Environmental Racism
April 30, 2008
Leroy Barber has dedicated more than 20 years to eradicating poverty, confronting homelessness, restoring local neighborhoods, healing racism, and living what Dr. King called “the beloved community.” He pastors a church in inner-city Atlanta, and he is the President of Mission Year, a national urban initiative introducing 18-29 year olds to missional and communal living in city centers for one year of their lives. He is married to Donna, and they have three children, Jessica, Joshua and Joel.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
I live in an unjust American landscape. The people in my church live in one of Atlanta’s urban sacrifice zones. If you sat down to list the social ills that are unequally visited upon my neighborhood, you might be able to name a few of the most prominent. Drug crime, addiction, prostitution, failing schools, broken homes, broken windows, lack of jobs, no public library, adult illiteracy, and homelessness would probably come to your mind.
Environmental injustices likely wouldn’t appear on your list. When visitors to inner-city Atlanta think about environmental disparities compared to their own neighborhoods, they usually think first about litter. Litter is an environmental problem, and it’s a sign of social disruption and lack of pride in place. But litter doesn’t kill anyone.
Within blocks of our church is a toxic waste facility, a trash transfer station, chemical plants, and other facilities that release carcinogens and heavy metals like lead into the air. On almost any environmental index, our area ranks in the worst ten percent of the United States.
The city’s huge impoundment lot for towed vehicles occupies the land that would be our neighborhood hub. The collective leaking oil seeping into the unpaved earth beneath these cars pollutes our groundwater and runs off into our streams. The city and county have permitted large freight operations and trucking operations to locate in our neighborhood, bringing with them reckless traffic and concentrated toxic diesel emissions.
Pedestrian fatalities afflict African Americans at a rate two and half times that in the white population in Atlanta, largely because the state Department of Transportation doesn’t design roads to accommodate walkers (or cyclists). Hispanic Atlantans are in an even worse plight: concentrated in newer developments but still reliant on walking, they are killed by cars at rates six times higher than whites. These can’t be considered accidents—they are predictable results of the way we build our cities. Asthma from air pollution affects large and increasing numbers of kids in my inner-city neighborhood. Nationwide, poor African American children are twice as likely to have asthma as poor white children, and blacks are three times more likely than whites to be killed by asthma. When Atlantans opted for public transportation and telecommuting to reduce traffic congestion for two weeks during the 1996 Olympics, emergency room visits and hospitalizations due to asthma fell by half!
Our neighborhood is one of the worst in the US for lead paint in houses. Nationwide, over 20 percent of black kids in older homes suffer from lead poisoning, compared to just over 5 percent of white kids in older homes. But black kids are also far more likely to live in an older, dilapidated home! In some parts of the country 1 in 3 inner-city children suffers from lead poisoning, which leads to lifelong problems like reduced IQ, slowed body growth, hearing problems, behavioral problems and kidney damage.
Antiquated sewer systems mean that high rainfall events bring floods of wastewater, toilet paper, tampons and condoms through many of our inner city parks and streets. Dilapidated houses and apartments are havens for rats and roaches (which are themselves triggers for asthma). Landlords, when they decide to treat for these pests, use whatever cheap chemicals they can lay their hands on—often agricultural chemicals not meant to be sprayed indoors. If you thought harder, you’d realize that greenspace and parks, sidewalks and bike lanes, banks and grocery stores, restaurants and retail are also distributed unequally.
The Bible says we’re meant to take a lesson from our environment about what God is like. Romans 1 says God’s eternal power and divine nature should be apparent from the creation. If kids in my neighborhood were asked to look at metro Atlanta and describe what God is like, I don’t think they’d get a vision of Jehovah-Jireh, the God who provides. If all they had to go on was general revelation, their picture of God would be horribly skewed. They would see God’s creation as a place that is more threatening to black and Latino families than to whites. Confronted with environmental threats so obviously distributed along ethnic and class lines, they might begin to imagine a racist God.
