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Can the World's Religions Help Save Us from Ecological Peril?
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Can the World's Religions Help Save Us from Ecological Peril?

Scholars and religious leaders argue that a spiritual connection to nature is essential for environmental recovery.

Paul Hond
Columbia Magazine, 2023
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Human-caused climate change spurs extreme weather events – which keep getting worse. Such crises disproportionately affect poor, vulnerable people.  Karenna Gore – founder of the Center for Earth Ethics at the Union Theological Center in New York and daughter of former US Vice President Al Gore, an international leader on the environment – calls for advocates to tackle climate emergencies the way they fought in the civil rights movement, on an interfaith basis where people united in a common cause. This emerging “religion and ecology” movement seeks to link faith traditions with environmentalism to focus people on being Earth’s stewards.

Summary

The climate crisis demands a response that combines spirituality, politics and environmentalism.

Experts agree that the increasing number of catastrophic weather events is a consequence of human practices. Speaking in New York at an interfaith conference on how to prepare for climate change, lawyer and activist Karenna Gore noted that disasters like hurricanes (and as she spoke in 2022, Hurricane Ian was aiming at Florida) are typically most ruinous for poor people – those least involved in causing them.

Gore insists that responding to climate change requires an interfaith approach. With this in mind, in 2015 she founded the Center for Earth Ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia University. The Center’s purpose is to bring the world’s great “faith and wisdom traditions” to bear on addressing climate change. Indeed, Gore and the Center helped give rise to an increasingly influential academic movement called “religion and ecology” that seeks to help people feel more connected with the Earth and more inclined to revere and preserve its life systems.

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About the Author

Paul Hond is an associate editor at Columbia Magazine, as well as the author of two novels, The Baker and Mothers and Sons.

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