The Green Movement Is Getting Religion

They are the “Redwood Rabbis” quoting Torah and Talmud on sacred stewardship to dissuade a Jewish magnate from wiping out some of the world’s most ancient forest groves. They are the “Noah congregations” of evangelical Christians plying conservative Republicans with biblical passages on why saving God’s creatures from extinction is a religious responsibility.

They are rabbis, priests and monks mailing out hundreds of thousands of action kits, lobbying in the halls of government and mobilizing their faithful for what many of them regard as the Earth’s most important battle.

The environmental debate, long dominated by a secular conservation movement based on scientific rather than theological arguments, is being dramatically reshaped by the fervent forces of God.

Some activists call it the birth of a religious movement as significant as the battle against slavery: Churches, temples and synagogues across the land are seizing the environment as a top-priority concern. They are armed with missionary zeal, moral authority, millions of troops and a simple but powerful mantra--”Creation care,” or the religious mandate to lovingly tend God’s garden and nurture all creatures within it.

To many of the faithful, the issue is as clear-cut as a bumper sticker now in vogue among religious environmentalists: “God made it. We tend it. That settles it.”

“You can’t follow Catholic teachings without understanding we have a significant responsibility for God’s creations, and we’re called on to be stewards, not exploiters, of the Earth,” said John Carr of the U.S. Catholic Conference. “This is as old as St. Francis and as new as today’s headlines.”

Not all agree. “Who needs to hear about trees?” one disgruntled congregant demanded of Rabbi Lester Scharnberg last year. The retort came after the rabbi devoted the High Holy Days sermon at his synagogue in Arcata to the controversy surrounding logging of ancient redwood groves in the Headwaters Forest near Eureka.

Similarly, among scientists, the mix of environmental concern with religious fervor worries many.

“The minute you turn [environmentalism] into an anti-technology religion, you start killing people,” said Bruce N. Ames, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at UC Berkeley.

To attack pesticides and other toxic chemicals without adequate analysis of their impact could jeopardize the poor by raising the price of products known to promote good health, such as fruits and vegetables, argues Ames. He was one of 46 prominent scientists who signed an appeal at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio warning of “the emergence of an irrational ideology” opposed to scientific, industrial and economic progress.

Supporters of the movement would deny that sort of label, but their growth does represent a repudiation of one popular interpretation of the Genesis story--an interpretation some have used to justify relentless development as a moral and religious right.

Caring for God’s Creatures

“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the Earth,” God instructed Adam, according to the Genesis account.

The idea that man rightfully dominates nature still holds power among some faithful, including many struggling for a living off timber and other natural resources.

But a host of theologians are citing other biblical and scriptural writings to urge a greater humility and sense of responsibility toward the rest of God’s creatures.

“We still espouse a God-given right of human beings to use the environment for their benefit . . . but that dominion involves a responsibility to care for it,” said Barrett Duke, the Southern Baptists’ environmental specialist. “[Creation] was not provided to us by God to consume it into oblivion.”

In the past, religious leaders say, they balked at environmental activism for several reasons. Environmental priorities often seemed skewed in their view--focused on wetlands and wilderness rather than the poor and weak. In addition, they viewed the issue as a province of science and feared environmental activism could be construed as nature worship and “New Age” pantheism.

Even now, environmentalists among the conservative Southern Baptists are careful to avoid pantheistic appearances by saying they worship the creator and not the creation.

For their part, some environmentalists, such as Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, say they once wrote off religion as a possible ally after accepting the arguments of such scholars as Lynn White, the late UCLA historian, whose essays blamed the Judeo-Christian tradition for elevating humans and devaluing nature.

“We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis,” White wrote in 1970, “until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

Pope now fully embraces religious activism. Last year, he apologized for ignoring, “to our detriment, the power that organized religion can bring to our mission.”

Theologians, Scientists Meet

The growth of religious-based environmentalism is reclaiming the environmental movement’s original spiritual roots. From St. Francis of Assisi, who urged a democracy of all of God’s creatures eight centuries ago, to the spiritual writings of English preacher Izaak Walton, Sierra Club founder John Muir and Jewish environmentalist Arthur Waskow, the idea that nature reflects God’s most sublime handiwork has a long-standing pedigree that is now being rediscovered with zest, as several recent events illustrate.

The movement arrived as a global force in October, when Harvard University brought together more than 1,000 top theologians, scientists and activists in what was billed as the largest interfaith dialogue on the environment in history. Muslims from 17 nations attended; the gathering of Shinto practitioners was the largest ever outside Japan.

Continuing forums will help religions develop a code of environmental ethics and launch a new field of academic study on religion and ecology, said Mary Evelyn Tucker, a Bucknell University religion professor who conceived and coordinated the conference with her husband, fellow Bucknell professor John Grim.

