Panelists from four different faiths agreed Monday that the status of the global environment is one of humanity's most pressing concerns.
Ambassador Akbar Ahmed moderated the interfaith panel, which was hosted by the Kennedy Political Union in conjunction with Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light. He placed heavy emphasis on the importance of the environment.
"Nothing could be more important [than the environment]," he said. "We are locked in a life and death struggle as a species. We literally are going to be faced with extinction unless we do something."
He discussed Islam's point of view on the topic.
"The first rules of Islam, laid down and extant, are the rules of war," Ahmed said. "No religious representative will be touched in war. No woman, no child and, above all, no vegetation, no tree, no crops, because vegetation and crops belong to God. If you destroy them you destroy what is yours."
Rajwant Singh, president of the Interfaith Council, was instrumental in guiding the Sikh community toward environmental awareness by speaking at the Kyoto and Moscow interfaith conferences on the environment in the late 1980s.
"Reverence to nature is a must," Singh said. "Sikhism emphasizes that the spirit and the nature are one. We will be experiencing heaven when we are experiencing love toward one another and love toward nature."
Rev. James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, was the Christian representative on the panel.
The crisis is particularly pressing, according to Jones, because "the window of opportunity is very small. What we have already done sets the path until 2050. What we now do will affect us after 2050. In the opinion of some, we have 10 years to do anything beyond 2050," Jones said.
Rebecca Kneale Gould, an associate professor of religion and an affiliate in environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, represented Judaism on the panel and is in the process of becoming a rabbi.
"This is the kind of issue, the state of our environment, that keeps me up at night and wakes me up early in the morning," she said.
Gould also discussed combining spirituality and the environment.
"This is a deep issue before us, an issue that demands urgent and thoughtful response," she said. "I don't think you have to be religious to address this issue from a moral and spiritual perspective."
The panel discussion, whose audience was largely composed of community members, took place in the Kay Spiritual Life Center.
Lisa Rothman, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she enjoyed what Gould said about the "false dichotomy between science and religion."
"Because I'm a biology major, that's often an issue," Rothman said.
She also said the panel was positive because "generally the more people who talk about environmental issues, the better"
