Pursuing environmental protection through religious doctrine and its relevance to the Sri Lankan context

Abstract

Environmental protection is one of the important global issues in the contemporary word. Considering the emergence of the environmental pollution and effect, environmental protection has got a status as a burning topic among the researchers and several types of research and forums have been conducted in this connection internationally as well as locally. Religion is one of the social institutions. All the major religions, which are followed in Sri Lanka are very much concerned about the environmental protection based on the theories of cosmology, creation, immanence of god in creatures, relationship of nature, human, admiration of nature, worship of nature. Hence, religions encourage the environmental protection. Religion, nature and humans, are interconnected as one family. In the modern era, science and technology exploit nature for human consumption and human activities. This is widening the gap between the interconnectedness of the god, nature, and human and even venerate the nature. Religious doctrine has not been adopted in the human characteristics and value formation. As a result man looks at nature as alien and he has failed to protect the environment. Religions give a sound eco-friendly background to human community through doctrine. But it does not reflect on their life. At this point, this research analysed data and extracted from the literature on religious Holy Scriptures, textbooks, encyclopaedia, journals, and research articles on environmental issues and try to communicate the findings. Sri Lanka is a religious country. The role of religions in influencing the decision making of every issue in Sri Lanka is inevitable since the independence. The objective of the research was to introduce the interaction of religions and environment, identify the environmental protection principles in the religious texts, and propose religious ideas for environmental protection. Therefore, the research explores and reiterates the environmental protection ideas from the religious doctrine and suggests to incorporate and implement those ideas in the environmental protection endeavour in Sri Lanka.