Members of several religious groups interested in energy conservation and pollution reduction tour a wind turbine installation in Californiašs Altamont Pass. LOS ANGELES TIMES

The Green Movement is getting religion

Web posted January 30, 1999

By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times

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.

``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, Calif., to the controversy surrounding logging of ancient redwood groves in the area's Headwaters Forest.

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 the University of California, 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 Brazil 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.

``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.

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.

Members of several religious groups offer an impromptu prayer at Californiašs Altamont Pass. LOS ANGELES TIMES

``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.

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 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.

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.

The movement arrived as a global force last 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.

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 represent the Garden of Eden.

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, Calif., Episcopal priest Peter Gwillam Kreitler, who resigned from his parish in 1990 to work full time on the environment.

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

Does 5 percent 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?

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.

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.