Open Discussions/Gulf Cultural Club
Religion and Climate
As Britain and other European countries swelter in the heat wave the input of faith traditions in shaping moral responsibilities towards nature is vital. Religious worldviews—such as stewardship, interconnectedness, and sacred trust—can motivate conservation efforts as deforestation, air-water-soil, pollution and wild fires intensify. But are people of faith and their institutions responding to the environmental challenges of the present day?
Tuesday 11th August, 2026
Speakers
* Dr Elizabeth Theokritoff
(Associate Lecturer – Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies)
**Dr Ala’a Shehabi
(Lecturer, activist, writer)
Dr Elizabeth Theokritoff : Thank you for your kind invitation to speak about this very timely topic from the perspective of the Orthodox Church. Since I am not familiar with this particular forum or its audience, I am conscious that my background may be rather different from that of many of you. So please feel free to ask questions if I refer to things with which you are not familiar, or if there are points that I should have explained more fully.
Today, the language we hear is that of a climate crisis or emergency: something has to be done, and it has to be done quickly.
I am certainly not denying that there are serious problems. But in what I might call the intellectual climate, rather than the physical climate, it can almost seem like misplaced pedantry to ask: What sort of crisis are we talking about? What does it actually consist of?
Yet I would suggest that asking these questions can make the difference between finding lasting solutions, which genuinely improve matters over the long term, and applying what amount to temporary sticking plasters that may quickly come unstuck.
The increasingly narrow focus on data, physical causes and catastrophic effects is undoubtedly important. But I do not think these things can be considered in isolation. When the focus is confined in this way, the proposed solutions are often technological—sometimes almost exclusively so—with relatively little expectation that we should change the way we live.
I should forestall one possible objection. I am certainly not suggesting that people who are already struggling to make a living should simply use less. But there are many of us, both in this country and elsewhere in the world, who could quite easily consume less of certain resources.
I think most Christians, and probably most people of faith more generally, would agree with those environmentalists who see environmental problems and the climate crisis as symptoms of a much deeper spiritual malaise: a breakdown in our relationship with the natural world.
For Christians, the natural world is God’s handiwork. It has been given to us to learn from and to use for our needs, but also as a means of relationship with God and, indeed, of communion with His goodness.
There are two important consequences of seeing the environment in this way.
First, climate change cannot be separated from other environmental problems.
Second, environmental problems more generally cannot be separated from our relationships with other people or from our relationship with the Creator.
This has been very much the message of Orthodox Christian hierarchs since the late 1980s. They have often called for repentance, understood not simply as remorse, but as a change of heart and a change of direction.
Environmental concern within an explicitly theological framework began in earnest, at least at the official hierarchical level, with three remarkable talks in 1988 by the then Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius.
Later, Patriarchs Demetrios and Bartholomew of Constantinople became particularly associated with this approach. Patriarch Bartholomew, often referred to as the “Green Patriarch,” has developed a very high international profile as an environmental advocate.
He has also organised a number of events bringing together people from across the whole spectrum of environmental concern: scientists, economists, environmentalists, conservationists and business leaders, together with religious leaders and theologians. This represents a very deliberately holistic approach to environmental questions.
Many of these events have taken place on board ships, travelling to areas facing particular environmental risks, including the Black Sea, the Danube, the Amazon and the Arctic.
This focus on particular places immediately brings us to the complexity of environmental problems. It is about the totality of a place: the people who live there, the way that place is connected and interconnected with the rest of the world, and the relationship between human activity and the natural environment. It is not simply a narrowly defined problem concerning something called “nature.”
Since 2012, this same approach has continued through what have become known as the Halki Summits. The first was concerned with environment, ethics and innovation. The most recent, held two years ago, was very appropriately focused on water.
Water is an obvious subject because it is vitally important both to physical life and to spiritual life, in ways that mirror one another.
Similarly, the Volos Academy in central Greece, established by the local diocese, has an environmental programme. A recent event focused on water in the Anthropocene and was organised in collaboration with a social collective working on environmental issues, particularly problems relating to water.
