World's religions join attempt to keep development at bay and preserve wildlife
Hundreds of thousands of sacred places around the globe are to be linked together in a new UN-backed network to try to preserve the world's fast-disappearing wild species.
They range from Jerusalem's Garden Tomb - where more than 3,000 people gathered today to celebrate Easter - to "skull caves" in Kenya, from a Mongolian mountain revered as a living God to a "spiritual park" in the Peruvian Andes.
Last week the United Nations Development Programme joined the world's main religions and leading conservation organisations in an effort to protect them from development or destruction. They plan to set up a new internationally recognised designation along the lines of Unesco's World Heritage sites.
The world's religions are among the planet's biggest landowners. "Between them," a new Atlas of Religion concludes, "they own over 7 per cent of the habitable land of the planet." And their specially sacred sites are usually havens of wildlife because they have been safeguarded by spiritual traditions or taboos.
But now, as the power of religions fades and economic pressures increase, many of the sites are in danger. The new campaign - spearheaded by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), set up by Prince Philip in 1995 - aims to beat off the threats, preserve new sites and even to revive sacred places that have already been despoiled. Prominent supporters include the Eastern Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew I and Nambaryn Enkhbayar, the President of Mongolia.
Posts
1 comment:
While the Temple Mount is, without question, the site of two Jewish Temples and the holiest and most revered spot in all of Jewish History, the Garden Tomb is simply a creation of the British Garden Tomb Association. They took a burial cave dated by archaeologists to the First Temple Period and the side of a hill made craggy by fumes from the nearby bus station and weather to convince protestant Christians that this place, which actually has no religious significance at all, could be the site they all clamor for.
There is simply no reason for it to be included in the UN's (or anyone's) network of "sacred sites".
suzanne
Post a Comment