The Rev. Chuck Currie

A Prayer for Copenhagen

A Prayer for Copenhagen

Creator God,

You gave us stewardship over creation In The Beginning.
Over the plants.
Over the soil.
Over the animals.
Over the earth.

Our sin is that we have failed your trust.
Over the plants.
Over the soil.
Over the animals.
Over the earth.

Man-made climate change threatens the sacred balance of life.
Temperatures are climbing.
The arctic is melting.
Entire species are perishing. 
Even the future of humanity is at risk.

Help us, O God, to reconcile with the earth and with you.
Let wisdom come to our leaders and to all people.
Give us the courage to act during this time of decision.
Sustain us with Hope as we wrestle with the consequences of failure. 
May we once again earn the trust you gave humanity so long ago.

For this – for the future of all creation - we pray.

Amen. 

- Rev. Chuck Currie
http://www.chuckcurrie.com 

Note: World leaders begin discussions today (Monday, December 07, 2009) in Copenhagen on how to address the climate change crisis. More information on their efforts can be found at from the United Nations.

Clean Coal Doesn't Exisit

We keep hearing about "clean coal" as a viable solution to American's environment crisis.  The problem is that it doesn't exisit.

Listen to the 12/04/08 NPR story.

A Podcast Sermon For Earth Sunday 2008

This morning I had the opportunity to preach at Portland's First Congregational United Church of Christ for Earth Sunday as part of a pulpit exchange with The Rev. Dr. Patricia Ross.  Dr. Ross took my place at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ for the morning.

Our Scripture readings at both congregations included Gensis 1:1 - 2:2 and Acts 17-24 (NRSV).  Use the below link to download the podcast of the sermon for your iPod or personal computer.

Download FCCEarthSunday.m4a

(click with the RIGHT mouse button on the hyperlink and choose “Save Target As” and save to your desktop or other folder – once downloaded click on the file to listen).

Now On ITunes

You can now subscribe to my podcasts on ITunes. Just open the ITunes application and use the search function to find

"Chuck Currie"

then click on the "Subscribe" button.

Ministers Will Exchange Pulpits For Earth Sunday

Here's a release my office sent out this morning. All are welcome.

The Rev. Dr. Patricia Ross and The Rev. Chuck Currie will exchange pulpits for a day on Sunday, April 20th. Both will be preaching on the environment and God’s call that we be good stewards of all creation.

Ministers in the United Church of Christ (www.ucc.org) have been encouraged to set aside a Sunday before Earth Day (Monday, April 21st) to preach on environmental stewardship issues.

Rev. Currie is the interim minister at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ in NE Portland (4715 NE 106th Ave). Dr. Ross will preach at his church during the 10 AM service. Additional information on the church can be found by visiting www.parkroseucc.org or calling 503-235-5457.

Dr. Ross is the senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in downtown Portland (1137 SW Park Avenue). Rev. Currie will preach at her church during the 10:25 am service. Additional information on the church can be found by visiting www.uccportland.org or calling 503-228-7219.

“On April 8, the Collegium of Officers of the United Church of Christ released a significant theological statement, ‘And Indeed It Is Very Good – A Pastoral Letter on Faith and Environment: Living in Community with God’s Creation.’ The letter offers a new prophetic word about the need to celebrate the beauty of the earth and engage in faith action on behalf of the interrelated components of creation. We want to make clear the UCC's extravagant hospitality with evangelical courage that extends to the environmental and the social, the local and the global,” states a news release issued by the UCC national offices.

More information on the UCC and environmental issues can be found at: http://www.ucc.org/earthcare/.

I'm excited to have the chance to be back at First Congregational UCC this coming Sunday morning.

"Green lobby turns to prayer"

What was once an issue only talked about in "liberal" denominations like the United Church of Christ is becoming increasingly an issue for all churches - liberal and conservative alike.

Click here for the full story.

Blogging In The Dark

We turned off most of our lights at 8pm to take part in the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour US.  Events like this are symbolic, yes, but also educational.  Most nights our house is lit-up as if we were trying to direct ships to shore.  Did turning off the lights cause us any hardship?  No.  Maybe we'll remember the lesson tomorrow night. 

"This far and no further: Act fast and act now!"

For additional background on this issue visit the United Church News Blog.

Statement from the World Council of Churches (WCC)
to the High-Level Ministerial Segment of the
13^th Session of the Conference of the Parties – COP13 to the UNFCCC
3^rd Session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol – CMP3

Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia

Friday, December 14, 2007

Mr. President and fellow participants in this UN Climate Conference:

A Change of Paradigm is needed

It is our conviction as members of faith communities that a Change of Paradigm from one way of thinking to another is needed if we are to adequately respond to the challenge of climate change. It constitutes a transformation, a “metamorphosis”. This kind of movement just does not happen on its own; it must be catalyzed by agents of change. The world Faiths could be one of those catalysts. 

A change in paradigm appears as mandatory in the prevailing economic strategy of promoting endless growth and production of goods and a seemingly insatiable level of consumption among the high-consuming sectors of our societies. Such economic and consumption patterns are leading to the depletion of critical natural resources and to extremely dangerous implications with climate change and development. 

Societies must shift to a new paradigm where the operative principles are ethics, justice, equity, solidarity, human development and environmental conservation.

In our traditions, we believe that the earth was entrusted to us but we simply cannot do whatever we want with it. We cannot make use of nature using it only as a commodity. We must bear in mind that our liberty does not allow us to destroy that which sustains life on our planet.

