if a farmer chooses that route and , as a condition of the subsidies receipt, does not use chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Even the sifting of the predator bugs, before processing of the crop product, insures no insect corpses are in the product, because once the predators consume their food source, they die but the crop is clean of detrimental infestation.

I'd rather buy wheat sifted of dead predators, than wheat saturated from it's very beginnings, with chemistry. If we are what we eat, it goes a long way I think, given standards and practices invested through factory (animal) and chemical farming, to explain not only obesity at a chronic level, at least in the States, as well as various eliminatory organ cancers. Like liver, lymph, kidney, etc... The residue of such practices have to be filtered in the biological organic human organ system. I imagine , after years and years of cleansing toxic chemicals and pesticide residue , through healthy human organ tissue, there would be a toll to pay. Yet another, "hows that not obvious", moment in human sustainability and foresight relative to environmental impact statements.

Hell of a statement when 7 year old girls get their period, because hormones in meat and the milk that does a body good if you're a calf, but not if your a little girl. Mom's say, "They're growing up so fast!" I say, they have a lot of artificial help in that area. Be afraid, be very very afraid! Especially when boys are developing man boobies at 10. We're so far gone we're actually mutating our young.

How very funny that is. Religion can’t save anything! Only people can do anything to effect a change in the uses and abuses of the planet.

Religion save the planet hahahahahahahaha. That’s funny, tell another one please

For my part, I do not believe I implied religion could save the planet. Rather, I observed that in the case of the OT , the vatican imparting a green message to the membership of the foremost populace religion on Earth, may incite individuals responsible for living here, to do something to save themselves and their only home. One can hold faith in an afterlife, but it's the inch at a time, in this life, that we occupy and effect, that determine the quality of living in the here and now, and at the very least, by implication after one's dead and gone, leaves a lasting impact on what and who remains alive in the wake of an individuals passing. So, if one person works to make their living environmentally compatible, perhaps their legacy will be they walked softly and respected the life, by respecting the home where they lived it.

That's not religious, that's just common sense that should exist already in any creature that expects to survive itself with the foremost of instincts imparting it doesn't insure a healthy future, to defecate where you eat! Earth isn't a toilet, it's a home. Maybe we should think of it as that mother it's often called, and ask ourselves , next time we think of tossing that spent cigarette butt out the car window, if we'd do that in our mothers house! If not, why would one want to do that on the planet that gives us a place to live!? This isn't about religious saving anything. This is about people taking responsibility to save themselves.

Yes, I know. And it's a horrible thing really. But it all comes down to money. Meats with the hormones, produce with the chemicals, and other products that is not organic... are cheaper. That's what the normal consemer can buy... so that's why it'll stay cheaper then organic. I know it's totaly bass ackwards, that that's how this works out.

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money."
Cree Indian Proverb

Personal responsibility, thats crazy talk . Couldnt agree more.

Yep! Call me radical, like that.

I like orange juice from the orange better orange juice in cartons.

I've been taken to growing trees. Yes trees. I'm waiting for a bit more money to come in so I can get me a pair of red woods to raise. Right now I have an orange and banana tree growing.

Soon as we get out own property, I'll beable to have my own garden. Fresh summer produce, no chemicals! *laughs*


Truthfully, we do need to get over the egotistic "We're more intelligent, and superior!" mentality. I mean, is it really that intelligent to poison our own food supply and habbitat?

Oh yes. I love the beauty of tree's. I've lived on properties between beach front and woodland, all my life. It's a wonderful feeling to come out of the bare gray of winter, knowing soon the branches will bud to brilliant colors and grow from there into blossoming tapestries, everywhere I look. It makes everything lighter, to live in the midst of tree's I think.

The National Arbor Day foundation is very good about helping to refurbish clear cutting, woodlands preservation and other such issues. And even contributes to a neighborhood beautification project. One can also buy tree's to keep the activism in the legislative interests, going as well. When I last renewed my membership they gifted me with 10 saplings of my choice, so I could plant what is indigenous to my area. It's lovely to help refurbish other places, while beautifying my own little space at the same time.

I live by the sea, so I can see it from my windows... and from our bedroom window I can see the bird sanctuary. The sanctuary was a quarry during the 1800s - the owner built the building I live in - and it's now full of trees and birds, including peregrine falcons. It's basicall just over the road. I couldn't live anywhere without trees.

I wish I could live by the sea...

Though I might want to get some land up in the Cascades. Things going as they are... they'll be a nice island chain soon. X)

Gw it really concerns me when the vatican is being consulted about global warming as mentioned they are not real good at the solving/ preventative level, on really anytihg the track record is poor to failure IMO .... My family are catholics and when i asked them how they intended to handle the priest molesting children my folks sort of looked at me and said well this is the time we need to stand by the church , i said i realize that but how do you intend to solve the issue, I got blank stares.... For me i jsut am gald to live in california we are a citizen based state that just sees the observable and few seem to have to discuss caring for the planet ...It sort of seems like a no brainer to me, whats there to discuss other than how can we help?????? good grief.....

It's about time the C.C. did something beneficial for the world. They can call it whatever they want, but if the world becomes a little healthier, a little less poluted for it, then I'm happy.