By Hector Welgampola

Amid erratic weather patterns, hurricanes, floods and climate chaos, terms such as "greenhouse gases," "global warming" and "climate change" have become everyday jargon.

Even so, long after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, these words have evoked public responses as varied as the mixed signals given by United States President Jimmy Carter installing solar panels in the While House and President Ronald Reagan later removing them.

Now, just as we hear of Vatican plans to install 1,000 solar panels in 2008, we find an Italian scientist dampening concern about global warming. Antonio Zichichi, retired professor of advanced physics at the University of Bologna, told the April 26-27 Vatican Conference on Climate Change, "500,000 years ago the Earth lost North and South poles four times, the poles disappeared and re-formed four times."

About that time, the world also heard a chilling message from the "Island of Ice" in the Arctic. Derek Mueller from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska told his father recently over a BBC hook-up, "The most compelling evidence that ice shelves are responding to climate change is that they are not reintegrating from their disintegration over the last 100 years."

Even if contradictory signals continue to confuse many people a decade after Kyoto, the everyday reality of droughts, floods and atmospheric chaos bring the warnings of climate scientists closer home.

In recent months, U.N. bodies such as the Commission on Sustainable Development and the Convention on Biological Diversity, and even the G8 Nations have demonstrated that even climate skeptics have awakened.

Vatican bodies for justice and peace, and social science, Caritas Internationalis, and CIVICUS World have also evidenced the problem's urgency.

Elsewhere, U.K.-based Christian Aid is pursuing conservation of water reservoirs in far away Kenya and other projects. Also in eastern Africa, the Malawi bishops' Justice and Peace Commission joined civil society protests against uranium mining. Meanwhile, a Jesuit-run retreat-center-cum-farm in Canada is helping discern a spiritual response to issues of ecology. And in India, artists at a Jesuit-run bio-reserve are interpreting ecological themes.

More importantly, such moves are now rippling in rivulets of faith-based people power. In China's remote Jiangsi province, for example, Catholics have offered clean well-water to neighbors in an environmental awareness program.

Laypeople are leading efforts to protect Indonesia's environment. On Flores Island, Church groups campaign against gold mines, claiming they destroy the local environment. Justice and peace groups in Papua organize indigenous people to prevent ancestral graves being vandalized under the pretext of sand excavation. The claim of Catholic NGOs that expanding oil-palm plantation undermines the environment has even challenged Church leaders in Larantuka.

Ecology-conscious groups of laypeople in India, Korea, the Philippines and Sri Lanka strive to green Church festivities and highlight the faith perspective of caring for Mother Earth. Catholics, Buddhists and Protestants among shareholders of a Korean conglomerate have demanded greater transparency in relation to social responsibility and the environment.

Such groups and persons are still a minority, but small people's persistent concern for ecology is growing, and it could move from the passionate personal concern of individuals to the collective commitment of concerned people.

Perhaps Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace read the signs of the times when he told the Vatican Conference on Climate Change that such efforts are part of "a religious and moral mission."

He was echoing a prophetic call in Pope John Paul II's blueprint for the new millennium. "How can we remain indifferent to the prospect of an ecological crisis which is making vast areas of our planet uninhabitable and hostile to humanity?" the late pope noted in his 2001 letter Novo Millennio Ineunte.

Laypeople's lead in caring for the environment must be welcomed as a new "religious and moral mission" for the 21st-century, but this is not their first faith commitment to tackle urgent current problems. Before laypeople got structured as Religious congregations, several Church ministries for the sick, the orphaned, the elderly or dying began as lay initiatives.

Once again, an urgent need of humanity has begun to impel some laypeople toward a new ministry -- an environmental mission.



Hector Welgampola, a Sri Lankan journalist, was Executive Editor of UCA News from 1987 until he retired in December 2001.


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