It is rare that religion and science find agreement, but that is what happened when Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke at a meeting on saving the earth from climate change.

“The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a book in 2007 called “Creation”, subtitled An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” Sacks told leaders of all the major faiths meeting at Lambeth Palace in London on Thursday.

(Photo: A partially dried reservoir in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, China, 29 Oct 2009/stringer)

“I thought that was a very good book. E.O. Wilson is known not to be religious, but what this book was was a call to religious people and scientists to call off the war between religion and science and work together for the sake of the future of life on earth.

“And I felt that was a very generous and appropriate call by a non-religious scientist.”

He said “that science and religion despite their apparent friction actually converge on a profoundly scientific and at the same time religious idea that there is a kinship of life and hence a covenant of life”.

Not only did such a high-profile religious figure agree with the scientific world, but faith leaders found harmony among themselves at the same meeting.

Sitting next to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, was the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who only days earlier had delivered the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans the chance to convert to Rome.

Also attending were faith and community organisation leaders including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian.

(Photo: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 23 July 2006/Paul Hackett)

Organised by Williams, the leaders issued a joint statement in which they “recognised unequivocally that there is a moral imperative” to tackle the causes of global warming.

They agreed to work together to raise awareness about the effects of “catastrophic climate change”, saying it was the poor and vulnerable who most suffered from the ensuing droughts, floods, water shortages and rising sea levels.

Quoting from the book of Genesis, Sacks said man was placed on earth to serve it and protect it. “Man was a guardian, not the owner using and abusing the good things on earth,” he said.

“We are taken from the earth and therefore owe it a sense of kinship and responsibility. We believe our very existence as human beings come wrapped up in environmental imperatives and ecological responsibility.”

Drawing on the story of Noah’s Ark where all animals, including the lion and the lamb, had to survive side by side, he said we would all drown if we failed to work together.

Of course, if everybody kept the Sabbath, when nobody drove cars, flew by plane, or switched on any electrical appliances, the environmental problem would be solved, he said.

But more realistically, a new set of rituals would have to be devised that recognise the importance of the environment.

“What religion allows us to do is take the big ideas and translate them into daily rituals,” he said.

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Remember the Christian Coalition of America?

Under the political operative Ralph Reed in the 1990s it was an electoral force to be reckoned with as it mobilized millions of conservative Christians to vote for mostly Republican Party candidates and causes.

It has since lost influence and political ground to other “religious right” groups such as the Family Research Council. But it remains a sizeable grassroots organization and is still unflinchingly conservative.

So it will no doubt surprise some to see that this week it has joined with the National Wildlife Federation – whose 4 million members and supporters includes 420,000 sportsmen and women – to run an ad urging the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that among other things addresses the pressing problem of climate change.

“Defending the status quo is no longer an option. We need swift action
to ensure America is the world leader in clean energy technology.
We can put Americans to work making and installing the clean,
renewable energy technologies that reduce our dependency on
foreign oil and address climate change.
Senators should work together to move forward with a clean energy plan for America,” says the ad, which ran this week in Politico.

It comes as the U.S. Senate considers a bill to curb the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Other U.S. Christian groups and prominent evangelicals such as Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter have urged action on climate change — a top priority of President Barack Obama — on the grounds that the poor will bear the brunt of warming temperatures. They also see a biblical responsibility to care for God’s creations.

(PHOTO: Vanishing Arctic Sea ice is one of the most visible signs of global warming. REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

But influential conservative Christians such as Richard land of the Southern Baptist Convention have spent the past months assailing the cap and trade provisions of the bill as a massive tax hike. In many religious right circles the climate change issue is seen as downright hysterical or an attempt by leftists to cripple the U.S. economy.

But even the most hard-line conservative Christians are no longer united on this issue.

Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican Senator from South Carolina, broke ranks with his party and recently outlined a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a New York Times op-ed piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry.

That won him praise from national hunting groups and local ones in his home state, which has a robust shooting and fishing culture woven into its rural fabric.

We have recently blogged and written on U.S. hunters and anglers — many of whom are evangelical Christian, conservative and Republican — urging action on climate change, not least because of its threat to the game they pursue.

Roberta Combs, the president of the Christian Coalition, told me in a telephone interview that her group joined forces with the NWF on this issue because it saw a biblical need to look after God’s creation. But she said it also wants America to pursue alternative energy policies to reduce its independence on foreign oil including expanding its use of nuclear power — a stance sure to make many greens see red.

“We don’t agree with environmental groups on everything but if we can find things we agree on this will be a better bill…I’m real proud of Senator Graham. He’s a man of lots of wisdom,” she said.

