Every year on September 1st, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew issues a message reminding the Church worldwide of our sacred obligation to care for the natural environment, and of the spiritual cost of neglecting and abusing it. Describing the ecological crisis as “a crisis of human freedom, of our religion and philosophy, of our ethos and our culture,” he called on humanity to build a shared “body of common fundamental values” rooted in solidarity.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate established the observance in 1989. Each year, more churches across the Christian world have taken it up, and the Patriarch called this growth
“a symbol and practical promotion of the unity of Christians.”
“Humanity must at last cease acting as though it does not know and definitively cast aside the illusion that planet Earth can in perpetuity withstand the burdens and destruction caused by human activity, or that nature has the power to renew itself of its own accord,” the patriarch said. He called for “ecological responsibility” to be treated as “a categorical imperative,” from the personal level to the global.
The dominant model of human behaviour, he warned, is exemplified by the Gospel’s “foolish rich man” (Luke 12:17–21): it drives what he termed “geocide,” consumerism, and the exploitation of nature for economic and geopolitical gain. In its place, he called for a “Copernican Turn” in how humanity understands progress and its relationship with creation.