Christian Institutions Urged To Protect Environment, Promote Bio-diversity
By SAR NEWS PANAJI, Goa (SAR NEWS) -- The Goa and Daman Archdiocesan Service Centre for Social Action has urged parish priests, heads of all religious and educational institutions to use every possible occasion from June 5-11 to spread the message of environment protection and preserve bio-diversity. "Today, the environmental issue is highly technical and multi-faceted with economic, social, political, legal and even military effects. Therefore, any and all development must be persons-centred", Father Valeriano Vaz, director of the Centre said. He told SAR News June 11 that the Rio Declaration of 1992 stated: Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature." He therefore has urged the archdiocesan heads of institutions to be proactive to promote person-centered development, participatory community life, creating social conditions where the marginalized are enabled to achieve the utmost of their potential and live in solidarity and total harmony with nature. Father Vaz also stressed to make people in their respective areas to analyze the environmental and developmental situation in which they live, work and motivate them to take effective measures collectively. Underlining that the air, water and land were dangerously being polluted, the director said the ozone layer was depleting rapidly causing global warming. He also said overuse of natural resources had nearly exhausted the non-renewable resources, reduction of forest cover causing extensive soil erosion and leading to extinction of rare plants and animal life and threatening rich bio-diversity. In coastal Goa, he said the rivers and beaches are getting polluted with industrial affluents, oil-spills sewage and garbage. Soil erosion in the upper areas, due to deforestation has over-silted them. Agricultural land conversion, with utter disregard for over 30 centuries old kazans and sluice-gate systems is a tragic ecological degradation, Father Vaz observed. Indiscriminate development, he said has not only caused imbalances in city, town, village planning but posed serious threats to sanitation - hygiene and resultantly to health. He added that the problem of garbage disposal in all parts of Goa had reached alarming proportions without any appropriate solutions in sight. "This extensive damage to the environment and ecology has been caused by persons or groups driven primarily for their selfish greed for power and profit", Father Vaz said. He said Pope John Paul II in his message for World Peace Day 1990 had said "It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. "Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness - both individual and collective - are contrary to the order of creation, an order that is characterized by mutual interdependence." END
