United Nations Climate Change Conference

The Global Religious Leaders Summit concluded in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi in Dec. 2023. 28 religious leaders from around the world convened to discuss how to leverage the influence of religious communities to address the climate crisis.“

Using love to connect spirituality and protect ecology

Your Holinesses, Eminences, Excellencies, Religious leaders and Friends:

I wish you all auspicious and peace!
I appreciate that this Conference listens to different voices, connects the wisdom of all walks of life, and sees the power of faith. Taking this opportunity, I would like to praise UAE for its efforts in reaching the goals of net-zero carbon emissions, clean energy, and caring for the earth.

The common link between religions is spirituality. We are here, with the common will and move, to discuss the current ecological crisis and how to make ecology sustainable. That is, spiritual ecology, because “spirituality is ecology, and ecology is spirituality.”

How can we say that spirituality is embedded in ecology? We can see the spirituality of all things in their lives . The spirituality of all things is originated from seeds, and the seeds of life are memories. Because of the memory, seeds are sowed in spring, growing up in summer, harvested in autumn, and stored in winter. They can grow into their shapes through the changes of the four seasons. Seeds can feed all life.

Nowadays, the four seasons are in chaos, floods, fires, wind disasters, and earthquakes occur frequently. These are all due to human beings’ large carbon emissions, willful consumption, and even using war to grill the earth and destroying the earth with nuclear bombs. The earth’s climate will only become more and more extreme. Due to the extraction of oil, the icebergs in the Arctic and Antarctic cannot solidify, because oil is the element that solidifies snow. Once the oil is largely pumped out, the elements that support the solidification of snow-mountains will be gone, causing icebergs to avalanche, and the four seasons will be messed up and no longer clear.

If spring, summer, autumn and winter are messed up, seeds will not be able to remember to grow, species will not be able to grow and reproduce, and will be extinct eventually, humans will be extinct as well. When we destroy the ecological living conditions, we cut off our own food. This is like committing suicide!

In the past , we did not know the importance of attaching value to ecology. Now, we must awaken spiritually and realize the relationship between humans and ecology. It is a community of life that coexists with diversity, depends on each other, and helps each other. Therefore, we have the responsibility to protect ecology and know the true value of ecology. We will then naturally “respect the value of species’ existence, be inclusive of each other’s living space, and achieve a world of sharing together.”

Now, the University for Life and Peace I am preparing in Myanmar is mainly to educate about ecological cyclic systems and ecological sustainability, so that everyone can understand that we are a partnership with ecology. The goals of the University are to promote spiritual ecology to different fields and cultivate future ecology protectors. I hope that everyone come together and collaborate to be partners for this ecological university!

Dear religious leaders, we are responsible to connect the spirituality within each one of us, to give this love to ecology, unite religions spirituality, use this resonance to protect the sustainability of the ecology, and let our love for ecology explode like nuclear energy to protect ecology.