Articles

How Faith Communities Are Helping to Save the Planet
Part 2: God Is Green: Finding Environmental Values in Religious Tradition

By Oliver D. Ferrari
Faith And The City E-Letter
Volume 2, Issue 11
September 9, 2003

Daron Joffe gingerly removed a pair of bowing sunflowers from a vase, wraps them in green tissue paper and hands them to a mother of two. He explained to her teenage son where the edible seeds will come from.

Every Friday, Farmer D stocks his truck with produce and drives to the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody from his 100-acre organic farm in Athens. He sells his fruits, vegetables and flowers, and he distributes a newsletter complete with featured recipes and narratives about the week's harvest. "They get to eat the whole season's food, and share in the stories of their food," says Joffe, over the din of screaming youth groups at the Marcus JCC.

Joffe directs the Gan-Chaim, or Garden of Life, program, which "provides educational and therapeutic gardening experiences for youth, adults, seniors and people with special needs at Jewish Community Centers, youth camps, and schools." In his farming sessions, Joffe recalls the intersection of farming cycles and Jewish holidays, which he believes to have been largely forgotten. The 26-year-old native of South Africa has stretched his $30,000 Joshua Venture grant to fund Gan-Chaim as well as marketing and development for his organic farm, Full Moon Cooperative. Full Moon offers a wildly successful Community Supported Agriculture program in which community members pay a seasonal fee and receive edible dividends at a rate of about one dollar per pound of organic produce.

Joffe is the Atlanta representative for the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), a North American conglomeration of Jewish groups and environmentalists that provides environmental education, scholarship, advocacy and action. COEJL, born in 1993, is just one of many new faith-based organizations with a focus on environmental justice. Indeed COEJL joins the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, and the Evangelical Environmental Network to form the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE).

To the cheers of many and the chagrin of some, the Evangelical Environmental Network recently launched the provocative "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign, advocating for greater consideration of fuel economy in vehicle purchases. NRPE finds an ally in the Interfaith Climate Change Network, dedicated exclusively to reduction of energy consumption as a means of reducing greenhouse gas production.

Engaged in a similar mission, Rev. Sally Bingham conceived the Interfaith Power and Light movement two years ago in California. It now boasts existing or burgeoning operations in sixteen states, including Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia. Rev. Bingham visited Atlanta in February 2003 for the launching of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, which is under the supervision of Carol Bartlett and husband, Rev. Woody Bartlett.

The hybrid gas/electric vehicle parked in the shade of a magnolia tree marked the Bartletts' Decatur home, set back from the road amongst ferns and wandering ivy. The Bartletts, both retired from full time employment, were relaxing in their living room, which was blocked from the July sun by a verdant portico.

Asked how they came to be involved in the faith-based Environmental movement, Mrs. Bartlett sighed. "We had been doing environmental work for a long time, and we were just tired of the impracticality of the conversation in faith communities." Mrs. Bartlett got wind of Rev. Bingham's work in California and decided to import the idea to Georgia.

Thanks to the Bartlett's promotional efforts, congregations in Georgia -- Episcopal, Catholic, Unitarian, Methodist and others -- began signing the GIPL charter. The roster is now 29 parishes long and growing.

"What I've learned from watching the churches take off with [GIPL] is you really only need about three people," Mrs. Bartlett said.

Rev. Bartlett hopes to soon organize a series of breakfast meetings with local clergy to talk about the theology of environmentalism. He recently published a book on the matter entitled Living by Surprise: A Christian Response to the Ecological Crisis (Paulist Press, 2003). Mrs. Bartlett cites lack of knowledge as the cause for inaction among clergy. Some, she claims, think to embrace ecological values is to forget about other social justice issues like poverty. "But poor people suffer more than anybody when the air and the water are bad," she said.

GIPL, like most of its national counterparts, focuses on two central issues in its affiliated congregations: the efficient use of electricity and the purchase of Green Energy. The latter has only recently been made possible, as a result of cooperation between GIPL, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Georgia Public Service Commission, and Georgia Power. "What we [GIPL] bring to the table is to say to Georgia Power, 'there's a market for Green Energy,'" Mrs. Bartlett explained. The "market" is congregants, thousands of them.

Rev. Bartlett described how to purchase Green Energy: Georgia Power customers can sign up for the program via the website or by phone. Green Energy subscribers choose to pay an additional $5.50 per month, an amount gauged to be 10 percent of the average household energy bill. With this $5.50 a month, Georgia Power will purchase 100 kilowatt hours of power from environmentally-friendly sources including wind, solar, and biomass. Congregations will receive special incentives for Green Energy purchase, if 10 percent of congregants subscribe.

In the past, Georgia Power has used hydroelectric and other renewables for 10 percent of power generation. The remaining 90 percent comes from coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear, sources that environmentalists hope to phase out.

"It's a faith issue," Mrs. Bartlett emphasized. "If you love your neighbor, you don't dirty your neighbor's air."


Links:
1. Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life: http://www.coejl.org
2. National Religious Partnership for the Environment: http://www.nrpe.org
3. The Regeneration Project (Rev. Sally Bingham): http://www.theregenerationproject.org
4. Georgia Interfaith Power and Light: http://www.gipl.org
5. Southern Alliance for Clean Energy: http://www.cleanenergy.org
6. Georgia Power: Green Energy: http://www.southernco.com/gapower/green/


This article is the second in a four-part series on the environmental movement and religious faith.
Part 1
Part 3

Oliver Ferrari is a senior at Emory University. He can be reached at oferrari@faithandthecity.org.