Monday marks the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict, observed yearly on November 6.
The environment has often been a victim of war. Water sources have been polluted, crops burned, forests cut down, soils poisoned and animals killed.
Last year, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I mentioned the devastating environmental effect of the war in Ukraine in his message for Creation Day 2022.
“Every war is a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe. The ongoing violence, beyond the thousands of human lives, also destroys the natural environment that it pollutes, forcing nations and peoples to return to ways of securing energy efficiency through means that are unfriendly to the environment,” His Sanctity said.
“Thus, humanity enters a new vicious cycle of destructive impasses, which confirm the saying that homo sapiens to this day continues to behave simultaneously as homo demens, as imprudent and irrational.”
In the same message, the Ecumenical Patriarch reminded that, For the Church, the elements of the world – according to a theological formulation – “are not simply utilitarian or useful material for the individual needs of human beings, but they are actions of the Person of the one Creator”.
The International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict was established on 5 November 2001.
Photo credit: Agerpres Archive (American bombing of the Ploiești refinery in World War II – Romania was originally on the side of the Axis, an alliance that included Germany)
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