A selection of readings, essays, and resource materials on the subject of nature.
This collection of extracts from the Bahá’í Writings—compiled in 1989—focuses on humanity’s understanding of its relationship to nature and its responsibility to preserve the world's ecological balance.
First published in January 1995, this Bahá’í International Community statement was prepared to facilitate greater understanding of the concept of global prosperity in the context of Bahá’í teachings.
In this statement, the Bahá’í International Community writes that a culture of consumerism has tended to reduce human beings to competitive, insatiable consumers of goods and to objects of manipulation by the market. A more profound look at human nature, the statement suggests, would reveal the ability of human beings to respond to a higher calling.
In this submission to the 2006 Commission on Social Development on the review of the First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty, the Bahá’í International Community reflects on the purpose of development—contributing to the foundation for a new social and international order, capable of creating and sustaining conditions in which human beings can advance morally, culturally and intellectually.
The search for solutions to climate change has revealed the limits of traditional technological and policy approaches and has raised difficult questions about justice, equity, responsibility and obligation. What is required is an approach based on the unity which connects us as the inhabitants of one biosphere, the citizens of one world and the members of one human civilization.
This statement, submitted by the Bahá’í International Community to the first session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, New York, 14-25 June 1993, proposes a campaign to promote world citizenship within a framework for reorienting education, public awareness, and training toward sustainable development.
Communities that thrive and prosper will do so because they acknowledge the spiritual dimension of human nature and make the moral, emotional and intellectual development of the individual a central priority. This paper, prepared by the Bahá'í International Community for the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held 3-14 June 1996 in Istanbul, Turkey, explores the possibilities for building spiritually and materially prosperous communities.
The Bahá’í International Community’s statement to the 48th Session of the Commission for Social Development on the theme of “social integration”, held in October 2005, in New York, addressed the question of values and their link to systems of religion and belief.
In September of 1986 the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) launched its Network on Conservation and Religion, bringing religious leaders together with environmental leaders in Assisi, Italy. The Bahá’í community joined this new alliance a year later, and put forward this statement in support of the Network's objectives.
In this article, first published in World Order magazine in 1994, Michael Karlberg describes how the Bahá’í Faith provides a source of purpose, faith, and inspiration—elements that have proven to be potent forces in human change.
In this essay, first published in The Bahá’í World 2005-2006, Arthur Dahl asks what are the ethical concepts and spiritual principles that are now necessary to transform society in order to make solutions to global warming possible?
A list of further reading on this subject is available here.