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| Religious leaders from numerous religious traditions including Hinduism and Islam, joined in silent prayer last Friday at
the front of the M/S Fram, with the Ilulissat glacier in the background. Colin Woodard |
In Greenland, an interfaith rally for climate change
Patriarch Bartholomew is leading an interfaith shipboard symposium down the coast of Greenland to improve cooperation between religious and political leaders.
from the September 12, 2007 edition
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Mr. Ball, an influential Baptist minister, said the event had considerable symbolic importance. "The image of all the religious leaders on the boat with the Ecumenical Patriarch says that we recognize this and that it's time for us to get busy, and for all hands to get on deck," he said.
Bartholomew, the head of the ancient "mother church" in Constantinople (now Istanbul), is the leader of a faith with a centuries-old reputation for avoiding involvement in politics and other worldly affairs. But over the past decade, he has led his sometimes reluctant church back onto the world stage.
He has declared the destruction of nature a sin, and built relationships with other religious and political leaders engaged in environmental causes. In 2002, he signed a joint declaration on the environment with the late Pope John Paul II, helping ease centuries of tension between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches since the Great Schism of 1054.
Glacial melting triple that of '02
The Ilulissat glacier in west-central Greenland, 155 miles above the Arctic Circle, was a poignant choice of settings. The glacier, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is massive: three miles wide and nearly one mile tall. It is also disappearing at a remarkable rate, having receded by nine miles over the past four years. Its ice is flowing at a rate of nearly seven feet an hour, nearly three times the rate of just five years ago.
"The amount of ice that comes into the ocean in a day could provide the water supply for any of the largest cities in the world for an entire year," says Robert Corell, director of the global change program at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington who has studied Greenland's glaciers for decades.
Some scientists argue that increased snowfall over parts of Greenland could compensate for the melting, but Dr. Corell, the head of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, says that data show Greenland's overall ice mass to be shrinking rapidly.
Global sea-level rise estimates in the latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change were based on data from 2005 and predicted a rise of eight to 24 inches over the century, says Corell. But more recent data has made it clear that Greenland's massive ice cap is collapsing much faster, and that sea levels will rise roughly three feet as a result. "The rate of melting is just phenomenal," he says.
Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark whose indigenous Inuit inhabitants aspire to independence. The Patriarch's ship sailed to the capital, Nuuk, over the weekend. Today he is at sea en route to southern Greenland, where he plans to conduct a Byzantine prayer service on the site of the first Christian church in the New World, built in AD 1000.
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