An event of this kind enables the authority of the local Church to support civil society groups that may otherwise be at a disadvantage in what can become a battle of influence. Polluting industries and businesses often represent significant financial interests and may have the support of local or even national government.
Beyond these crisis-management approaches, however, I think something even more significant is the way in which the Orthodox Church can model the restoration of healthy relationships among human beings and the rest of creation.
I would emphasise that this often means maintaining and rediscovering what already works—particularly indigenous wisdom and local cultures.
In many cases, we are talking about Christian societies where traditional ways of living have been grounded for centuries in people’s faith and liturgical practice, including the way in which material resources are used.
Traditional societies of any kind have had to work within the constraints of climate, geography and topography. If they had not done so for centuries, they would not still exist today.
Having the technological power to ignore nature is a modern luxury, and quite possibly a short-lived one.
For Orthodox Christians, there are theological reasons behind this approach of allowing nature to guide us.
If one believes, as we do, in a divine rationality—the Logos, the Word and wisdom present within all created things—then one is likely to think carefully before assuming that human beings can simply improve upon nature.
We need only consider the many problems created by attempted solutions.
This does not mean that human beings should not use, shape or innovate within nature. Human beings have always done so. But our use of nature should be guided by what is given to us: by the God-given order and principles inherent within created things.
It also requires us to recognise that the very constraints of nature may themselves be telling us something.
This, I think, provides part of the premise for the Costa Carras European Citizens Award for the Safeguarding of Endangered Cultural and Natural Heritage.
Costa Carras was a remarkable man: an Anglo-Greek shipowner, a devoted churchman and someone who was both highly influential and remarkably self-effacing.
He provides an excellent example of somebody who sought to put the power and influence that came with wealth to the best possible use. Because he was wealthy, he had access to other wealthy and powerful people.
He was largely responsible for encouraging the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to take an interest in environmental matters. He also encouraged its chief theologian, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, who was a close friend of his, to examine the theological foundations of environmental concern and action. Zizioulas subsequently wrote extensively on the subject.
The first recipient of the award for safeguarding cultural and natural heritage was a Romanian NGO recognised for its work protecting the heritage of Roșia Montană in the western Carpathians.
This is significant because the award recognises both nature and human communities.
Roșia Montană was an area in which the local community was at risk of being destroyed, together with the natural beauty of the region, by a foreign gold mine. The government had made special provisions to enable the mine to proceed.
Eventually, the citizens’ group succeeded in defeating the proposal and securing .
Central to the formation of the Orthodox ethos—of the kind of ethos represented by such an award—is the monastic tradition, together with the holy spiritual fathers and mothers associated with Orthodox monasteries.
Orthodox monasteries often have a considerable influence on their local communities, but that influence can extend much further. I will speak particularly about two Greek monasteries that I happen to know, although this is a widespread phenomenon.
One can think of monasteries in many ways as ideal ecological communities.
They practise things such as organic farming, frugal living and using only what is genuinely necessary. There may also be a vegetarian diet and periods of fasting, sometimes involving a vegan diet.
These are not simply trendy ideas adopted in order to “save the Earth”, as we might rather self-importantly describe them today. They are simply ways of living that have existed for centuries. What is new is the recognition and intentionality with which these practices are now understood as an important expression of faith.
One example is Chrysopigi Monastery in western Crete. The present community has been there since 1976, on the edge of the city, and it has become both a physical and a spiritual oasis for the growing urban population.
The monastery was also able to obtain a form of green-belt protection for some of the remaining farmland surrounding it.
The community has a long association with the monastic Elder Porphyrios, now recognised as a saint, who was well known for his love of the natural world and his delight in all God’s creatures.
He encouraged the sisters to regenerate the land on the mountainside around an old dependency of the monastery. The area contains a tree-lined gully, honeycombed with limestone caves that were once home to hermits associated with the monastery.
It is also an important ecological site, with a unique microclimate, considerable biodiversity, endemic species and medicinal plants. It is therefore a particularly sensitive and fragile ecosystem.