Republicans are mostly skeptical of any move to “cap and trade” U.S. carbon emissions that result from burning coal and oil, decrying it as a massive job-killing tax by forcing the use of more expensive wind and solar power.

But a big chunk of their base seems to be parting company with them on this issue though climate change skepticism still runs deep in the U.S. heartland.

According to a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday, 36 percent of Americans say global warming is a result of human activity, down from 47 percent in April 2008.

The U.S. “Religious Left” — which has been active at the grassroots level to support President Barack Obama’s drive for health care reform – has now launched a campaign in support his other major domestic initiative: climate change legislation.

Faithful America, a coalition of progressive evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant and Jewish groups, unveiled a video on Thursday urging viewers to “TELL CONGRESS: STOP CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS EFFECTS.” The campaign is called Day Six.

You can see the video below:

A climate bill aimed at reducing America’s emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming is being crafted in the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives earlier this year passed its own version.

The Day Six campaign also asks people to sign an online petition that urges senators to : “… support a climate bill that addresses the root causes of climate change and makes needed investments in vulnerable communities already experiencing its devastating effects.”

The organizers say that: “‘Day Six’ is a reference to the creation story in Genesis, when God made human beings stewards of creation.”

Many left-leaning and liberal groups of faith see a biblical imperative to curb the effects of climate change because poor and developing regions like Africa are seen bearing the brunt of its consequences. 

One the other side, the religious right — a loose network of conservative Christians that is a key Republican Party base — has been at the forefront of conservative efforts to rally public opposition to climate change legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

 Conservative Christian radio stations have spent the summer saying its “cap and trade” provisions are the biggest tax increase in U.S. history.

Which side do you think will have its prayers answered?

(PHOTO: A buffalo skull is pictured in Lake Naivasha, Kenya, the only fresh water ecosystem in the eastern Rift Valley, June 4, 2009, which is drying up due to drought and other factors/ REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya ).  

Former Arkanas Governor and Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee has won the first informal round in what will no doubt be a long race to head the party’s White House ticket in 2012.

The affable Baptist preacher, who won the hearts and minds of conservative evangelicals during his failed 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, topped other possible Republican presidential contenders in a straw poll at a summit of Christian conservative voters in Washington.

Out of a field of nine, Huckabee garnered the most votes or 28.5 percent. Delegates to the convention were asked: “Thinking ahead to the 2012 presidential election and assuming the nomination of Barack Obama as Democtats’ choice for president, who would you vote for as the Republicans nominee for president?”

Surprisingly, former Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who lit up the party’s conservative Christian base last year, came in fourth with 12 percent. Her relatively poor performance could have been linked to her failure to attend the summit — Huckabee delivered a rousing speech on Friday.

Huckabee’s arch rival in the 2008 race, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, was the runner-up with 12.4 percent.  He also gave a well-received speech that stuck mostly to economic and foreign policy themes.

Like any straw poll, this one counts for nothing. But it does give an idea of what this key Republican base is looking for as the party tries to chart a path back to power in Congress and the White House.

The second question on the straw poll asked the almost 2,000 delegates — of whom about 600 responded — to indicate the most important issue in determining their choice of candidate out of a list of 13 choices.

Abortion won by a long shot at almost 41 percent, while “protection of religious liberty” was a distant second at 18 percent.

Some observers have suggested the conservative Christian movement, known as the “Religious Right,” needs to expand its agenda beyond “hot-button social issues” if it wants to grow and have political and electoral success. And much of its leadership has been talking more about issues such as poverty.

The movement has also turned its attention to climate change in response to Obama’s agenda, which includes proposed legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Conservative Christian radio stations have spent the summer assailing the “cap and trade” provisions of this legislation as a massive tax hike and several of the delegates whom I spoke to expressed skepticism if not hostility to the widely accepted scientific idea that humans are causing climate change.

One of the break-out sessions on Saturday was called “Global Warming Hysteria: The New Face of the ‘Pro-Death’ Agenda.” For a synposis of this and other sessions click here.

But it is clear that abortion remains by far the biggest issue to this crowd — and even when they talk about climate change these “pro-lifers” talk about the “culture of death.” Time will tell if this is an electoral winner or loser for the Republican Party.

Are the residents of Fiesch and Fischertal in Switzerland particularly pious, desperate or both? I wonder after learning that villagers there want Pope Benedict's blessing to stop the melting of Europe's longest glacier. That, after hundreds of years of praying for it to stop growing. Researchers predict winter temperatures in the Swiss Alps will rise by 1.8 degrees Celsius in winter and 2.7 degrees Celsius in the summer by 2050.

You can track the fate of the Aletsch glacier here, but don't expect to see a repeat of Spencer Tunick's 2007 naked photoshoot.

