Vatican City, Sep 25, 2007 / 09:54 am
Monsignor Pietro Parolin, the Under-Secretary for Relations with States, delivered a speech to the UN stressing that "everyone, without exception, has a grave responsibility to protect the environment."
The 62nd session of the UN General Assembly met to discuss the theme, “the future is in our hands: addressing the leadership challenge of climate change.” Monsignor Parolin underscored that his “delegation wishes to stress the importance of environmental protection and the unification of the international community to “foster a healthy environment”.
He confirmed that scientists appear to have established a clear correlation between human activity and climate change, but cautioned that these results and remaining uncertainties “should neither be exaggerated nor minimized in the name of politics, ideologies or self- interest. Rather, they now need to be studied closely in order to give a sound basis for raising awareness and making effective policy decisions.”
The monsignor identified two attitudes that are particularly harmful to creation and humanity: The first is the “fundamentally reckless” approach in which people say, “we should actually exploit our world to the full, with little or no heed to the consequences, using a world view supposedly based on faith." The second approach is to treat the earth as the only good, and characterize[s] humanity as an irredeemable threat to the earth, whose population and activity need to be controlled by various drastic means.