The idea of constructing a substantial new monastery and environmental education centre in such a location might initially seem counter-intuitive—or, less politely, even crazy.
But Elder Porphyrios had an intuition that this land, with its remarkable combination of natural, cultural and spiritual history, could become a place of reconciliation between human beings and the natural world.
And that is, in many respects, what has happened. The new buildings appear to have grown naturally from the earth, while the stone used in their construction was quarried on the site. The result is an extraordinary mosaic of wild and cultivated areas, conservation landscapes, fragile natural habitats, archaeological sites, contemporary human activities and dwellings.
Traditional styles and methods of construction have been combined with modern technology to respond to the climate, including solar heating, photovoltaic panels, water purification and irrigation.
Many of the caves have been converted into chapels and are lit with oil lamps using very clean-burning wicks made from the calyx of a plant that grows on the mountainside.
For nearly 30 years, and particularly over the past 20 years, the monastery has also operated a dedicated environmental education centre for local schoolchildren, teachers and young adults. They learn about flora and fauna and about practical techniques for sustainable living, beginning with the simple principle of not using things that you do not absolutely need.
It is a vision of a natural landscape in which human beings, too, can feel at home.
The Circular Economy and Traditional Practice
Another monastery, this time in central Greece and also inspired by Elder Porphyrios, provides a further example.
It is smaller and combines traditional techniques with modern approaches to organic agriculture. The community specialises in a variety of heritage vegetables grown for seed and hosts an annual seed-exchange festival.
It is particularly striking as an example of a circular economy. There are oak trees around the monastery that were planted by monks centuries ago. They provide shade and timber, firewood and acorns for the pigs.
The monastery also has apple trees. They shelter nesting birds and provide food for insects in spring, while their fruit feeds the nuns and their guests. The monastery sells meat, although the nuns do not raise the animals themselves.
Much of the monastery’s furniture, including the stalls in the church, was salvaged from the roadside and from objects discarded in the local town. These were carefully and lovingly restored. In this way, even man-made objects can be restored and put to good use, and can therefore also be understood as capable of glorifying God.
One of the best-known examples of Eastern Christian monasticism and its ecological role is provided by the monasteries of Ethiopia and their sacred forests.
These are traditional forests, some of whose wood is used for rebuilding and for furniture within the churches. But the forests are considered sacred places.
There is a concept of concentric circles of sacredness extending outward from the church itself to the surrounding fields and landscapes.
Some of these areas contain remnants of what were once sacred forests, even though the land may now be privately owned. Nevertheless, farmers will often continue to respect individual trees because they are understood to belong to the Church.
I came across an article on this subject with the particularly telling title, “The Human
Ecology of Sacred Space.” It is a remarkable example of the way in which religious belief can shape people’s relationship with the natural world.
As I mentioned earlier, the influence of the monastic example can radiate outwards.
There is, for example, a married priest and his wife in British Columbia who have established a kind of sanctuary in the wilderness. Again, their aim is to teach resilience, living with nature and an awareness of the whole Earth as a living icon of God.
The priest speaks about resilience as depending upon a deep understanding of the sacredness of one’s life in relation to all things.
This centre has also provided the basis for a spiritual ecology programme within an international movement of Orthodox Christian young adults based at a monastery in rural eastern Poland.
This is not simply an environmental programme. It is a programme emphasising that life as an Orthodox Christian necessarily entails restoring our relationship with God in and through His creation.
In conclusion, beyond these practical examples, I think what is particularly striking about the monastic and monastic-inspired approach is that it provides an antidote to the eco-anxiety—and even eco-despair—that is becoming a genuine social problem, particularly among young people.
This is because it combines two things.
On the one hand, there is a recognition of the seriousness of the various crises that we face. On the other, there is a spirit of love and trust in the Creator who cares for creation, together with love and respect for the human being who bears His image.
It affirms that human beings are not simply destined to be permanent destroyers of the natural world. Rather, we are creatures formed to live within it and called to lift creation up with ourselves towards God.
