From Desmond Tutu and William Vendley
A RELIGIONS FOR PEACE LETTER
Rt. Rev. Desmond Tutu
Dr. William Vendley
Dear Friends:
Warm greetings.
As the former President of Religions for Peace (RfP) South Africa, I am pleased to join my good friend and our Secretary General, Dr. William Vendley, to announce today the launching of the Religions for Peace Faiths for Earth campaign in 195 countries.
Faiths for Earth is a global multi-religious online campaign to protect our shared earth from the ravages of climate change and its disproportionate effects on the poor and excluded.
It seeks to mobilize religious believers and women and men of goodwill to embrace the moral responsibility to care for our earth and each other by seeking to live better and more sustainable lives in greater joy and harmony.
I am honored to join with Dr. Vendley and other senior RfP religious leaders in advancing this timely and important initiative.
At the heart of the campaign is a petition urging each country’s sitting head of state and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to take bold actions to halt climate change, including phasing out the use of harmful fossil fuels and committing to one hundred percent renewable energy by midcentury.
The first phase of the Faiths for Earth campaign is to amass signed petitions from all around the world to present to world leaders prior to their convening this December in Paris. There, they must hammer out a binding international agreement on climate change. We need a groundswell of religious voices to provide a clear moral imperative for a binding climate agreement.
So far, 290,702 people in 27 countries have signed our petition. This is a great start. We can do better. You are vital to our effort to spread the word.
Join Us In Protecting Our Earth By:
1. Sign the online petition of your respective country here: http://faithsforearth.org/
(The petition is available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Turkish, Filipino, Indonesian, Norwegian, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.)
2. Urge every member in your network to join the campaign and sign the petition. (You will find attached a draft personal message which you may edit as you see fit to send to your network). We also invite you to ask those within your network who sign the petition to kindly forward it on to their network of supporters.
3. Post your country's petition on your organization's website.
4. Share your country's petition on your social media sites.
Protecting the earth and its climate is understood by us – each according to her or his tradition – as a serious religious obligation. Our respective religious traditions call us to work together to heal and protect our life-giving planet.
We hope that you will join us in the Faiths for Earth campaign. The timing has never been more crucial.
Yours in Solidarity for Peace,
