Ecological debt is a spiritual issue 31.08.09

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“The Bible is an ecological treatise” from beginning to end, said Dr Ofelia Ortega, WCC president from Latin America. She described care for creation as an “axis” that runs through the Word of God.

“Nature is our home,” said Dr. Maria Sumire Conde from the Quecha community of Peru. She says some of those who have come there, however, have not been good guests.

In a 31 August hearing on “ecological debt” during the World Council of Churches Central Committee meetings in Geneva, Sumire and others shared some of the ways that the global South has frequently been victimized by greed and unfair use of its resources.

In the case of Peru, Sumire said mining has had particularly devastating effects: relocation, polluted water, illness and decreasing biodiversity.

“We indigenous peoples propose that those responsible should take on the ecological debt and commit themselves to rectify the harm done over the years” to the earth and its people, she said.

The concept of ecological debt has been shaped to measure the real cost that policies of expansion and globalization have had on developing nations, a debt that some say industrialized nations should repay. Dr Joan Martínez Alier, a professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain, said that debt includes both actual financial costs as well as intangibles such as quality of life.

Martínez said climate change, unequal trade, “bio-piracy”, exports of toxic wastes and other factors have added to the imbalance, which he called “a kind of war against people around the world, a kind of aggression”.

“I know these are strong words, but this is true,” he said. Martínez beseeched those present, at the very least, to not increase the existing ecological debt any further.

Dr Ofelia Ortega of Cuba, the WCC president from Latin America, said it is a spiritual issue, not just a moral one.

“The Bible is an ecological treatise” from beginning to end, Ortega said. She described care for creation as an “axis” that runs through the Word of God. “Our pastoral work in our churches must be radically ecological,” she said.

Dr Kim Yong-Bock of the Advanced Institute for Integral Study of Life in South Korea also framed the issue in biblical language. “God has made comprehensive covenants with all living beings and with the earth as the living entity,” he said. “This covenant is broken.”

Prayers for the environment

Tomorrow, 1 September, marks the 20th anniversary of the Day of Prayer for the Environment. The late Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I proclaimed the first environmental prayer day with an address in 1989, beginning a tradition of annual prayer for the environment throughout the Orthodox world.

His successor, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, issued an encyclical letter on creation on the occasion of the anniversary. Noting the many difficulties caused by the global economy in the past year, the ecumenical patriarch says the crisis “offers an opportunity for us to deal with the problems in a different way”. “We need to bring love into all our dealings,” he said, “the love that inspires courage and compassion.”

He asks for prayer for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December and for “justice and love in all aspects of economic activity”.

He concludes: “Let us all renew our commitment to work together and bring about the changes we pray for, to reject everything that is harming the creation, to alter the way we think and thus drastically to alter the way live.”

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