Dr Ala’s Shehabi: I’ll talk a little about my own research. It isn’t directly connected to the original topic, but I want to show you how I would like to incorporate faith and religion into my own research.
I want to begin by tracing the idea of justice, and specifically by connecting faith with climate change.
What is the connection between justice, stopping climate change, and preventing the destruction of the planet? One way of thinking about this is through a concept of justice in which we recognise that protecting the Earth is, ultimately, inseparable from protecting humankind.
I’ll approach this academically and theoretically, because environmental justice has emerged within the contemporary climate movement as a key concept, and I draw on it in my own research on energy justice.
So, when we start asking: What is energy justice? — how do I, as someone from the Gulf, connect to the concept of oil as a resource? What is my connection to water, to land, and to the resources beneath the ground? To answer these questions, we have to draw on different frameworks, vernaculars and registers of justice.
My approach in my own research is to ask people themselves. We convene citizen assemblies in different cities, particularly in places where there is little or no energy infrastructure, and we ask people: How would you redesign this system? What would an energy system based on justice look like?
Can we live sustainably? How do we do that? Before the inception of the modern economic system, people lived in ways that were, in many respects, more sustainable. So are there references to ways of life that we can draw upon — not necessarily to go backwards, but to rethink what we mean by modernity, progress and development, and to consider our own histories and the ways in which people used to live?
Generally, this question gets framed around the idea of lifestyle sustainability: the things that we can do individually. But I want to ask the bigger question: How do we redesign systems so that they are not built on pure extraction?
At the moment, we simply take from the environment without giving anything back.
The idea of environmental justice originally emerged in the Western context, particularly in 1982, when a majority-Black community in North Carolina protested the siting of a hazardous waste landfill in their community. That protest helped spark the environmental justice movement.
At its core is a very simple question: Is environmental harm distributed unequally along the lines of race and class? When there is an oil spill, or when an oil refinery is built, these facilities are often located in poorer communities. These communities become what we call sacrifice zones — places that have effectively been designated as acceptable losses, areas considered dispensable in the name of development.
For example, I am currently looking at this picture, and I kept asking myself: Why here? Why are all these villages sitting next to industrial wasteland? How did this come about?
I had to go back 100 years to understand that it followed the lines of where oil pipelines were built and where shipping infrastructure needed to be placed. The purpose was to export oil as quickly as possible. British colonial engineers and American oil companies made these decisions, and it just so happened that these villages were in the way. So the choice became: the villages or the infrastructure. In that process, tens of villages were displaced or destroyed.
And so you have to rethink the story that, when you think of the Gulf, you think of oil and you think of the desert. In my research, I try to reverse that narrative. I argue that oil helped make the desert. When oil was discovered, water from the natural water supply had to be used to refine it. Within five years, a hundred thousand palm trees had disappeared. So what you see today as desert was not necessarily desert before. The landscape was transformed by the extraction of oil.
That is the kind of history that often hasn’t been told, and I find it fascinating: oil reshaped landscapes, oil created wastelands, and oil created sacrifice zones.
So the question of justice becomes: How do we make sense of these sacrifice zones within the modern story of development?
This brings us back to the question of climate justice, and that question is important today. I focus on energy because it is one of the biggest causes of carbon emissions. At the heart of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. And even when we talk about an energy transition, it often looks as though we are simply moving towards renewables while continuing to expand our overall energy consumption.
If you drive through the countryside, you see wind turbines getting taller and taller. Some are more than 200 metres high. One proposed solution is to put them offshore, where you don’t see them as easily and where they don’t take agricultural land away.
But actually, I would argue that what we call the energy transition is not really a transition at all. It is an energy expansion.
Think about the historical transition from coal to oil. We never stopped using coal. We still use coal at enormous levels, while we also added oil on top of it.
And now, on top of our modern use of coal and oil, we are adding renewable energy.
So rather than replacing one energy source with another, we are continuing to expand the overall amount of energy we consume.
Globally, the overwhelming majority of energy still comes from fossil fuels, while only a small proportion comes from renewable sources. Yet there is a huge narrative around the energy transition — around renewables, clean energy and green energy.
