Theology, Science Join Hands Patriarch Takes Lead For The Environment

Speaking aboard a ship in a Black Sea port, his tone was anxious.

A life-sucking combination of natural decay and man-made blight had left the vast inland salt water basin on a “razor’s edge” of complete ecological collapse, he said. Once again, human indifference was strangling an environmental treasure.

It was a speech worthy of any alarmed crusader. Only his address ended with a blessing.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, head of the Eastern Orthodox churches, opened his latest environmental initiative on Saturday aboard a ferry that will carry more than 250 scientists, activists, politicians and religious leaders on a weeklong journey to view the ecological troubles of the Black Sea.

Bartholomew has pushed environmental issues onto the Orthodox agenda since the late 1980s in an attempt to reform the impression of a distant and self-absorbed clergy.

His role expanded in September 1995 with an environmental conference among various groups, including Roman Catholics and Protestants, on the Greek island of Patmos.

He is scheduled to meet with President Bill Clinton during a four-week trip to the United States beginning next month.

The present effort on the Black Sea asks scientists and theologians to set aside centuries of estrangement and unite on ways to improve and preserve the environment.

Religion, said the patriarch, can provide the ethical context and direction for activism.

“It is at this point the work of science begins,” said the gray-bearded patriarch, dressed in the traditional black robes of the Orthodox clergy. “For science certifies the situation (and) proposes measures that would delay the worsening of this situation.”

The challenge is daunting for the Black Sea, a thumb-shaped body running from the shallows on the coasts of Bulgaria and Romania to rocky inlets in Georgia and southern Russia. In a symbolic way, the sea represents the patriarch’s goal of bringing together diverse points of view.

The sea has acted as a natural barrier and buffer for cultures and faiths: Orthodox on the European shores; Muslim in Asia Minor. But its environmental crisis has begun to unite researchers and politicians from all its shores.

Fish stocks have plummeted to critical levels - valuable caviar-producing sturgeon are nearly gone and the once immense anchovy schools have shrunk drastically.

The Black Sea was made vulnerable by geography. Five great rivers, including the Danube and the Dnieper, have carried organic debris for millennia. The decomposition has robbed oxygen from about 90 percent of the sea - leaving a layer of habitable surface water that runs no deeper than 660 feet.

The increase in industrial toxins and untreated sewage since the 1950s gradually fouled and clouded the surface - limiting the life-giving sunlight in vital marine spawning and feeding grounds. Recently, alien species carried in the water ballast of merchant vessels have further destabilized the food chain.

“We are close to witnessing the death of a sea,” said Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University.

But the mood of those aboard the Greek-flagged ferry Saturday was energized by the science-theology partnership urged by the patriarch, whose environmental initiatives have appeared to gather more momentum than efforts by other faiths, including papal declarations on ecology.

“We have two great powers here that can motivate people: the passion and ethics of religion and science’s quests for answers and solutions,” said the Rev. James Parks Morton, president of the Interfaith Center of New York and chairman of the national religious partnership for the environment. “Can they be harnessed together? Perhaps. But I know this: It would be a powerful force.”

“Science gives the misguided illusion that we can understand everything and control it,” said David Suzuki, a genetics researcher and zoologist at the University of British Columbia. “Its power is, for me, its fatal flaw. We can’t make everything better. … Perhaps religion can help provide the context.”