Anglican Bishop of Liverpool Speaks to DC Area Faith Leaders

Forty-five Muslim, Jewish and Christian clergy and community leaders gathered October 24 for a breakfast on the role of faith communities in caring for creation. The Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool (Church of England), Imam Yahya Hendi, Secretary General and Founder of Imams for Human Rights and Dialogue, and Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, President of the Washington Board of Rabbis, spoke about faith foundations for active engagement in care of creation care and environmental justice.
“We are pleased to work with faith communities in the DC region to build a sustainable future,” said Allison Fisher , program director for Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light (GWIPL). “From our three speakers, we heard strong calls to reach across religious differences to work together to provide leadership to the growing response to global warming.” At the end of the morning, 22 of the local faith leaders pledged to incorporate creation care into sermons or support a lay-lead creation care effort in their community.

Bishop Jones shared how his own focus on the environment developed through a series of discussions he had with British school children during the millennium year. Challenging religious communities to put their faith into action, Jones said, “We are caught up in a disease of consumption and that is what is afflicting the earth. So last year for Lent in the Diocese of Liverpool I called a carbon fast.” A carbon fast would have more value than giving up chocolate or candy that some choose. He reported that by the end of the carbon fast “people weren’t ready to resume their previous consumption levels; it made them think about their life.”

Imam Hendi shared the unique response he gives to the question, “Where are you from?” Hendi explained that he says, “I am from dust. I am a Dustian. ... I try to remember that I come from dust, and therefore I am someone who tries to find that harmonious relationship with the dust from which one comes.” Hendi went on to encourage humanity to come together as Dustians, to move together to protect our mother earth.
Religious communities contribute multi-generational thinking to the broader society, added Rabbi Dobb. Multi-generational thinking will “lead to some very different outcomes than when we are focused on quarterly profit earnings reports and other much shorter cycles of time that the dominant society would have us focus on. As people of faith, we can take the long view. When we take the long view, what’s two cents per KWH more to make sure the electricity that lights our sanctuaries and fellowship halls could come from wind or biomass instead of from coal? Intergenerational thinking will begin to change our action.”
The breakfast workshop, ‘Caring for Creation: How to Build a Sustainable Future,’ was co-sponsored by the British Embassy and Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

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Arizona Gets Green Religion

Although there is no Interfaith Power and Light chapter in Arizona (at least not yet), faith communities in that state have been getting into the environmental movement in a big way, according to this article from the online version of the Arizona Daily Star (see excerpt below):