I must admit that until recently, caring for the environment in whatever form was not on my list of priorities a Christian. In fact I was quite clueless to any environmental issues up until about 7 years ago. It was then that I started to connect what I knew about structural injustice with these environmental issues. As a black pastor I am part of a history in which pastors not only built the spiritual lives of their congregations by teaching, preaching, and living out Christian beliefs, but they also stood for justice against forces that threatened the well-being of their congregations and communities.
These environmental inequities aren’t given to us from the hand of an unjust God. They are the results of human sin, a tolerance for injustice unwilling to see or act on the side effects of how we build our cities. I feel I am obligated as a pastor and leader of color to look at this issue and take it as seriously as I do my preaching on Sunday mornings. As we work together to build Dr. King’s Beloved Community, we have to think about the words of Jesus in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I don’t believe heaven is a place where people of color have less, so my job is to work that justice throughout this earth.
Above the Arctic Circle by Jim Ball
April 29, 2008
After a six-day trip to a symposium and tour of Greenland, my wife Kara and I arrived home to discover that our travel destination, the Arctic Circle, had become hot news—with major stories on NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. The NBC correspondent was reporting from the exact place we had visited, the Ilulissat glacier, a stunningly beautiful World Heritage Site on the western side of Greenland, 155 miles above the Arctic Circle. Newspaper articles were reporting on what we had heard during the Arctic symposium: the Arctic sea ice has receded farther this year than any time since satellite measurements have been kept starting in 1979.
The reduction has made the famed Northwest passage navigable (saving 5,000 to 10,000 miles a trip when it becomes commercially viable), and the nations which have Arctic coastlines —the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark (for Greenland) —are now racing to claim sovereignty over as much of the Arctic as they can get, because vast quantities of oil, gas, and minerals are thought to exist under what normally would be covered with ice. In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that up to 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves could be stored below the Arctic ice. The cover story for the Spring 2007 Harper’s magazine reports that the U.S. could reap $1.3 trillion worth of resources.
I have often commented (as I did in June to a hostile question from Senator Inhofe during my testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee) that I hope companies will make lots of money solving global warming. I want them to do well by doing good. But in this instance we have a situation where global warming itself is unlocking the very resources fueling its rise. It feels perverse.
And because it feels perverse it would be quite easy to take cheap “prophetic” shots at those who want to capitalize on such opportunities. But it is probably enough to underscore at this point that global warming has and will bring death. Pristine areas will be scarred and exploited. All to put cheap gas in our cars. The symposium we attended was sponsored by Patriarch Bartholomew (called by some “the Green Patriarch”), spiritual leader to 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide. It was entitled “The Arctic: Mirror of Life.”
The Arctic, we learned, is indeed in trouble. Senior scientist Bob Correll, who chaired the recent Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and who has been studying the area for decades, told us that the Arctic sea ice is currently disappearing at a rate much faster than scientists projected only a few years ago. Bob told us that by 2040, plus or minus 10 years, the Arctic summer sea ice could be gone. Previously I had heard 2040—but possibly by 2030? Twenty-three years from now? Once it disappears in the summers, what then, besides the drilling? Human-induced global warming will have caused the disappearance of what we culturally understand as the North Pole. How could we do that?
Another shocker was learning how much of the pollution from industrial nations was ending up in the Arctic due to global circulation patterns, traveling up the food chainto bioaccumulate in massive quantities in polar bears, walruses, whales, and seals. When the Inuit, the peoples native to the Arctic regions, eat their traditional diet, they too are impacted. One of the findings presented at the symposium is that among the Inuit twice as many girls are being born than boys. The scientists suspect that PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls—industrial pollutants known to be endocrine disruptors) that have bioaccumulated in the animals that are part of the diet of Inuit mothers are causing their unborn male babies to abort. While not on the same geographic scale as the consequences of climate change, these largely unknown tragedies are nevertheless known by God. I don’t know what my own culpability is with regard to PCBs, but I do know that the Inuit are innocent victims. And it haunts me.
