Faithful join efforts toward conservation
By Dan Shapley Poughkeepsie Journal April 22 , 2005

Nature is God's creation and gift -- a setting for spiritual enlightenment and contemplation that is temporarily in human stewardship.
For a growing number of the faithful, that notion is fueling a desire to fight for environmental protection, often in partnership with long-established environmental groups that had not before embraced a religious view of the natural world.
It also represents a new front in the national push-and-pull over the political term ''moral values'' -- a phrase associated with ideas such as right-to-life and traditional marriages. Environmental activism has typically been aligned with the more secular world of science.
''We each have to find a different language,'' said Sister Kathleen Donnelly, a Catholic nun of the Sisters of St. Ursula at the Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck. She also coordinates the Religious Orders Along the Hudson, a group of monasteries, churches and other religious land owners in the Hudson Valley concerned about good land stewardship.
''For the scientists to just stay with their measureable quantities, that's good information but it doesn't go far enough. For us to stay with our religious language, that's fine, but no one else understands it,'' Donnelly said. ''We have the same goals, if we talk long enough. We want the same healthy air, we want the same healthy water.''
There is evidence of the trend in the statements of national religious leaders of different faiths, in forums discussing the uniting of faith and science being planned locally and in the strategizing of environmentalists trying to protect and restore the Hudson River.
Many trace the beginning of religious interest in the environment to the first Earth Day 35 years ago today, but momentum built in the early 1990s. It was then that a group of influential scientists, including Steven J. Gould and Carl Sagan, called on religious groups to take up the environmental charge. The U.N. Earth Summit in 1992 raised awareness. And the leaders of several faiths began calling on the faithful to take heed.
The Hudson River helped inspire several influential thinkers on the topic of unifying spiritual practice and environmental stewardship -- like cultural historian Thomas Berry and Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The monasteries and retreats on and near the Hudson have also had a long-standing environmental and land stewardship ethic.
The most tangible result of that connection has come in the form of a series of shareholder resolutions put to voters by the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, an interfaith group. It has rallied investors to force General Electric Co. to disclose how much money it has spent fighting the estimated $500 million dredging of PCB pollution from the Hudson River. The resolution is faith-based, is on an environmental issue and uses an economic argument, said Sister Patricia Daly, the coalition's executive director.
Despite the long presence on the Hudson of both environmental activism and religious reflection, the move to join forces formally has taken on a sense of urgency recently.
''Many of the great social issues of this country began in the religious communities. Although the environmental movement was originally a secular movement, the feeling is now that a lot of good can be done by organizing the grass roots of congregations,'' said Rabbi Larry Troster, the Jewish chaplain at Bard College in Annandale and the rabbinic fellow of the Council on Environment and Jewish Life. The council is one of several organizations affiliated with a national interfaith umbrella group, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.
''We're not just trying to put a religious veneer on secular teaching,'' Troster said. ''We have deep and ancient teachings that can be applicable to this issue.''
The Garrison Institute, an organization that explores worldly applications of spiritual knowledge, began actively coordinating religious and environmental groups in the Hudson Valley this year. It has convened a group of valley writers from both sets, and plans to rally support for a common statement of purpose by hosting a series of public conversations over the next three years.
They call it the Caring for Creation Hudson River Program.
''Our ultimate vision is to get the two communities working more closely on more issues on the Hudson. It's place-based,'' said Bob Perschel, the Garrison Institute's senior program director for the environment. His background is as a forester and activist with the Wilderness Society.
Interested in ethics
Some individual church leaders have seen an increasing interest in environmental ethics, even if their churches have not formally joined forces with the Garrison Institute or other similar organizations.
''People have become more aware of how terribly we've treated the world and how much we need to do to consciously pick up our trash,'' said Rev. Robert D. Eckler, of Fishkill Baptist Church. ''The Earth is the Lord's; we belong to him. We're his people and we want to do what we can to keep what he made as good as he made it.''
The emerging partnership underscores that there is soul-searching among many environmentalists brought on by a realization that their message is not resonating with many citizens, especially at the national level. Contradictory studies by opposing interests have pitted science versus science, leaving many baffled and distrusting.
That anxiety is embodied by a debate over a recent controversial essay that has circulated on the Internet titled, ''The Death of Environmentalism.'' The essay declares the environmental movement effectively dead because it has not addressed the interests of real people.
That anxiety was evident at the State of the Hudson Summit Monday in New Paltz. There, leading scientific, environmental and government notables working on the Hudson pondered the future of their efforts -- in terms that included not only traditional environmental quality but affordable housing, job availability, cultural and economic diversity, and religion.
''The environmental community sometimes gets so caught up on the facts and figures we don't connect on a more visceral level,'' Riverkeeper Alex Matthiessen said. ''The spiritual community can help us reshape how we communicate.''
Make contacts
Bill Matuszeski, an influential consultant who shaped programs to clean the Chesapeake Bay, told members of the audience that to be successful they need to reach out to local governments, landowners and farmers, builders and businesses -- and churches.
Churches, as large landowners with buildings and parking lots, are the perfect setting to demonstrate sustainable building projects on a scale that can be replicated in homes, he said. Churches can choose pervious parking lots that reduce polluted runoff and erosion, adopt energy-efficient practices, and reach a large general audience.
James O'Dowd took on that challenge himself.
A New Paltz resident and a member of the Reformed Church of New Paltz on Huguenot Street, he took the charge of national Reformed Church leaders to heart and started a Caring for Creation chapter at his church three years ago.
The group of about a dozen people will hold its third Earth Day fair Sunday. New Paltz's annual Clean Sweep street cleanup will have a recycling component this year, thanks to the group.
The church now fills cups made of recycled materials with fair trade coffee, which is grown under the shade of rain forest trees rather than clear-cut land. When a light bulb burns out, the church replaces it with a highly efficient compact fluorescent bulb.
''We want to get involved with other churches, with the goal of influencing other business and government institutions,'' O'Dowd said of future plans. ''We're a small part of what could be a critical mass that could influence policies down the line. And we do things by example. If the churches don't set an example, in terms of ethics and morality, then that's not good.''

