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Celebrating ‘green Christmas’ when ecological crisis threatens Earth
To show our support for a green Christmas, we can stop marking the holiday with consumerism. This behavior is far from the spirit of Christmas.
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To show our support for a green Christmas, we can stop marking the holiday with consumerism. This behavior is far from the spirit of Christmas. (JP/-)
T
he song “White Christmas”, written by Irving Berlin and popularized by Bing Crosby in 1942, is perhaps the Christmas carol that is most frequently heard as the holiday approaches. Many of us may know the lyrics very well.
But as today’s ecological crisis afflicts the Earth, our shared and common home, it is only fitting that we speak about a “green Christmas” as the new way of celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. The Christmas holiday indeed needs a new context so it is relevant to our lives today.
Pope Francis was genuine in the message of his 2015 encyclical, Laudato si’, subtitled “On care for our common home”. In it he says that the Earth “is among the most abandoned and maltreated”, and that human beings, who were created of the Earth’s elements, are responsible for the damage.
The question now is how the ecological crisis affects the way we prepare to celebrate Christmas. The answer, of course, is to think about and mark a green Christmas.
The world community created the idea of a green movement when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in September 1962 and Lyn White wrote about the historical roots of the ecological crisis in 1967.
Many scientists, writers, priests, theologians and activists began to open their eyes and souls to the reality of the environment that was suffering a crisis as a result of human greed.
The commitment to conserving nature sprouted everywhere and in every field. In essence, everyone wanted to renew their care for the Earth for the sake of the future.