One of the purposes of the Arctic tour was to have religious leaders from around the world experience a brief time of silent prayer together on the deck of our ship. Those participating were arrayed in their finest traditional dress that clearly marked them as leaders from various faiths: Shia and Sunni Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and various branches of Christianity. They all looked quite impressive, whereas I, as a Baptist evangelical, was dressed in fairly typical low-Protestant garb for such an august occasion – grey slacks and a blue blazer covered by a purely functional blue windbreaker.
We prayed for two minutes in the Arctic silence. Afterward, I was asked by reporters whether I had had a spiritually meaningful experience and what I thought the real significance of the event was. I told them that the real power of the event would not be measured by its impact on the clergy who participated, but by its effect on those who saw such diverse religious leaders come together to pray for the people of the Arctic and what we are doing to them. Right after the time of silent prayer the Sunni Islamic representative asked me directly (and rather boldly, but in a friendly way) what I had prayed. I shared with him the Apostle Paul’s reassurance that when we don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit prays with us with sighs too deep for words. On the deck of that ship above the Arctic Circle, I found that most of the time I prayed only emotions instead of words. But when I did pray in words, they were these: “Help us, Lord Jesus.”
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Book Review
April 28, 2008
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.
Two years ago, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan showed us how we got to the point of needing investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from. Now, in her newest book, Barbara Kingsolver shows us how delicious a closer relationship with our food can be: for a year, she, her husband, and her two daughters chose to eschew all oily foods. No, not fried foods or things made with butter or sizzling chicken skins—they meant things like pineapples, bananas, and, for that matter, bunches of basil or gallons of soymilk—if they’re being shipped in gas-guzzling vehicles, instead of being raised in their rural Kentucky county. They began this project to bring their food choices into line with their family values, which include, Kingsolver writes, “love your neighbor” and “try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you’re here.”
And the story Kingsolver tells is in every way a story about family and about that second part of Christ’s greatest commandment. In cutting themselves off from the industrial food chain they’re concerned about peak oil and global warming but also about the small local producers—their neighbors—who are less and less able to survive by raising food in this country, where most consumer’s food-purchasing habits (as well as government legislation) favor the large and the industrial; the plastic-wrapped and petroleum delivered. Feeding themselves locally becomes a family project; even their fourth-grader, Lily, keeps her family (and others in their community) supplied with eggs and meat from her own organic, free-range chickens, and the celebratory meals following each harvest—the asparagus, the tomatoes, the chicken—are family affairs, cooked and enjoyed together. Concern for the environment and for others who share it begin the project—but a taste for good food, as well as the family intimacy that’s fostered by raising, cooking, and eating together–keeps it going.
Kingsolver’s enthusiasm is infectious—she manages to make you wish you were there for the day spent dispatching and eviscerating poultry, and her energetic writing makes this book so much more than a primer on seasonal eating. Although it is, in many ways, a primer: she succeeds in demonstrating that it’s not merely possible but in fact preferable to eat locally and seasonally, both in terms of taste and even—in a certain sense—simplicity. After all, if you keep to the seasons of the year and to what’s available in your garden, at your farmer’s market, or in your CSA share, not only are you getting what’s freshest and tastiest (have you ever had a strawberry in January that didn’t taste like water?), but deciding what’s for dinner is also much simpler than if you’d walked into your ‘local’ giant supermarket. Particularly inspiring were the sections that ended each chapter, written by Camille Kingsolver, that offered practical nutritional wisdom as well as delicious sounding recipes (asparagus and morel bread pudding, rhubarb crumble, cherry sorbet) and weekly meal plans based around each season’s bounty.
