Religion
Related: About this forumWhen God isn’t green: Religion versus the planet
Jay Wexler examines the collision of religious and environmental values
WHEN GOD ISNT GREEN
By Jay Wexler
After the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India, Ganesh idols, covered in toxic paint, are dumped into rivers. (Shailesh Andrade/Reuters)
Brian Bethune
March 20, 2016
God, or at least his adherents, and the natural world do not always get along, an issue thats becoming acute now that religion is starting to embrace environmental values. Pope Francis is both author of an encyclical urging an ecological response to climate change, and spiritual head of a church whose demand for palm fronds every Easter season has played havoc in Central American forestsin one case, almost driving a rare parrot to extinction.
Thats the sort of sharp, localized conflict that drew the attention of Wexler, a professor at Boston Universitys law school and a religion-friendly atheist environmentalist. He travelled around the world for his quirky book, looking at particular quandaries and the local accommodations being reached (or rejected). They are mind-boggling in their variety. The expense of properly disposing shaimosthe ever-expanding supply of Orthodox Jewish religious books and objects that have to be buried separately from regular trashdrove one rabbi to bury them in the woods around his New Jersey town. The state found out and made him unearth 10 tractor-trailer loads, all now above ground, leaking ink into the watershed, while state and synagogue officials argue over what to do.
In Bangladesh, the Hindu festival of Kali Puja is celebrated by the slaughter of perhaps 100,000 turtles, with the rarest species the most prized. In Rhode Island, a three-year-old fell seriously ill when her family moved into an apartment where previous occupants, practitioners of the Caribbean religion Santeria, had sprinkled mercury to fend off witches. Wexler himself almost coughs up a lung at a Taoist joss-burning ceremony in Hong Kong, where long lines of people threw stacks of paper into a monstrous, towering, filter-less black furnace, its three smokestacks barfing out smoke and ash into the atmosphere.
None of his reporting is as riveting, though, as his account of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival held in Mumbai in honour of the elephant-headed god of wisdom. At the end of the festival, worshippers dispose of their Ganesh idolsan estimated 180,000 of them in Mumbai alonein bodies of water. Wexler watched, among a fast-moving crowd a million strong, as the larger idolsup to eight metres tall, often covered in toxic paintwere thrown into the Arabian Sea, significantly increasing lead and mercury levels offshore. The sheer numbers and the cost of one quick-fix solution knownrequiring idols to be made of expensive organic clay rather than cheap plaster of Parismakes the Ganesh practice perhaps the most troubling for him.
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/when-god-isnt-green-religion-versus-the-planet/
MisterP
(23,730 posts)where not even birds sing for the sake of bananas and fuel ethanol, and the hacendados running it have regularly shot and exiled clergy
rug
(82,333 posts)I wonder what he says about Peru's Ley de la Selva,
Cartoonist
(7,315 posts)I guess that makes me a bigot for saying that.
So rug, did you get your Palm frond today?
rug
(82,333 posts)BTW, do you remember what they do with the leftover ones?
Cartoonist
(7,315 posts)I guess they burn them and use the ashes for next year's Ash Wednesday.
rug
(82,333 posts)The ashes are mixed with oil and placed on the forehead with the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It's a worthwhile thought.
The despoliation of the environment is nothing compared to corporate rapacity of every resource, including humans..
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Leontius
(2,270 posts)especially when you compare the damage these events cause to the millions of tons of pollutants spewed in to the environment by power plants and industries every year.
struggle4progress
(118,275 posts)?quality=75&strip=color&w=1012
Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)More and more people, greedily consuming and polluting more and more, is the second major reason pollution increases.