I paid my second visit to Assisi within a week when I attended, with Princess Michael of Kent standing in for the Duke of Edinburgh, the launch by the ARC of their Green Pilgrimages Network. ARC, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, is an organisation launched in 1995. To quote them, they are “a secular body, set up to help religions develop environmental programmes based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices”.
ARC’s great insight was to see that the world’s faiths had a crucial role to play in helping to tackle the global environmental crisis, and that by doing so together they could understand better each other’s beliefs, bringing the world’s different faiths together. This Assisi gathering, appropriately hot on the heels of the Pope’s own gathering of world religious leaders in the same city, saw Copts, Jews, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Hindus, Sikhs, Lutherans, Muslims, Shinto priests and Daoists, all sharing experience of pilgrimage, and how they could make pilgrimages more environmentally friendly.
Let us be clear. This is not marginal activity. At last year’s Haj, there were 100 million plastic water bottles left behind by thirsty pilgrims. As the world’s faiths own 8% of the habitable land on the planet, and represent 85% of our 7 billion human beings, we cannot afford not to engage with faith in trying to solve major global problems like environmental waste and pollution. So it was wonderful to see representatives from many key pilgrimage cities – the Mayor of Assisi, the Chairman of the Punjab Pollution Control Board (looking after Amritsar), the Mayor of Trondheim, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and others – talking to faith leaders about how to work together for a very practical common good. This was the opposite of utopia.