Undoubtedly, Switzerland's tourism industry has suffered this summer, with 148,000 fewer foreign visitors bunking at chalets and the like in June compared to the same month last year. Of course it's not clear if the decline was due to melting glaciers or the credit crisis.

Back in the United States, melting glaciers aren't a big source of concern.

A task force from the American Psychological Association, citing a Pew Research Center poll that found that climate change ranked last in a list of 20 compelling issues, concluded that psychological barriers like uncertainty, mistrust and denial were to blame. It added that habits can change, especially if money is involved.

Supposing you agree with the APA that green habits are important to develop, what ones would you consider most essential and practical, or even spiritual?

(PHOTO: Aletsch glacier, the largest glacier in the Swiss Alps is seen on August 18, 2007. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)

An uprising by a radical Islamic sect in northern Nigeria may ostensibly have been about religion, but such bloodletting will recur unless underlying issues of poverty, unemployment and education are addressed.

West African Islam is overwhelmingly moderate and northern Nigeria is home to a powerful political elite, yet militant cleric Mohammed Yusuf was able to establish a cult-like following. Yusuf’s sect, Boko Haram, wanted sharia (Islamic law) more widely applied across Africa’s most populous nation. Its name means “Western education is sinful”.

But the support Yusuf drummed up — from illiterate youths to professionals who quit jobs and families to join him — came as much from frustration with what is seen as a corrupt and self-serving political establishment as from pure religious fervour.

To see an analysis by my colleague Nick Tattersall, click here.

This whole situation — and I have seen frustrated and violent Nigerian youth in other parts of the country when I reported there in the past – is perhaps a classic example of how underlying factors, be they social, economic or even environmental, can exacerbate religious divisions.

It brings to mind a book we wrote and blogged about last year by  historian Philip Jenkins entitled “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia — and How It Died”.

“The Chronology of Christian sufferings under Islam closely mirrors that of Jews in Christian states,” he writes, noting that “Around 1300, the world was changing, and definitely for the worse.”

“If we seek a common factor that might explain this simultaneous scapegoating of vulnerable minorities, by far the best candidate is climate change, which was responsible for many economic changes in these years, and increased poverty and desperation across the globe.”

ln places like Nigeria, Pakistan and India — all scenes of current religious tension and strife — it is perhaps no coincidence that climate change is seen uprooting parched rural populations or stoking conflict as people compete for scarce resources like water or cattle. You can see some of our recent coverage of sectarian violence in Pakistan here and here.

Whether or not you accept the climate change link, there is little doubt that there are many regions today that mirror in some ways the “poverty and desperation” of the 14th century world that Jenkins has in mind — and have religious divisions as well.

But some critics of organized religion might argue that this is all backwards and that faith itself — or the faithful in their devotion — are the fuel that fans the flames of frustration and poverty.

What do you think?

(PHOTO:Nigerian security officers stand near burning motorcycles at the demolished house of the Islamic militant leader Mohammed Yusuf in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, August 3, 2009. REUTERS/Akintunde Akinleye (NIGERIA CONFLICT)

Among U.S. religious groups, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely to believe that human activities are contributing to climate change, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. You can see the numbers, based on a broader 2008 poll, here.

Overall the Pew Forum found that a plurality, or 47 percent, of the adult U.S. population accepts that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activities. Most scientists have reached the conclusion that the planet’s climate is changing because of human-induced factors, notably the emissions from burning of the fossil fuels that drive the global economy.

Among religious groups Pew found that those who said they were unaffiliated with any faith tradition were the most likely to accept that humanity was warming the planet, with 58 percent of them taking that view.

Among white mainline Protestants the figure was 48 percent, it was 39 percent for black Protestants and 34 percent for white evangelical Protestants, a key base for the Republican Party whose leaders have often cast doubt on the link between emissions and climate change.

Former U.S. president George W. Bush pulled America out of the Kyoto treaty to curb emissions — a move hailed at the time by his Republican base — while President Barack Obama , a Democrat, has made climate a key policy priority.

Many evangelical Christians put their faith completely in the Bible which they see as the revealed word of God and so they also question other widely accepted scientific views such as evolution. Some have even suggested that climate change may be a sign that the biblical end times are drawing near.

But doubt about the link between human causes and climate change is hardly restricted to evangelicals in America. Overall 21 percent of Americans say there is no solid evidence that the earth is warming and 18 percent attribute it to natural causes. This is perhaps not surprising in a country that has an enduring love affair with the automobile.