Meanwhile, California is awash in ecofaith activity: In recent months, Jewish faithful were recreating the ancient ceremony of Hoshannah Rabbah--a fall festival designed to praise God--beating the sands of Santa Barbara with willow branches to cast away sins and, in a modern ecological twist, proclaim a renewed commitment as caretakers for God’s creation.

The Episcopal Diocese of California voted to encourage all churches to reduce energy use and aim to go green with renewable sources. The campaign is led by the Rev. Sally Bingham, who was ordained last year after entering the ministerial path six years earlier with an explicit desire to promote religious environmentalism.

In Newport Beach, 150 people gathered at St. Mark Presbyterian Church for their first conference on “Creation Care,” an initiative launched by the church’s new environmental committee. The committee has completed a recycling project and is aiming next at energy conservation, said Bob Parry, who also writes an environmental column for the church newsletter.

“It’s exploding--a real movement taking off,” said Jeffrey Auerbach, a Santa Barbara psychologist who helped form one of the first regional Jewish environmental groups three years ago.

Efforts of this sort “are bringing a whole fresh perspective into the environmental debate,” said Peter Kelly of the liberal Environmental Information Center in Washington. Religious involvement “means a possibility of marshaling the majority support [for the environment] we know is there.”

As the movement grows, its members are influencing the language, the parameters and sometimes the outcome of environmental debates.

They are animating the global ecological lexicon with a poetic new language of the soul. The atmosphere is not oxygen or carbon dioxide but “God’s breath of life.” The seas are the “waters of Baptism.” Ancient groves of redwoods and rain forests in ecosystems that have supported the Earth since time immemorial represent the Garden of Eden.

Morality and Social Justice

All living creatures, from the cuddly seal pup to the slimy razor clam, are “God’s creations and unique entities that deserve respect for just what they are,” says Santa Monica Episcopal priest Peter Gwillam Kreitler, who resigned from his parish in 1990 to work full-time on the environment.

In keeping with his beliefs, Kreitler stopped buying meat more than a decade ago and now consumes mainly vegetables and occasionally fish. He says that efforts to eat “lower on the food chain” are slowly taking hold within the movement.

Religious environmentalists are also pushing open the parameters of the ecological debate to questions of morality and social justice.

Does 5% of the world’s wealthiest population have the moral right to endanger everyone else with industrial pollution? Is it ethical to place toxic waste dumps near the poor and politically disenfranchised?

Last year, the Rev. Peter Moore-Kochlacs of Environmental Ministries of Southern California told a Senate committee that placing a nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley in the California desert would violate the teachings of the apostle Paul to work for the common good, the exhortations of the Hebrew prophets to walk the earth humbly and quite possibly the 6th Commandment against killing.

Religious groups have played a significant role in the debate over the Headwaters Forest, where pressure from Jewish activists is credited with helping to prod Charles Hurwitz, the head of the company that owns the forest, into making a deal. Hurwitz is Jewish.

Similarly, in the debate over the Endangered Species Act, evangelical Christians are often credited with a hefty role in halting attempts to loosen the laws. Republican leaders pushed hard to amend the law after winning the congressional majority in 1994, but conservative religious groups countered by lobbying Republicans in 1996 with biblical injunctions and metaphors of Noah’s Ark as “God’s first Endangered Species Act.”

“Conservatives are supposed to conserve,” said Stan LaQuire, the Republican executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network near Philadelphia.

Some Republicans challenge LaQuire’s credibility and deny that evangelicals had any significant impact on the endangered species debate. Mike Hardiman, spokesman for Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Stockton), a leading critic of the law, dismissed their involvement as “nothing significant.”

“Left-wing” foundations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts had “purchased the credibility of religious organizations by throwing money at them,” Hardiman charged. LaQuire denies the charge, saying that grants from the Pew trusts came with no strings attached.

Fueling much of the movement is the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, launched in 1993 to enact what executive director Paul Gorman called a “distinctly religious response to the crisis of environmental sustainability and social justice.” The partners include the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Evangelical Environmental Network, the National Council of Churches and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.

The partnership has sent educational materials to 120,000 congregations and coordinated leadership training and conferences.

At the grass-roots level, local ministers like Kreitler and Moore-Kochlacs say religious environmentalism has transformed their lives and their ministries.

Kreitler, host of a cable TV show on environmental sustainability, had already founded the Santa Monica-based Earth Services, which launched the Great L.A. Clean-Up in 1991 and has held 85 round-table discussions on the environment.

After the 1992 Rio de Janeiro summit on global warming, he began what he calls “the most important theological work I’ve ever done”--selling organic fertilizer to revitalize the poisoned and polluted soils of God’s garden.

With two other Episcopal priests, Kreitler markets the Australian-developed fertilizer throughout the Western hemisphere through their firm, “Optimum Yield.”

“We actually have a chance to develop healthy soil, which means healthy plants, healthy food and healthy children--and that’s a pretty exciting theological principle,” Kreitler said. “When God commands: ‘Peter, preserve creation,’ what can be more elementary than becoming a fertilizer salesman?”