"A river has a right not to be drained dry. The Earth has rights, and to care for the Earth we can't do it in the abstract," said the Rev. Stuart Taylor of St. Mark's Presbyterian Church in Midtown, who is rereading the Old and New Testaments from an environmental perspective.
Taylor will give a series of sermons this fall, which he is calling "The Green Bible," based on what he believes the Bible says about protecting the environment. Some environmentalists, for example, interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is God's body and that as humans we are assaulting our deity.
"We're looking at the Bible anew. The old interpretations have not served the Earth well," said Sylvia Thorson-Smith, a St. Mark's elder and a retired professor of sociology and religious studies. "Jesus was deeply rooted in the Earth."
Of a more practical nature, St. Mark's plans each week to give its 400 members "climate-change solutions" that they can do themselves. Those tips include replacing older heating and cooling systems with new, efficient models; cleaning the condenser coil on the refrigerator; turning off computers at night and putting them in a power-save mode; washing clothes in warm or cold water; and buying in bulk, which reduces packaging.
Other groups, including the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson, sell compact fluorescent light bulbs as a way of encouraging worshippers to replace their incandescent bulbs with ones that last longer and use less energy.
The church also is considering banning non-vegetarian food from its premises.
"Eating beef is a huge pollutant of the Earth," said the church's minister, Susan Manker-Seale, who posts the menu of the local vegan restaurant Lovin' Spoonfuls on her church's walls and has the restaurant cater events. "We're not trying to force people to do anything, but we do want to inspire them to learn."
Manker-Seale's congregation recently voted to become a Green Sanctuary, part of a program within the Unitarian Universalist denomination that requires congregations to complete steps, including a community "green" project.
Vegetarianism is one of the less popular ways of going green, but Manker-Seale believes more people should be paying attention to damaging effects of the meat industry. Animal-welfare groups have recently begun promoting a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report that says the livestock business generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.
Other congregations have held electric-car demonstrations, switched to china and silverware instead of disposable plates and utensils, sponsored alternative gift fairs that included sales of reusable water bottles, and adopted villages harmed by global warming.
St. Philip's in the Hills, Tucson's largest Episcopal church, recently put together a "green team" of people aiming to infuse the congregation with more awareness of environmental stewardship. The church is performing an audit of its own energy consumption, and this month will begin a series of events focused on being green.
"We'd consider the Earth as the ground of all our being. It supports and sustains us and is one binding need we all have. It feeds us and it fuels us," said Greg Foraker, director of adult formation at St. Philip's. "The Earth is really central to Christian tradition, but the news we've been hearing lately reminds us that we can't let go of that core faith."
One of the upcoming speakers at the St. Philip's events will be Susan Kaplan of Tucson's Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.
Kaplan publicly lectures anyone she sees drinking bottled water, explaining that most of the bottles end up in the landfill. Though she doesn't give faith-based reasons for her admonitions, she says the principles of her faith were a key motivator for her newfound passion.
She considers her environmentalism an extension of "tikkun olam" — a Jewish directive meaning "repair the world" — and has even written a rap song about her views that she performs to various Jewish groups.
"Remember those bad plagues we read about at Seder? Well today there are more, and they got greater and greater," the lyrics say. "Trash and rubbish, dirty air and dirty water. Waste and too much driving, The Earth is under slaughter."
Road cleanups, film screenings and education sessions about recycling are among activities that Kaplan's group sponsors.
Recently, the group helped the Tucson Hebrew Academy acquire a grant from Tucson Electric Power Co. to install solar panels on the school to generate electricity. Kaplan hopes to do more interfaith environmental projects in the future.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 22 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

Support Your Local Farmer

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a growing phenomenon, thanks in part to local congregations like the one featured in this article excerpted from the San Mateo County Journal.

On Wednesday evenings, faith and produce mingle at Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel synagogue.
As parents gather to collect their children from Hebrew school or attend lectures, many also pass through the social hall, where they collect boxes of tomatoes, peaches, spinach and other organic produce.
It’s a blending of physical and spiritual sustenance that Rabbi Hillel Norry calls the best of Jewish values in action, and it’s just one of a growing number of faith-based community supported agriculture (or CSA) programs nationwide.
“We’re taking Jewish ideals of justice, economics, health, ecology, well-being and responsibility and putting them to work in the real world in a way that makes our lives and the life of the farmer better,” Norry says.
Fueled by growing interest in local food, CSAs have gone from just a few during the 1980s to about 2,000 today. They operate on the simple premise of enlisting community support for area farms, then rewarding that support with food.
In most cases, people buy shares in participating farms, paying a set amount upfront. For the Atlanta group, it’s $700, though most CSAs cost between $400 and $600. In exchange, the farmer delivers to them a weekly share of the crops, usually for 20 weeks or more. Consumers get good, local food; farmers get guaranteed income.
Of course, interest is contingent on caring about where one’s food comes from. But for some faiths, that concern is built in. Many Jews and Muslims follow kosher and halal tenets, which detail how foods can be raised, processed and stored.
For others, it’s a natural extension of existing concerns about the ethics and values of food and eating, issues important to groups such as the Iowa-based National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
Under the group’s leadership, several organic farms with CSAs have been established on or are planned for church-owned land in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, many of them operated by orders of monks and nuns.
“We’re still at the beginning of this ethical food system revolution,” says Brother David Andrews, the conference’s executive director. “Only a small percentage of our institutions and dioceses are doing this, but as consciousness of things like global warming, the obesity epidemic and diabetes grow, support for this will continue to grow.”
Launched this spring, Shearith Israel’s program is one of 10 Jewish CSAs created during the past three years as part of a project called Tuv Ha’aretz, Hebrew for both “the best of the land” and “good for the land.”
Under the auspices of Hazon, a New York-based nonprofit that also runs Jewish environmental bike rides and a blog on Jews, food and contemporary issues, Tuv Ha’aretz was started at New York’s Congregation Ansche Chesed.
“We needed 40 families to start, and we had 80 sign up,” says Nigel Savage, Hazon’s founder and director.
And interest elsewhere is strong, too. Tuv Ha’aretz coordinator Leah Koenig says she frequently gets e-mails from people around the country asking for information on starting a CSA in their synagogue or Jewish community center.
In Atlanta, Aaron Marks, a law student, said he and his wife joined the CSA for their 16-month-old son. “We’d heard a lot of scary reports about growth hormones and pesticides and wanted to try to keep his diet as chemical-free as possible,” he said. “We’re both concerned about the environment, and the fact that we’re doing something that might have a direct effect is good.”
Frieda Socol, a member of Shearith Israel since before her wedding 57 years ago, says the fresh CSA produce has started to take center stage at her Friday night dinners, when her family comes together to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath.
“I’ve learned a lot, finding out just exactly what can be done with some of these sometimes rather strange vegetables we have,” she said. “They’ve made Friday night dinner more interesting.”
Tuv Ha’aretz also runs CSA programs in St. Paul, Minn., Houston, Berkeley, Calif., Philadelphia and Washington, and even provides them with relevant biblical passages and other Jewish texts for inclusion in weekly CSA newsletters.
Hazon hopes to share its CSA model with other faiths and is seeking funding to launch joint efforts with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Faith In Place, an ecumenical environmental group in Chicago.

