At the end of the year of 2015, an international conference took place in Paris to which the UN invited the leaders of all nations in order to make an internationally binding treaty about the necessary measures for preventing global warming. The political leaders on this globe have a last chance to prevent that cataclysm of which early signs are already visible everywhere, though to very different degrees. Precipitations fall less frequently than in former decades, and when they fall, they much more often cause floods that, by their immediate impact, more frequently produce destructions of a degree that, until recently, were unheard of. The number and extent of forest fires has drastically increased, as have hurricanes and tornadoes. And the sea level is rising from melting glaciers and ice sheets around the North and South Poles, so that island nations in the Pacific Ocean are on the brink of drowning in the surrounding seas.
Facing the Environmental Crisis explores the wider problem of the environmental crisis from the scientific & religious perspective, since the climate crisis is only one component of it. Politics and economy have not yet faced the environmental crisis by what it takes, in order to avoid the destruction of human civilization. Facing it would require a new concept of economy that would give preference to sustainability over short time profits to which following the law of offer and command leads.
Scientific communities are particularly accountable to the environmental crisis. For they address reality by theorizing that focuses on mere aspects of human experience as e.g. technical and economical success rather than on the reality of human experience in its entirety. Consequently, the industrial application of scientific theories have side effects outside of their focus of success that endanger the survival of life on this globe including human civilization.
By their repeated public declarations on preserving God’s creation from human destruction, religious communities have addressed the responsibility that humanity has for preserving it from human destruction. Unfortunately, they usually have not been able to announce that their communities may be organized for executing nonviolent resistance against the continuous destruction of the environment, although contributing to it contradicts God’s commandment of preservation. Faith doctrines, however, require them to obey God rather than humans, e.g. bosses, in the case that they order their employees to contribute to environmental destruction. Religious communities have not faced yet that, by announcing their communities to become movements of nonviolent resistance against that destruction, they would gain a new credibility particularly among economists and politicians.
You can find Facing the Environmental Crisis: Consequences for Scientific & Religious Communities by Dr. Hilmar Lorenz on Amazon.