(Photo: A view of the Manhattan skyline during Earth Hour in New York March 28, 2009. REUTERS/Eric Thayer (UNITED STATES)

A thought-provoking new book on Christianity’s “lost history” holds that one of the central causes of 14th century religious persecution may well have been climate change. You can read my interview with author Philip Jenkins about “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia — and How It Died” on the Reuters website here.

“The Chronology of Christian sufferings under Islam closely mirrors that of Jews in Christian states,” he writes, noting that “Around 1300, the world was changing, and definitely for the worse.”

“If we seek a common factor that might explain this simultaneous scapegoating of vulnerable minorities, by far the best candidate is climate change, which was responsible for many economic changes in these years, and increased poverty and desperation across the globe.”

Jenkins notes that after a period of warming that had seen Europe’s population double from the 11th to the 13th centuries, the world entered a period of cooling which historians have long dubbed “The Little Ice Age.” Cooler, wetter summers hit harvests, leading to famines in Europe. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, there was widespread environmental collapse in the face of desertification.

This was all followed of course by the Black Death of the mid-14th century, which struck severely weakened societies and in Europe saw fresh persecution and pogroms against Jewish communities. This pushed many Jews to less developed, eastern regions of the continent; and Christians in Muslim societies also eked out their existence mostly in marginal or remote areas.

Jenkins is hardly the first historian to highlight the impact of climate change on past societies. But his observations are sobering against the backdrop of global warming and environmental pressures in our own time and the role many analysts think they are playing in stoking social conflict in places such as Nigeria and India, where religious tensions run high.

Climate change in our day — which most scientists attribute to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — is seen exacerbating conflict in poor, rural communities in the developing world in part because of competition over increasingly scarce resources such as arable land and water. It may also raise tensions in overcrowded urban areas as rural migrants leave the land.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that some fundamentalist Christians in the United States think climate change may be a sign of the End of Times — a widespread take in the 14th century on that period’s turmoil. Other U.S. Christians have joined the green crusade on the grounds that rising temperatures and their associated problems will be felt most harshly by the poor, making global warming a moral issue.

What do you think? Are there lessons from the links between religious conflict and climate change in the past that we can usefully draw on today?

The Bible has gone green.

HarperOne has published a Green Bible that highlights with green ink over 1,000 references to the earth and what the publishers say is a scriptural mandate to care for it. The inks are soy-based on recycled paper (of course!).

“The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth,” HarperOne says on its web site about the publication.

The Green Bible is one new piece in the chain connecting the “creation care” movement, which has linked U.S. evangelicals across the political spectrum, Catholics who stress the social teachings of their church and Orthodox leaders, among others.

The movement has been galvanized by the challenge of climate change and other pressing environmental issues and their impact of the poor — and “God’s creation.”

“The poor and the vulnerable are members of God’s family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in a brief foreword to “The Green Bible.”

Highlighted lines in The Green Bible include the opening passages of Genesis and this one from Leviticus that says “You shall not strip your vineyard bare.”

But many environmentalists and scientists will no doubt question the ecological utility of some of the highlighted passages.

Take this one highlighted from Deuteronomy: “If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself…”

I doubt if you will find a single modern biologist who would support the removal of chicks from their nests as a conservation strategy.

“The Lord bless you and keep you” is highlighted under the Priestly benediction in Numbers. One wonders what explicit ecological message is contained in that passage?

Will The Green Bible make some readers see red?

Imagine you go to a conference on major bioethical questions — controversial issues like abortion, embryonic stem cells, assisted reproduction and euthanasia — and a keynote speaker uses all his allotted time warning about global warming. Is this the wrong issue to discuss — or the only one worth talking about?

The question arose at the annual conference of the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) that ended at the weekend in Prague. Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, told the assembled bioethicists they had to look beyond their usual issues to consider the far larger ecological threat he said could soon end up destroying mankind.

The issue is urgent for bioethicists, he said, because the healthcare industry in the rich OECD countries is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. It also spends vast amounts to prolong patients’ lives, about half of it in the final months before death. “The more effort we put into saving individual lives, the more likely we are to doom the human race to extinction,” he said.

“Just being a little bit more green isn’t the answer,” he insisted. Rich countries will have to find ways to cut their carbon emissions almost completely within the next few years. His outlook for the healthcare industry was summarised in a bleak PowerPoint slide:

Possible changes in medicine

• close most hospitals and concentrate on good-quality primary care
• reverse the brain drain and send redundant health workers to developing countries
• outlaw assisted reproduction
• stop medical research undertaken for utopian or financial reasons.

If western countries closed all their hospitals, he said, life expectancy there would drop by only eight months.

“What is more important,” he asked, “maintaining our wealth and economies for 20-30 years until climate change wipes them out, or trying to ensure that as much as possible of the human race survives?”