But the reality is that we are still extracting and polluting at an enormous scale.
So what is this idea of an energy transition, and how do people conceive of it?
In Western theories of justice, we tend to refer to liberal ideas of justice. We can break some of these down.
We can talk about distributional justice. Distributional justice asks: Who gets the benefits of an energy system or of the environment, and who bears the costs?
Who wins? Who loses? How are the benefits and burdens distributed?
Then we can talk about recognitional justice: whose knowledge and whose voice actually counts when these systems are designed?
And then there is procedural justice: who makes the decisions? Who is sitting at the table when decisions are made? Who runs the energy companies? Who has the political power to decide whether we continue extracting oil or whether we invest in offshore wind?
These are political decisions. Energy is not simply a technical problem.
I think something quite important happens when we frame energy as a technical or economic issue. If you think about energy, you might think you need to be an engineer or an economist to have an opinion about it. You might think it is simply about whether your electricity supply works, whether you can switch the lights on, and how much your energy bill costs.
That creates a boundary. It stops ordinary people from asking questions about one of the most important systems shaping and destroying our environment, because we are made to believe that we are not knowledgeable enough. So the fact that energy is framed as a highly technical or economic topic can actually prevent ordinary people from having a conversation about it.
But energy is fundamentally political. If I vote for one political party, perhaps they support more extraction in the North Sea. If I vote for another, perhaps they support investment in renewables.
But there is another question we rarely hear: Should we simply use less energy?
That is the question of recognition and procedure: who gets to participate, how are decisions made, and are those decisions democratic?
These frameworks are useful. We can use them to question the existing system.
But they don’t quite cover some of the problems we have in the Middle East.
What about sovereignty? Who owns the energy? Who has the right to export it? Who has the right to control, extract and sell a resource that sits beneath their land?
This question is particularly important because we have experienced decades of conflict in the Middle East — from Iraq to the current conflict involving Iran — in which energy, the export of oil and the control of oil have played an important role.
So the question of sovereignty doesn’t quite fit within traditional Western frameworks of justice.
It is really about power and sovereignty. And what Trump has done is to make explicit something that has often been left unsaid in American geopolitical discourse: the desire to control oil. In response, Iran’s position has also been framed around sovereignty and control — including the possibility of restricting access to the Strait of Hormuz.
So this is really about power and control: Who gets to export? Who gets to extract? Who gets to benefit? Who gets to decide? Who gets to control global energy markets?
This is where questions of energy justice emerge in very practical terms.
It is not just a theory. These questions are actually helping to define war and peace today. I have been thinking about these different imaginaries around the environment.
If your imaginary is that of an oil-producing country, you might say: We need these resources. The only way we can develop and grow as a country is by exporting oil and gas.
You might hear similar arguments in Scotland: What about the jobs? What about the economy? But then we have to ask: What is humanity as a whole? Who decides when we think at the planetary scale? Nation-states have defined sovereignty according to political borders. But the climate does not respect those borders.
That is another scale that we struggle to think about because we are constantly thinking in terms of countries and national interests, rather than the planet as a whole.
Anyway, that is broadly the thinking behind my own research.
But the topic today is religion. If we want to challenge the dominant paradigm, what are the alternatives? What is the alternative imaginary? Are there other ways of thinking about justice that we can adopt in our own struggles and movements?
We have attempted to explore this by moving around different communities and asking whether there is a vernacular way for people to articulate conversations about energy around the things that actually matter to them. It is not that we put religion in one box and politics, economics and energy in another.
The question is: How do we bring these things together? It is not simply about faith. Faith is not just a cultural backdrop. It can be part of the agenda that we want to set.
There is some interesting work emerging in this area, and I came across the work of a scholar who looks at new environmentalism and contemporary Islamic thought. I would actually love to invite her to speak here because I am very interested in her work.
She traces a particular lineage of thinkers who have been influential in developing Islamic environmental thought.
