The unfortunate reality is that humanity has rejected to be shaped by the suggestions and inducements of God. We have not followed His guiding grace in determining the measure of our needs and how we use the world; how we work in the world or how we preserve the world. The result is that we behave toward the environment, toward nature, rapaciously and catastrophically. When we apply our own sense of mastery and not appropriate use we upset the natural harmony and equilibrium that is based in God. Nature reacts negatively and the result is that terrible desires pile up on the human family. Recent unusual fluctuations in temperature, typhoons, earthquakes, violent storms, the pollution of the seas and rivers, and the many other catastrophic actions for man and the environment ought to be an obvious alarm for something to be done with human behavior. The principal reason for this catastrophic behavior of contemporary man is his egocentrism, which is another face of self-reliance apart from God, and even self-divinization.
On account of this egocentrism, the relationship between humanity and nature has been radically altered. Now an impertinent, arrogant subjugation of the forces of nature has supplanted that which was designed by God. In place of the preservation of life and freedom, these forces serve to destroy and oppress our fellow man, or we indulge in excessive consumption, without regard to the consequences of such excess.
— His Holiness, The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Speech on the Day of the Protection of the Environment, Sept 1, 2006.
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