Certainly the family’s experiment won’t be repeatable for many (if not most) people; raising, preserving, and cooking most of the food for a family of four requires things that many of us don’t have: space for a garden, root cellar, and a large pantry, knowledge of animal and plant husbandry as well as food preservation skills, and, obviously, a lot of time. However impractical it might be to try and replicate everything Kingsolver and her family does, they do a good job of showing that it’s more than possible—and profitable—to go ahead and do something to improve your food’s fuel-efficiency—planting a small garden, perhaps, or seeking out a farmer’s market or CSA program. (As Stephen Hopp points out in one of his richly informative contributions, if every American would eat just one locally and organically produced meal per week, it would reduce our oil consumption by 1.1 billion barrels each week). And Kingsolver insists that the most important ingredient in pursuing a local diet is attitude—the willingness and discipline to wait for an in season tomato. However, they make eating local sound so attractive that one can’t help but long to set one’s own eating habits to the pattern of anticipation and fulfillment that is the cycle of such discipline.
Some of Kingsolver’s background in evolutionary biology is evident in the book; this maybe off-putting for certain evangelical readers, but I think that they will be won, in the end, by the essential Christian-ness of her entire project: it is, after all, a project that has at its heart the goal of learning to eat in a way that is loving to all one’s neighbors—those around the world who are impoverished by American overconsumption, those in our communities who could flourish by producing food for us, if only we would rely on them for our daily bread, those with whom we sit to eat each day, and the next generation, who will have to deal with the aftereffects of our eating habits when we’re gone. Kingsolver also demonstrates, in telling her family’s story, an astoundingly sensible (and, in my estimation, Biblical) perspective on humanity’s role in caring for the earth— and the lives both animal and vegetable—that God has placed on it.
RACHEL STONE taught English at a small Bible college in California before taking off across the continent (and the ocean) to live in a small Scottish university town with her husband and their now-2 year old son. She enjoys baking bread, writing, reading, running, and finding new ways to live in joyful simplicity.
My Dream by Dr. Dorothy Boorse
April 25, 2008
Ever since Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, people of imagination have used that same phrase to describe their own hopes and visions. This week I was asked, “as a person of faith and a scientist, what is your dream for creation care in your faith community?” I was unprepared for the question, answered poorly at the time, but this is what I would have rather said:
I have a dream that Christians would be peacemakers, patient, kind, and good, that we would be known by the love we show each other and the world. Because we were such people, redeemed and growing in Christ, we would have a right relationship with the rest of the creation. We would not use more than we need, we would share with others, we would be wise in our decisions about resources. We would care for the earth and its creatures because God placed them in our care. We would be in community—for even if each of us individually lived careful and intentional lives, wasting little, prudent and content, there would still be significant work for us to do together. As C.S. Lewis envisioned it in Mere Christianity, not only would our individual ships be on the right course, but our whole fleet of ships would steer together in a correct course. We would build more housing in which garages, laundry, and even belongings are shared, and have more cooperative strategies for everyday problems. I dream of a suburb where every yard is wildlife habitat, every window designed to keep birds from hitting it, every road is as passable as possible for wildlife, every garden made for the climate it is in, and laundry hangs drying in the yards of the poshest of neighborhoods.
On a societal level, I would like convenience to be a lesser good and intentionality to be the greater. I would like better planning of developments so they are green, include a range of economic levels, form small neighborhoods and do not require cars. I would like people to move less often and be more invested in the place where they live. I would like them to buy local produce, know the people around them, and be on the cell phone less.
I would like fewer strip malls, fewer extravagant children’s parties, and more games of catch. I would like to see us use our formidable ability to develop technology for the betterment of the world and for the bringing of good news, rather than for conquering either humans or nature.
But more than that, I would like churches to weave creation care throughout their ministry. I would like people to make a connection between caring for the poor and caring for the creation in which we all live. I would like to see Christians vote thoughtfully about a greater range of issues. From their efforts personally, communally and politically, I would like to see the U.S. become more economically equitable internally and with the rest of the world. I would like Christians to lead efforts to give overconsumption as much attention as overpopulation. I dream of a time when churches own fewer buildings, and congregations spend their resources on the world around them, on art, music, food and shelter for the poor, on care of the wild and the domestic, when Christians work toward the common goal of a sustainable society.
