“No climate change, no climate refugees”. On the basis of this theme, this paper aims to propose a method for undertaking the responsibility for climate refugees literally uprooted by liable climate polluting countries. It also considers the historical past, culture, geopolitics, imposed wars, economic oppression and fragile governance to understand the holistic scenario of vulnerability to climate change.

About the author

Bayes Ahmed (www.bayesahmed.com) is currently working as a Research Associate at the UCL Humanitarian Institute. He is also affiliated as a Lecturer at the Department of Disaster Science and Management at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Recently, he has worked with the communities vulnerable to flooding and landslides in Ladakh, India; earthquakes in Manta, Ecuador; droughts in Naogaon, Bangladesh; and cyclones in the coastal belt of Bangladesh.

Jason Kenney was all smiles, waving at the crowd and shaking hands through the passenger window of his trusty blue Dodge Ram pickup, as he rode triumphantly onto a Calgary stage on election night, April 16. But as he stood at the podium addressing his followers, some of his words were less jovial. “[W]e have been targeted by a foreign-funded campaign of special interests seeking to landlock Canadian energy,” he told jubilant supporters in his victory speech. “In other words, we’ve been had.”

Vancouver, BC
June 17, 2019

The Rev. Beth Hayward
Fr. Kaleeg Hainsworth

RE: Invitation to Vancouver climate change meeting for Christian leaders

Dear esteemed bishops, elders, pastors, priests, congregational leaders, lay and youth leaders:

As many of you are aware, we are in the midst of a global climate crisis, the magnitude of which is only now becoming clear. The science is beyond dispute and all but two governments in the world have begun extensive measures to address the situation. Put starkly, the central and defining challenge facing every living thing is that our earth’s climate is changing dramatically and drastically forever. The children alive today ~ read more ~

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris.

“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture,” said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

“The whole earth is the living icon of the Face of God.” ~ St John of Damascus

For nine months now, I’ve been making a film about the Orthodox Church and climate change. I have seventy hours of interviews with hierarchs, clergy, monks, lay leaders, and scientists in the can so far, and I have hundreds of hours of beautiful, impactful, and current footage of landscapes, churches, wildlife, and of areas ~ read more ~

"...That's the disposition that I hear in patristic texts opening, opening, not shutting it down to some dead meaning. I have witnessed that in poetry during my younger life. Becoming Orthodox just shortly before I turned 40, realizing that there was a reason I hungered for that because that's actually the truest thing about language and the truest thing about our relationship to revelation through language. The world is inexpressible and what one learns to do is to hear everything as a provisional, albeit necessary involvement, of understanding. It doesn't eclipse what's going to be revealed next. And that's the exciting aspect of Orthodox Liturgy and even the vision of the world. Trust, honor it, love it for what it is and wait for it to open up. Examine your relationship with this world as also potentially one of opening..."

Through beautiful shots of the natural world, church architecture and iconography; through glimpses into our services, which offer creation back to the Creator as “thine own of thine own”; through interviews with church leaders and meditations on the lives and teachings of the saints, this film will humbly attempt to show viewers that God is alive in His creation. It will call the faithful to action — not to one kind of political activism or ideology, but to prayer and reflection on how to preserve the fragile beauty around us, on which our lives depend.

I have arrived now in Athens, and I preparing for a week-long symposium convened by His All Holiness, Patriarch Bartholemew, on climate change and refugees. HAH has convened 150 people from all over the world for this symposium – including Bill McKibbon (of 350.org), some clergy, many leading scientists and politicians, and a number of leading business people. We have received endorsements and video messages of support from Jane Goodall, among others. Our work will be to travel with HAH to a number of Greek islands in the morning to tour the refugee camps forming there and then, in the evening, to hold meetings, discussions, and listen to presentations and lectures. Our goal is to find initiatives which can be developed international which will both address the problems exacerbated by climate change – in this case refugees and population displacement.

Over the course of the next five days I will be posting here the events, pictures, and findings of this historic symposium. I want to document as closely as possible what happens here, as this is already considered a historic event.

A full list of participants can be found here: greenatticasymposium.org, as well as our schedule and lecture list. I hope you find these report ages front the front lines interesting, and I welcome discussion which arises from them.

We are all staying at the magnificent Divani Carevel hotel in central Athens, with views of the Acropolis and the city. Some of us have been invited tomorrow to begin the symposium by meeting at Mars rock – the famous place of the muses and of course Paul’s preaching – where we will each provide a short reflection on what we think should be one area of climate change that should receive special attention and for which we are asked to provide a possible solution.

Stay tuned!

‘The World is Charged with the grandeur of God… the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.’ These are the first and last lines from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. They contain, I think, an exact summary of Orthodox Church teaching about creation and perhaps a good approach to climate change. We hold that everything, from atoms to galaxies, is created by, reveals, is filled with and ‘charged’ with the ‘grandeur’ and glory of the ~ read more ~

Full disclosure first: I am an ebook developer. I run a small company that makes ebooks and book trailers. We also do a lot of consulting for publishers and organizations, helping them build custom digital publishing systems. We are still learning, struggling, and trying to do things right. I love what we do. I love the people I work with and the clients we work for. The ebook developer community is full of people who are professionals trying to make the most beautiful and innovative ebooks possible given the restraints, obfuscations, variability, and voodoo-code of the device world we make them for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an industry display more professionalism than this one. Ebook makers basically rock. However, I am also an author (An Altar in the Wilderness), an Eastern Orthodox priest, and single full-time dad of three kids. Additionally, I am a lecturer on spiritual ecology, the climate and the environment, and a backcountry enthusiast. It’s important for me to disclose this outright because I am speaking from all these frames in what follows.

All that said, I have a simple proposition to make.

I think that we must stop making ebooks for devices - now. Not later, and certainly not at some indefinite future point. Instead, I think we should channel all our energy, hard work, and collective intelligence into solving, developing, and standardizing the Portable Web Publishing model. I believe we should do this for the following three reasons, in order of importance. I can think of more, but these three will do for now.