"Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen...being understood through the things that were created". For, "The heavens declare the Glory of God; and the firmament reveals His handiwork" (Rm.11:40; Ps.19:1-7).
The Stein Valley is a 2,000 metre high meadow, nestled amidst cloud piercing, snow-capped peaks in Southwest British Columbia. It is one of those sites that fairly echoes the 103rd Psalm, and testifies to its accuracy. Here, with hemlock, fir and pine ringing a virgin alpine meadow, bejewelled with wild flowers, God is truly "robed in majesty." This is the domain of beaver, deer, elk, mountain goats and bear, the nesting ground of grouse and pheasants, the realm of mauve fireweed, golden ranunculus, sky blue lupines and an endless array of blossoms.
The Stein Valley is the largest virgin wilderness area in Southwest B.C. It is also the target of logging companies, driven by a lust for quick and easy profits. The news that this magnificent jewel in the crown of God's creation is about to be sacrificed to the brutish greed of a handful of men who have proven their indifference to the welfare of the forest and their gross lack of appreciation for the ecological system we live in, is cause for serious alarm.
Should an Orthodox Christian be involved in the ecology movement? Should he not be concerned solely with the "age to come," and is it not inevitable that the environment will be destroyed before the coming of Christ, as the Book of Revelation says?
Truly, the Book of Revelation does clearly say that before the end, a third of the fresh water, a third of the seas, a third of the land and a third of the atmosphere will be poisoned and destroyed (Ch.8). But the holy fathers and New Testament prophets tell us that all this will come to pass by the greed and avarice of man, and not as a direct action of God. Indeed, all those calamities of the last days will be the result of man's passions -- greed, pride, self-love and cold indifference.
It is, perhaps, this cold indifference that must concern us, as Orthodox Christians, most. Those who do not wish to be involved in the ecology movement, or who wish to believe that Orthodox people should not be, must be certain that their motive is not cold indifference. For Orthodox Christians, participation in the ecology/environmental struggle has a great spiritual dimension, in that the forces leading to the destruction of our ecosystem are passions which the Scripture describes as demonic.
The destruction of our ecological system is a direct result of man's greed, self-love and idealization of a certain concept of pleasure -- a false material and carnal form of pleasure which deprives man of true joy and deprives the world of peace.
Many people have now come to realize the ecological disaster that man's greed has caused for our world and some of them have taken action and formed groups to try to stop the complete destruction of our environment. These groups are called "ecology movements", and they have served very useful purposes in forcing various levels of government to enact ecology laws. In some cases, ecology groups such as the Canadian Greenpeace Society have helped to save certain species from extinction.
While most of us are aware of the ecological crisis around us, few of us realize that our Orthodox Faith is profoundly concerned with ecology on the highest order. Indeed, if we actually tried to live our faith, we would be the foremost ecologists as well. Orthodoxy has always understood and clearly taught the profound unity between man and the cosmos, the absolute and intimate relationship of all material creation, both the animate and the inanimate. The Holy Scripture indicates this many times, but nowhere more profoundly than in the ninth chapter of Romans, where we see that even the redemption of mankind is bound with the deliverance and redemption of all creation: "The whole creation waits expectantly for God's children to be made known. For the creation was made subject to frailty...but yet with hope. We know that the whole creation has been groaning and toiling together until now, and that creation itself will be set free of its bondage to corruption, into the glorious freedom of God's children....For in this hope, we were all saved." (18-24).
This is a universal reality, and the central force of this universal unity is the God-given law of mutual attraction. The laws of gravity, magnetism, positive and negative electricity, positive and negative charges of protons and electrons in the atom, and sexuality. These are forces which draw and hold matter and creatures together.
These forces of attraction in themselves testify to the universality and inseparability of all created nature. They were given as a remedy to the forces of division and separation which the fall and sin have generated. Every seeming breach in these laws is a direct result of the disharmony created in nature by the passions of human beings. The fall of man brought a kind of disharmony into the universe which would have resulted in cosmic chaos had God not provided the universal laws of attraction as a counterfoil to man's sin.
Nevertheless, man, through his constant disobedience to God and his constant increase in his self-loving passions, has continued to struggle against the forces which unify nature, and has continued to upset the balance of nature and undermine the harmonious, finely interrelated functions of our universal ecosystem, which was directly created by God.
The greed-inspired war against this system -- the very life-support system of mankind -- must certainly be seen as inspired by Satan, the ancient enemy of God and man. Resisting this war demonstrates no only an Orthodox veneration of the creation of God, and a reverence for His handiwork, it also demonstrates a genuinely Christian concern for all mankind and, above all, it is a resistance of the actions and deceits of Satan in his never ending struggle against the things of God and against mankind.
When we, as Orthodox clergy and people, neglect to take an interest, even a role of leadership, in such positive and beneficial movements as environmentalism, we leave the leadership open to other forces, many of which are simply deceits of Satan in another form. Many environmentalists have found the Christian faith so unresponsive that they have begun a romantic, but spiritually destructive worship of the "great spirit." It is foolish to think that Orthodox people cannot be ensnared in this delusion also. The idea of praying to the "great spirit" is presently only a romantic ducking of spiritual responsibility. But few of the younger people who are ensnared in this by their own hyper-romanticism, will recall that in very many native cultures, human sacrifices were made to this "great spirit," who in times past has demanded of its followers both virgin and infant sacrifices. The growing cult seems innocuous and "charming," but a growing number of devotees are taking it more and more seriously. They have a fantasy of an innate "higher wisdom" in the mystics of native cultures and somehow manage to ignore the more blood-thirsty and brutal realities of the historical lives of the native cultures they so ardently idolize. They wish to remain unconscious to the fact that it has taken Christianity 2000 years to overcome much of this brutal and bloody legacy, which included the taking of slaves and their wanton massacre as a demonstration of their master's wealth. Having lost contact with history, they do not realize the immense progress in human thought and culture which has taken place under the guidance of the Christian ethos. They speak of the imaginary super wisdom of native medicine men, but scorn the fact that Christians have covered the world with hospitals and free clinics, making real medicine available to the most poverty stricken and needy people in the world.
In abrogating all responsibility and responsiveness to such a desperately urgent reality as the environmental crisis, Orthodox leaders are inviting many of their young people to fall into the spiritual delusion of those who have accepted the responsibility and given the leadership in this righteous cause. Perhaps it is time for us to discuss this matter at our conferences and retreats, and at our clergy meetings, to see what can be done to establish a solid Orthodox presence in the ecology movement. It would certainly be within the realm of our faith, and it would most certainly be Scriptural. The presence of Christ must be seen there where Satan is using another human catastrophe which he helped create, to delude good people with his cult of "the great spirit," which is only another of his own disguises.
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