What a joyful vision! How far I am myself from bringing much of it about! How small we are and how great the changes needed! But we serve a sovereign God. I believe that the environmental problems we have now highlight the fact that we need God and that we need to repent, particularly of pride and discontent. Thankfully, I think we are seeing many such changes in the church today. Christians are experiencing changes tantamount to a revival, changes which may bring us back to some of the strengths of earlier believers, those for whom creation was not as separate from humans and for whom care of creation and love of neighbor went hand in hand.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave us a rhetorical framework to express our belief in what is good and right. In creation care, as in racial harmony, seeing the goal is a part of following God’s leading. My prayer is that as more Christians feel called to lives of stewardship, that vision will become ever clearer.
Dr. Dorothy Boorse is an aquatic ecologist and Biology Department faculty member at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. She is one voice in the Christian Environmental Stewardship movement and lives with her husband and two sons in Beverly, MA.
Don’t Write Off Tree Planting
April 24, 2008
A lot of attention, not all of it complimentary, has been given to the trend for celebrities and others to plant trees to offset their “carbon footprint.” While some congratulate this effort, others have likened it to the infamous practice of buying indulgences to offset your sins. All agree that it is, at best, a partial solution to climate change.
But the effort should not be so quickly discounted. Fighting climate change is only a small part of the story. There are many other good reasons to plant trees, especially in the tropics. Floresta, the ministry which I direct, began planting trees nearly twenty five years ago, when we realized that deforestation was a major contributor to rural poverty in poor countries. The link between trees and poverty may seem obscure at first, but there is a remarkable connection between the two. Though largely hidden from our sight and consciousness, farmers working at or near the subsistence level still make up a huge proportion of the world’s population. Many of them, working with crude hand tools, eke their living from rocky hillsides, while walking for hours to get water and firewood. Among the poorest of the poor, they lag in almost every area of human development. Their soil and their water are their only assets, the only things they have on which to build a life.
And their soil and water are dependent upon the health of their watershed—upon the forests upstream and the trees in their communities. Trees are vital for preventing soil erosion, and can even help to build the soil by fixing nitrogen, bringing buried nutrients to the surface and by contributing leaf litter and other organic matter to the soil. Where the trees have been stripped from the hillsides, massive soil erosion follows, robbing the poor farmer of one of her most valuable possessions.
Water, availability and quality are also dependent on the health of the forest. Absence of trees results in a decrease in the local rainfall. This is magnified by the fact that when the rain does fall, there is little to stop it from immediately running off before it is able to soak into the ground. Where the soil is protected by a canopy of trees to break the fall of precipitation, leaf litter to slow runoff, and roots to increase soil permeability, water is able to infiltrate and replenish local aquifers. On the other hand, on uncovered soil, water can simply be the engine for erosion and downstream flashfloods. If the water does not soak in, the water table will drop and the local environment will become drier. This is one of the contributing factors to desertification and the increasing incidence of drought in many places. The farmers of many countries can point to rivers that were once reliable sources of water but which today flow only during heavy rains—and at those times, flood higher than ever in the past. These farmers often spend hours a day simply carrying water to and from their homes. Where the land has been stripped of trees a desert is soon created. But it is a reversible process!
The trees also act as a filter. Studies have shown a direct correlation between the absence of forest cover and the presence of E. coli and other contaminants. This especially impacts the rural poor who cannot afford to have water piped into the home or to buy bottled water to drink. Instead family members, especially women, often walk hours to fetch water and additional hours to collect the firewood necessary to purify water by boiling it.
Moreover, as firewood becomes scarcer and its collection costs more time and money, people are less likely to boil their water or even adequately cook their food, increasing health risk and contributing to the downward cycle of desperation. Families who already have no safety net are forced to take greater risks with their well being. There is also a direct correlation between deforestation and a number of infectious diseases. Recent studies show a direct link between malaria and deforestation, and in some locations it has been shown to be one of the most important variables in the incidence of leishmaniasis and hookworm.
Ultimately, deforestation is one of the root causes of rural emigration, as people leave the unproductive countryside in hope of a job in the overcrowded cities, or perhaps in the United States. One of the reasons that we began planting trees and working with poor farmers in the state of Oaxaca ten years ago was the realization that much of our immigration problem in Southern California is rooted in declining opportunities in the mountains of Oaxaca—a state that has been referred to as the most eroded spot on earth.
