‘Green Bishop’ awarded for his tireless environment work
2009-11-19 10:15
HE LIKES hiking, body surfing and has a strong bond with mother
nature, and it is when he goes up into the mountains that he is able to feel the
presence of God most acutely, he says.
Bishop Geoff Davies was last week awarded with the SAB
Environmentalist of the Year award for his environmental activism.
“The main duty of Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment
Institute (Safcei) is to encourage, enable and equip faith communities to take
their environmental responsibilities seriously,” says Davies, who is an
executive director of Safcei, an organisation representing various faith
communities whose aim is to care for the environment.
Davies retired in 2004 after 17 years of service as bishop of the
Anglican Diocese in Umzimvubu, the Eastern Cape, to establish Safcei. He talks
passionately about the environment, God and man’s duty towards other living
things on earth.
According to him mankind should take action in “preserving our
water resources, stopping erosion, bringing ethics into business relations”, and
adds that greed and the desire to make money at the expense of the environment
has led to “overfishing, destruction of forests, building on wetlands and do
things with no regard for the environment”.
He believes that the destruction of the environment and the
emission of greenhouses gases is upsetting the delicate ecological balance.
“People don’t realise that the atmosphere is delicate and needs to be looked
after to allow life to flourish, and we have the responsibility to care for
everything God has brought into being.”
Dubbed the “Green Bishop”, Davies was born in Cape Town and studied
history and social anthropology at the the University of Cape Town.
He had a short stint as a journalist at the Cape Argus newspaper
before going to England where he studied theology at the Cambridge University.
Thereafter, he was ordained as a priest at the St. Paul’s Cathedral in London
before going to work in Botswana. He returned to Cape Town later on and preached
the gospel of environmental preservation and care in the faith community.
Davies recalls an incident in the former Transkei where he saw a
group of people stoning a bat which was taking refugee in a tree. “I told them
not to kill it because it helps human beings by eating mosquitoes. We should not
be hurting what God brought into being but instead we should protect.”
The confidence and conviction in the bishop’s voice as he talks
about care for the environment is enough to convince one that he deserves the
award.
His wife, Kate, is an environmental educator while one of his two
daughters works at the Zambezi National Park as an environmental educator.
“The award is a wonderful honour and encouragement,” he says, and
it will spur him on his mission to make “people far more aware of their position
and change attitudes” to the environment “because if things go on like this,
with droughts, rising sea levels and storms getting worse millions will be
homeless and will starve.”
Davies said he will be closely watching the world leaders at the
United Nations’ Climate Change Conference on December 7-18 in Copenhagen,
Denmark, and prays that world “leaders are going to do what is right and take
urgent and meaningful action to stem climate change.”
- City Press