Overview

Religious leaders and communities must recognize the scale, urgency and moral dimension of climate change, and the ethical unacceptability of any action that damages the quality and viability of life on Earth, particularly for the poor and most vulnerable.

Participants | Objectives | Related InitiativesÂ

Objectives

  • Urgency may promote commonalities. Heightening the sense of urgency is especially important to accelerating the impulse toward finding common understandings across the religious/scientific divide and also between religions on issues like climate change. Without urgency, the differences may continue to take precedence over commonalities.
  • Informing urgency. Religious leaders, therefore, should be supplied not just with basic information about climate change, but especially information about the threat of non-linear change, abrupt surprises, and irreversible effects such as species extinction caused by climate change.
  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some have called climate change a civil rights issue for our era. One religious leader quoted King at the Conference and helped promote focus among the participants:
    • “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs.We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late . . .’â€

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