But as we have happily found, this situation can be reversed. Land can become productive again. At Floresta we have seen rivers and streams restored, and farm productivity dramatically increase. Families, split by lack of opportunity and illegal immigration, are thrilled by the opportunity to stay together. God’s plan of redemption and restoration can be graphically demonstrated as we work together with the poor to reclaim degraded lands.
So don’t discount planting trees. By all means let’s make the big lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions. But let’s plant trees too. And as you plant trees to offset what you can’t change, make sure you that the organization you are working with is doing more than merely sticking trees in the ground. By finding an organization that is working in collaboration with the poor to plant trees and restore degraded lands, your tree planting can do much more than assuage your guilt. It can literally give sustenance and health to God’s precious children.
Scott C. Sabin is the executive director of Floresta, a Christian nonprofit organization that reverses deforestation and poverty in the world by transforming the lives of the rural poor (www.floresta.org).
Baptists Battling For Environment
April 23, 2008
This post originally appeared at Projo.com.
RECENTLY, A GROUP of 46 Southern Baptist leaders signed a declaration on the environment and climate change calling for bolder leadership from within their ranks. The document also urges Baptist ministers to preach more about the environment and to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy. These signatories represent three of the past four presidents of the convention, as well as presidents of some of the largest Baptist colleges and seminaries in America.
What is most compelling is not who signed the declaration, but who led the initiative, a 25-year-old seminary student named Jonathan Merritt, the son of a megachurch pastor and past president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
This represents a significant milestone in the Baptist ministry, demonstrating a generational shift of power and priorities within the ranks of conservative evangelical Christians. This generational shift is not unique to the Baptists. We have a vast generation of young faithful who have an enhanced sense of global justice and community. These are the pastors raised on U2 and Bono, Christian rock festivals and summer-mission trips to plant trees on the barren hills of Haiti.
Some of the fastest-growing churches are now being led by Gen-X pastors who have made caring for creation core expressions of their churches. They light candles like Catholics, sing like Pentecostals, quote scripture like Baptists, drink beer like Lutherans and recycle like Mennonites. And they fill me with hope.
These young leaders have an expanded sense of community. Language such as “man vs. nature,” or “jobs vs. the environment,” seems foolish. These young Christians are holistically pro-life and therefore understand that something is flawed in a concept that justifies driving species to extinction for the mere sake of making a profit.
These young leaders also share a greater sense of interconnectedness about the world and recognize the link between responsibility and environmental change. We should applaud them for taking a public stand to acknowledge this and for sharing their position to preserve God’s creations and “return to a biblical mandate to guard the world God created.”
They see a biblical mandate to struggle for the common good and see a role for good government in civil societies. And they are not frightened to stand alongside new allies to fight for the causes they hold dear.
I am a part of such a unique new coalition, connected by faith, science, art and conservation. We are faith leaders, scientists, photographers and secular environmental groups who have joined together around the idea that we have a moral duty to protect imperiled species threatened by climate change. While we represent different ideologies, beliefs and histories, we are connected by a similar sense of moral responsibility.
The Southern Baptist document states, “We must care about environmental and climate issues because of our love for God. This is not our world, it is God’s. Therefore, any damage we do to this world is an offense against God Himself. We share God’s concern for the abuse of His creation.”
The Baptists are right. God calls us to a theology of engagement. When Bible-believing Christians read in Psalm 104:24, “In wisdom you made them all, the earth is full of your creatures,” what else can they read into it except that God cares about eco-systems — living communities of life, a creation full of wonder, beauty and interconnectedness.
The Bible also says that the Earth reveals its goodness and sings praise to the Creator. If growing older has made us blind to the intrinsic beauty of nature, or tone deaf to the earth songs that mystics and children have always heard, then I thank God for the clear eyes and sharp ears of these young Christians. It is they who will whisper “hush!” and remind us how to squint our eyes and cup our hands around our ears. They will teach us to see the beauty of creation and to hear songs of life. They will remind us what is truly irreplaceable. To the young Christians everywhere — thank you. Be bold and stay forever young.
