Highlights
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2024-07-06 10:32 I direct the Interfaith center for Sustainable Development, based in Jerusalem. I was ordained as an orthodox rabbi, and for the past 14 years, I’ve had directed this organization.
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2024-07-06 10:35 And I’ve been living in Israel for the past 20 years, and I’ve been focusing on this connection between religion and ecology because religions are the biggest ngo’s on planet earth, and they have huge media assets, huge land holdings, big educational institutions, but they’re a sleeping giant in terms of climate action.
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2024-07-06 10:38 And among those 85%, theres a range in terms of how much people practice on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. But most of humanity does have some affiliation to a religion.
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2024-07-06 10:40 To put it differently, I believe that the spiritual roots of the climate crisis are greed, short term thinking, egoism and arrogance.
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2024-07-06 10:44 And then we’ve worked with a christian pastor from the Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky, Reverend Leah Shade, to develop over the past several years an eco preacher resource that we’re distributing to many christian clergy to encourage them to incorporate climate change and ecology as part of their sermons.
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2024-07-06 10:45 And so even though China is thought of as a communist country, but actually China has become more religious in the past couple of decades.
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2024-07-06 10:48 Now, why is there so much opposition within many traditional religious groups to ecological action? It partly has to do with the fact that the ecological movement emerged in the 1960s at the same time as the hippie movement and the free love movement and the tree huggers.
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2024-07-06 10:50 I mean, I don’t want to get too political on this, but when you look at the situation in the United States, for example, very much the Christian, I want to say evangelicals, I guess, are extreme right wing and so align themselves more with the fossil fuel lobby than the climate lobby.
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2024-07-06 10:50 So I have a book here called Anointed with oil, which is a book written by Professor Darren Dochuk of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
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2024-07-06 10:51 And over the past 180 years, since the first oil was made in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1841, by the way, Baku is going to be the site of the next UN climate conference in November.
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2024-07-06 10:54 One teaching that relates to climate change is a verse from the book of Genesis, chapter 14, verse ten. Eco Bible is a commentary on 400 verses in the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers and deuteronomy.
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2024-07-06 10:55 And then these kings came to believe that Abraham had also been miraculously saved by the tyrant nimrod in Iraq when Abraham was younger. And I believe that this teaching is a metaphor for our current situation, that humanity is stuck in fossil fuels.
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2024-07-06 10:58 And it’s looking like for COP 29, there will be senior religious figures attending as well. At COP 28, we had two senior swamis who are senior hindu religious figures, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Sadhguru, who have large followings in India, where there’s about a billion Hindus.
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2024-07-06 11:02 Last year I was in Sweden and I spoke at a lutheran church, and the pastor of that lutheran church bicycles from his home to the church about 20 km every day, 10 miles. And he does that every day, rain, snow, ice or sunshine.
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2024-07-06 11:03 In the nordic countries, the Church of Sweden has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030, as has the Church of Finland, as has the Church of England.
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2024-07-06 11:05 Or to put it in more secular terms, they’re just feeling healthy.
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2024-07-06 11:05 This fund would work to scale the religion and ecology movement.
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2024-07-06 11:08 And so one of the things that I think that religion can also bring to the table in the climate crisis is giving people a sense of hope.
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2024-07-06 11:12 But the fact that there’s a billion cows that are on planet Earth right now mostly used for producing milk and butter and cream for ice cream, as well as meat for steaks and hamburgers, and the fact that there’s 24 billion chickens, these are significant things, which goes back to the relation between spiritual wisdom and ethical consumption.
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2024-07-06 11:13 You know, we didn’t used to eat eggs the way that we eat eggs today. That was because the first vaccine for chickens was in 1956.
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2024-07-06 11:15 Well, we have a website, interfaithsustained.com, and we’re active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
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2024-07-06 11:16 And so she looks at the boy and she says to him, I don’t know whether the bird in your hands is alive or dead. All I know is that the life of the bird is in your hands.