News Items

The Forum regularly posts news articles of interest here from a variety of sources and news outlets. You can check back here or view the most recent ones from the homepage. We also archive these articles here, for those doing research, with news going back to 2006. Use the menu on the right to explore the archived articles.

News

The Book of Black Fire: An Eco-Theology of Revelation

By Lawrence Troster
Conservative Judaism 62: 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010-2011)

Click here to read this article as a PDF file.

Biodiversity Year Ends on a High Note - UN General Assembly Backs Resolution - 'IPCC-for Nature'

 

Full title:

Biodiversity Year Ends on a High Note as UN General Assembly Backs Resolution Signing into Life an ‘IPCC-for Nature’

December 21, 2010
United Nations Environment Programme

New York/Nairobi - A new international body aimed at catalyzing a global response to the loss of biodiversity and world’s economically-...

WikiLeaks cables: Dalai Lama called for focus on climate, not politics, in Tibet

Exiled Buddhist leader told US ambassador to India that ‘political agenda should be sidelined’ in favour of climate issues

By Jason Burke
The Guardian
December 16, 2010

Himalayan monks to launch green movement in Kolkata

December 16, 2010
Indo-Asian News Service

Kolkata - The fast-melting glaciers in the Himalayas could destroy Hindu pilgrimage spots as well as the caves where thousands of sadhus meditate, and monks have decided to launch a green movement by planting trees in and around Kolkata city and the Sundarbans area, said a spiritual leader just back from the Cancun climate summit.

Advent: Let's start to heal our planet

December 13, 2010
By Mallory McDuff
USA Today

As a child during Advent, I fought with my three siblings over Jesus. We didn’t argue about conversion, but rather the right to put a one-dimensional infant the size of a thumbnail onto the Advent calendar made from red felt and glitter glue. My mother devised a rotational system, which meant that every four years, each child would...

The Risk of Ocean Death from CO2

December 10, 2010
Planetwork

Cancun – The new trump card in climate change will be ocean acidity, or what might be better called ocean death. This newly recognized threat makes drastically cutting CO2 astronomically more urgent, even as negotiators are just now barely beginning to agree to the emissions reductions required to avert dangerous climate change.

Gift endows interdisciplinary studies of theology and the environment at Yale

December 10, 2010
By Rich Heffern
Press Release

NEW HAVEN, CT -A gift pledge of $3 million will endow a joint senior faculty appointment between Yale Divinity School/Berkeley Divinity School and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in honor of H. Boone Porter, a Berkeley and Yale graduate, and his wife, Violet M. Porter.

Faith-based Organizations Advocate for Climate Justice

Presented by the World Council of Churches (WCC), Action by Churches Together (ACT Alliance), and Caritas Internationalis (CI)

ENB on the side
International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)
December 8, 2010

This event discussed the work of faith-based organizations in the context of climate change.

If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation?

December 6, 2010
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press

CANCUN, Mexico – Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. “It’s getting worse,” says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation’s climate change coordinator.

Has Environmentalism Lost Its Spiritual Core?

December 6, 2010
By Bryan Walsh
Time

Environmentalism began as a religion. Certainly that’s how paleo-greens like John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would have seen it. Muir was awakened to nature when he first explored Yosemite in the 1860s, and he felt it in a religious way — he called what would become one of the nation’s first national parks “the grandest of all...

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