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Environmental Missions Prayer Digest
September 2012 |
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Greetings!
Maybe we should have saved this month's feature for October and run a special Halloween edition. The particular means by which the Parsi people (adherents of Zoroastrianism) dispose of their deceased seems to grate against our sensibilities. The city of Mumbai, India often hears complaints about the Parsi "Towers of Silence" where bodies are lain out in the open skies so that vultures might remove the flesh from the bones.
 | | Pedestrians walk by a Zoroastrian Temple in Mumbai (photo:Šperegrinari/Flikr.com-by,nc,sa) |
But my rare encounters with a Parsi (usually on an airplane in or out of Mumbai) make me believe that they are among some of the most genteel and sophisticated people in the world. They tend to be highly educated. At 97.9%, their community has the highest literacy rate in all of India. And actually the Towers of Silence, rather than being an expression of morbidity, are indication of a high view of purity. Zoroastrians believe that the elements of earth, fire and water should not be defiled by contact with the dead. After the vultures dispose of the flesh, the bleached bones of the corpse are collected and buried in concrete vaults, never to have contact with the ground.
Worldwide, the Parsi only number around 110,000 in population. Operation World reports that Parsis "in their wealthy, cocooned religious communities remain unevangelized." Thank you for praying for them (even though you may have to cross a sizeable cultural barrier to do so-- but that's what missions is all about.)
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Parsi Burial Customs Disrupted by Vulture Die-off
The People of the Western Ghats River and Streams
(WWF Global 200: #171)
 | | Engraving of a tower of silence from the 1886 book True Stories of the Reign of Queen Victoria by Cornelius Brown |
"Ecosystems services" refer to those goods and services which are provided to us through God's creation. We consider them as essentially free of cost and therefore often take them for granted. For example, bees as pollinators are among the most important of farm laborers but they never receive a paycheck. For centuries, the vultures of India have been providing a crucial ecosystem service for the Parsi people of India's urbanized western ghats. (See above.) In the 1990's Indian cattle farmers began using a drug, diclofenac. Vultures who fed on cattle carcasses quickly died of kidney failure. To date, India has lost an astounding 97 to 99% of its vulture population. Diclofenac was banned by the Indian government in 2006, but recent studies claim that over a third of Indian pharmacies continue to sell the drug to livestock farmers. Parsi attendants have installed solar collectors at many Towers of Silence. These devices concentrate sunlight on the bodies and help dessicate the flesh, but they do not work during the cloudy days of monsoon. (Solar collectors are an example of a costly partially-suitable technology which we must install when we lose a free ecosystem service.) Crows have replaced vultures at the Towers of Silence but crows accomplish in weeks what vultures could accomplish in days. Additionally, crows are also driven off by the heat of the solar collectors.
Plans are underway to designate the Doongerwadi Forest (a park in the middle of Mumbai's sprawl) as a vulture sanctuary.
Please pray: - Thank you Lord, for the innumberable ecosystem services through which You deign to meet our needs. Help us not take them for granted, and help us be good stewards of them.
- Thank you for carrion, and what they mean for this world you have created.
- Lord, we pray for success of India's plan for vulture restoration. We also pray for the full success of India's diclofenac ban. Empower Indian pharmacies and farmers to obey the law of the land.
- We pray sympathetically for the Parsi as they, like us, lose their loved ones to death.
- We pray that the Parsi would hear the good news that our purity can be found in Christ crucified, his broken body hanging from a cross in the open sky, two thousand years ago.
- Lord of the Harvest, please send workers to this small, but dear, harvest field.
Links: listen to the NPR story here
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You can mobilize prayer!
Please consider forwarding this letter to three people whom you imagine might want to join you in environmental missions prayer.
And if you know of any people, projects, or issues that you would like to see featured in EMPD in the coming months, please contact us.
Lowell Bliss
Eden Vigil
Links: Contact the editors, Eden Vigil website, Donations to Eden Vigil
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