What is interesting is how the idea of protecting the environment is imagined not simply as a secondary consideration, but as a religious duty. Three concepts emerge from this body of Islamic environmental thought.
The first is the idea of tawhid, meaning Divine Unity.
It is very simple to describe as the belief in one God, but the implications go much further. The physical universe is sacred because it points directly towards the Creator.
Then there is the concept of mizan, which relates to balance and cosmic order.
Islamic thought places importance on the idea of things existing in balance.
As we know, everything on the planet exists within a fragile equilibrium. If sea levels rise, for example, coastal environments disappear, flooding increases, and ecosystems are disrupted.
There is a very fragile balance within the natural world.
The idea of mizan is therefore important because disrupting that balance can be understood as a violation of a divine order. It is not simply a matter of policy. We are disrupting something that is understood to be part of a divine order.
Another important concept in Islamic thought is stewardship. The idea is that human beings have an amana — a trust. The Earth and the environment are entrusted to us.
If something is entrusted to you, you have an obligation to look after it.
If I go into someone’s house, I don’t destroy it simply because I happen to be there. I have a responsibility to treat it with care.
In the same way, the environment can be conceived of not simply as property, but as something entrusted to us.
This is particularly interesting in contrast with capitalism, which is based heavily on the idea of property rights. If we own a piece of land, we tend to think of it as belonging to us individually. Whereas in Islamic thought, there are traditions of collective ownership and collective responsibility.
And these ideas are not entirely unique to Islam. If you think about the National Trust here in the UK, for example, the very idea of a trust is important. Something can be held in trust without being understood simply as private property. The problem is that much of our land has been privatised and commodified. Once something becomes private property, it can be monetised and treated as a commodity.
There is a whole history here that we don’t necessarily learn about — the history of how land that was once held collectively or publicly was transferred into private ownership. So these are just some very simple and basic ideas. There are many philosophers who explore them in much greater detail, and within Islam there are also traditions of jurisprudence and legal frameworks that explore questions of the environment, stewardship and the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
But I think we need to simplify some of these ideas — not to make them simplistic, but to make them tangible to our own communities.
And perhaps we can universalise some of these ideas so that they can speak to people beyond any single religious tradition. I have some examples from other places that also talk about the environment and climate change, but I think I want to make one final point.
We need to do more work on combining religious ideas and references with questions of environmental justice, so that people can develop their own conception of what they are fighting for. Why do I want to save that tree that is about to be cut down? You can define the problem in terms of health: the tree produces oxygen, provides shade, improves air quality and has other benefits. But you can also define it in terms of something deeper. How would you explain your motivation to someone campaigning to save a centuries-old tree? Sometimes, you know viscerally that it is wrong to cut down a tree that has been there longer than any of us. How do you articulate that feeling?
Sometimes we understand that it is because we have a duty towards the natural world. It is a living being. There is a moral connection. It is not simply material. It is not because the tree has some economic value. People are not necessarily saying, Please don’t cut down this tree because we could sell its wood. Most of the time, the wood is simply thrown away.
So the value we attach to the tree is something much deeper. And I think there is an urgency to this question because the climate crisis is not going away. It has become a divisive issue. People disagree about what is happening, or even whether climate change exists.
But regardless of where we stand on that debate, I think religious traditions give us another way of thinking about our relationship with the environment.
We have an obligation towards the Earth.
And fundamentally, I think we have to understand this very simple point:
It is not only about whether the climate is changing. It is about whether we are willing to destroy the planet we have been entrusted with. We have to prioritise and centre the environment in the way we think about development, justice, politics and our future.
*Dr Elizabeth Theokritoff is an Associate Lecturer at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, with a particular interest in theology and ecology, and has given invited lectures, papers and workshops on ecological themes in several countries. She is author of Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (2009), as well as numerous articles and book chapters, and had been involved in various environmental education initiatives in the Orthodox Church over more than 35 years.
**Ala’a Shehabi is a British-born economics lecturer, activist and writer. She has a PhD from Imperial College London, is a former policy analyst at Rand Europe. She is the deputy director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London.