Peter Illyn is executive director of Restoring Eden.
Hope Springs Eternal
April 23, 2008
This spring it is good to keep this well-worn phrase in mind: “Hope Springs Eternal.” Although a familiar phrase, it is apropos for our present consideration of climate change. Our society has turned a corner on seriously addressing the issue. There will be concrete action and there’s no turning back.
As I write this, we know that Senator McCain will be the Republican Presidential nominee, and either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama will be the Democratic nominee. The Administration of any of these three presidential contenders will transform this issue. Due to the Supreme Court’s decision that CO2 can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, the next Administration can independently take action even if it can’t work out a deal with Congress—although it is highly likely that a deal will be reached.
I’ve been hopeful for quite some time now. Congress itself has been taking action. A serious, substantive piece of legislation, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, has been voted out of the Environment and Public Works Committee to the full Senate. There could be a vote sometime this spring or summer. While the sooner we seriously address the issue the better, this is tremendous progress—given Congress’ history on climate change.
This movement within the Senate has me hopeful for another reason. Based on some recent changes, the bill is now something I think Christians can feel good about.
The key turning point in this regard was a meeting in late November with Sen. John Warner and religious leaders affiliated with the four partners of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). (EEN is the evangelical Partner.) We had been told that Sen. Warner would not agree to our major requests to strengthen the provisions related to helping the poorest of the poor around the world adapt to the consequences of climate change. His staff said that he was “intractable.” So although expectations were low, the outcome of the meeting exceeded our wildest expectations.
While all of the religious communities played an important role, Sen. Warner himself singled out evangelicals as a community he felt was important to be behind action on climate change. Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals and I were the evangelicals in the meeting, and Rich mentioned results from a national poll of evangelicals that EEN commissioned, including that 84 percent of evangelicals are in favor of climate legislation. Rich helped him understand that the evangelical community was changing and growing in its concern for the poor and for God’s creation.
When Sen. Warner saw how much all of us were committed to the international adaptation provision, he said to his aide, “Go get the bill.” When the appropriate pages were handed to him, he took out his pen and said, “So tell me what you want.” (All of our jaws metaphorically dropped. This just doesn’t happen.)
I reiterated to Sen. Warner what one of our Catholic colleagues had said earlier for the group, that we wanted the funds targeted to poor countries. So he scratched out the text we wanted deleted and wrote in our language. Then he asked, “What’s next?” At that point a colleague pulled out all of our suggested changes and handed them to him. “Let’s get this done today,” he told his aide. Rabbi David Saperstein closed the meeting by saying to Sen. Warner, “I’m the senior religious leader doing advocacy in Washington, having been doing so for over 30 years, and this is the best meeting I’ve ever been in.” Later that afternoon I called Sen. Warner’s aide to follow up on something. She was just as astounded at the outcome as we were. “You guys did a terrific job,” she said. “We played our roles,” I replied “but it was the Holy Spirit that brought about this success.” Around ten o’clock that evening she emailed us the changed language that is now in the bill.
But as wonderful as this was, I’ve been hopeful before this latest progress in Congress and our meeting with Sen. Warner. In January 2007 a coalition of major corporations called the Climate Action Partnership (CAP)—including such companies as GE, GM, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP — called for significant mandatory action.
And I’ve been hopeful since the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) launched more than two years ago— February 6, 2006. We’ve been attacked by some of the most prominent politically-conservative Christian leaders and yet we are still going strong.
Actually, my hope goes back to my recognition more than 15 years ago, when I fi rst started seriously researching global warming. As I began to understand the terrible consequences, I realized that the One with nail-scarred hands has in fact been raised from the dead, and our Risen Lord walks beside us as we tackle the greatest challenges of this and every age. Our God turns crucifixions into resurrections. Indeed, hope springs from the eternal.
- Written by The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., Rev. Ball is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