Eco-Awareness at Passover

According to an article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Jewish Community Federation of Rochester is promoting eco-awareness for Passover.

During B.J. Yudelson's family Passover celebration tonight, someone at the table will ask why the Jewish people dip green herbs in salt water.Yudelson, in conjunction with an initiative of the Jewish Community Federation of Greater Rochester, plans to expand on this question, one of the traditional four considered at Passover. As the family talks about how salt water represents the tears of the Jewish slaves, Yudelson will ask her five grandchildren, "Is our Earth crying?"
This Passover, which begins today and will continue through April 10, the Jewish Community Federation of Greater Rochester is asking its members to consider the Jewish mission of "tikkun olam," which means "repair of the world."
The federation sent out a pamphlet printed on recycled paper to almost 6,000 people, offering suggestions for four other questions to be asked at this year's Seder: How can we make this Passover different from all others? Why is the environment a Jewish concern? If the Earth, ha'aretz, could speak at this year's Seder, what would it say? Can our family really make a difference?


IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Eco-Friendly Bible Blogging

Today Slate's Blogging the Bible features the book of Joel, about which blogger David Plotz asks, "Is Joel a favorite book of the budding religious environmentalist movement?"

N.B.: In the case of this blogger, the answer is yes, yes it is, because the book of Joel clearly depicts the God of the Bible as having love for all creation and not just creating it for people to exploit it.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

A Rabbi Urges People of Faith to Unite around Climate Issues

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Rabbi Warren G. Stone published on Planetsave.com:

In a world where matters of faith seem so often and so tragically to divide us, there is no issue that aligns us more deeply than our shared dependence upon and sacred responsibility to this tiny planet, enfolded within its fragile atmosphere, spinning in the vastness of time and space. I experienced this shared conviction most profoundly, when in 1997, I served as the Jewish NGO representative at the United Nations climate talks in Kyoto, Japan. I met with Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist leaders from around the world. We spoke at Kyoto’s largest Buddhist Temple, and all concurred that our human actions, our sins, have damaged the environment. Each speaking from the voice of his or her own authentic spiritual tradition, we affirmed our religious responsibility to act. Amidst Buddhist chanting, I blew the shofar, a ram’s horn, the blast of sound that has been Judaism’s ancient call to action since the days we wandered, searching for our way, in the desert.
I carried this profound experience back to my own country and my own community. Here, too, I found that faith traditions can readily unite on issues of climate change.

Louise Feldman, Jewish Environmentalist

This is a Courant story about Louse Feldman, a longtime supporter of the Interreligious Eco-Justice Network, who died November 5. She will be missed.