Logging on
- Garrison Institute: www.garrisoninstitute.org
- Resurgence Association: www.resurgence.org
- National Religious Partnership for the Environment: www.nrpe.org
- GreenFaith: www.greenfaith.org

June 9-12
The fourth annual U.S. Resurgence Conference will take place at Bard College in Annandale. It is titled, ''Earth & Religion: Crisis, Opportunity, Convergence -- Bringing Together People of Ecology and Faith.'' For information, contact Judith Asphar atresurgenceassoc@ aol.com or 845-679-8761, or visit www.earthandreligion.org

QuotableFaith described
Worship the creator or the creation? That quandary has stifled some religious action on the environment and painted environmentalists as "tree huggers" or pagans.

''My father was Catholic and mother Presbyterian. I, myself, am not anything now. There isn't really a word for what my spiritual beliefs are except that I believe in the miracle of the universe and the extraordinary evolution. So, I would call myself generically spiritual and actually religion is a slightly dirty word for me. ... Re-integrating the Earth and creation into faith in a more proactive way is part of what we're aiming for -- to think of and acknowledge that the environment should be a unifying principle because we're all, locally, regionally globally, breathing the same air, drinking the same water.''
-- Judith Asphar, director of the Resurgence Association, which is organizing a conference on the topic at Bard College in June.

''That question of celebrating or honoring the creator versus the creation is very important for some people in some faiths, and I honor that. For me, I don't make the distinction. I don't make the distinction in the sense that, shouldn't we honor what the creator created? That is the most tangible physical expression of the creator, and it's right in front of us. I feel the responsibility to honor that and care for that.''
-- Bob Perschel, senior program director for the environment at the Garrison Institute.

''We have to be very careful with God's creation. It doesn't belong to us, it belongs to God. We're here to act as God's stewards.''
-- Rabbi Larry Troster, Jewish chaplain at Bard College

''Most people are aware that the average American lifestyle is a train wreck environmentally, and most faith traditions have teachings about an ethic of moderation -- that we're not just put on Earth to be consumption machines. Consumerism is a powerful force in our culture and people are open to hearing from their faith community a sense that life is deeper than consuming as much as possible.''
-- Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopalian priest and director of GreenFaith, a New Jersey interfaith environmental group. He recently spoke at the Reformed Church of New Paltz.

Copyright © 2005, Poughkeepsie Journal

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