We Must Act Here and Now

Much has been said and written about addressing climate change. However, a tangible result is not yet on the horizon. The First Commitment Period within the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012. Time is running out to reach equitable and sustainable targets for post-2012.

Are we ready as human beings, as members of the global society, as members of our faith communities and our organisations, as sovereign nations, to meet what is expected from us? Or are we going to implement new delays, new strategies to avoid our ethical and moral duties? In doing so it would be no less than suicidal, jeopardizing the diversity of life in the earth we inhabit, enjoy and share.

It is time to adopt legal mechanisms that adequately respond to the gravity of the situation as documented by the IPCC and which have enforcement provisions with sufficient strength to compel full compliance.

The Statement adopted by the World Council of Churches Executive Committee on occasion of the “10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol”, among other issues, clearly reminds us of our responsibilities and points us toward the future:

• The Kyoto Protocol sets out targets and a schedule for industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. It is an important first step towards a just and sustainable global climate policy regime. However, in the last ten years, it has become clear that carbon emissions are still far above sustainable levels and still increasing. Much more radical reductions are urgently needed.
  
• The Kyoto Protocol came into force only in 2005. 175 countries have now ratified it… There is also a trend to convert the protocol into a market-based instrument for minimizing economic damage to national economies and business opportunities instead of stressing its purpose of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
  
• After 2012, when the first commitments of the protocol end, a more principle-based approach is essential for achieving an effective and equitable global policy on climate control. Principles that should be taken into account include the principle of equal entitlements to the use of the atmosphere and equal rights to development; the principle of historic responsibility the precautionary principle (prospective responsibility); the principle of priority for the poorest and weakest; and the principle of maximum risk reduction.
  
• …the need for a broader and more radical timetable of action against climate change will be high on the agenda.  The Bali conference must make concrete progress in this regard.
  
• The need now is for more comprehensive policies to support and promote adaptation and mitigation programmes in countries severely affected by climate change, particularly in the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific regions.

We have arrived to the point where we know what is causing climate change. We have expressed all our concerns, cleared our doubts and affirmed what took us to the inequitable situation where the poorer carry the burden of the irresponsible waste of resources, energy and extreme consumerism of the richer. It is time now to start taking the positive actions that will lead us to find practical solutions to the problems of the great majority of today’s world population.

The eyes of the world are on us. Hundreds of millions of people, women and men, young and aged, have placed their hopes on us. We have to realize that we are kept in their prayers, every one of them following their own religious tradition. And this we cannot forget. Our mission is not to deceive or disappoint them.

Our willing participation in these great changes is required today, now, and not tomorrow. There is no time left for endless words. There must be no more delays. Once more we cry out:

“THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER: ACT FAST AND ACT NOW!”

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE

OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

DECEMBER 10, 2007

OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention — dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken — if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures — a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst — though not all — of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.” After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless — which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented — and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: “Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: “Mutually assured destruction.”

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a “nuclear winter.” Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent “carbon summer.”

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suffice.”

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis — a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called “Satyagraha” — or “truth force.”

In every land, the truth — once known — has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between “me” and “we,” creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step “ism.”

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the “Father of the United Nations.” He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull’s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, “crisis” is written with two symbols, the first meaning “danger,” the second “opportunity.” By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 — two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon — with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance — especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters — most of all, my own country —- that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.”

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures — each a palpable possibility — and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, “One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.”

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?”

Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?”

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”

Biking For God’s Creation: Why I’m Taking The Bike Commute Challenge 2007

We recently purchased a Honda Fit – one of the most fuel efficient vehicles on the market (one small step for the environment). In September, I’m going to take another small step that will help reduce the release of pollutants into the air and perhaps slow the ever expanding size of my waistline: I’m going to take part in the Bike Commute Challenge 2007. During the month of September I’ll try and ride my bike as often as possible to Parkrose Community United Church of Christ, where I serve as the interim minister. My office is less than five miles from our house and so I don’t really have an excuse. For most of my twenties I didn’t even have a car and so a bike was my main form of transportation. I need to return to that (as much as you can with 3-year old twins and pastoral responsibilities that often require a car). This for me will be as much of a spiritual exercise as a physical one. As a minister, I believe and preach that what we are doing to the earth is a sin. God called God’s people to be stewards of creation and we have messed this planet up. What will be left of the world for our children and their children if we don’t stop and take that responsibility seriously? One small way I can help is to take my bike out of the garage and get it on the road.

Related Link: A Podcast Sermon On Psalm 8: Stewardship And Creation

"Summer time, and the water is sacred"

Statement from the National Council of Churches

Washington, August 3, 2007 – During the hot and dry months of August and September, the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Program is asking churches to use water wisely as part of their Adamah Congregations quarterly action program.

The NCC hopes to reach people in the pews through organizing bible studies on water across the nation. Churches can register to host a bible study at www.nccecojustice.org/adamahh2o.html.

“The sacredness of water in our faith tradition is stated clearly throughout the Bible," says Cassandra Carmichael, Eco-Justice Programs Director.

"The average American uses 80-100 gallons of water per day. We pray that as congregations study the scripture that they will be moved to protect this precious gift.”

The Adamah Congregations program started in January 2007 as a way to engage congregations in taking simple actions to “green” their church.

Previous actions include asking churches to switch to a fair trade coffee hour and replacing incandescent bulbs with energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs.

The Eco-Justice Programs office of the National Council of Churches works in cooperation with the NCC Eco-Justice Working Group to provide an opportunity for the national bodies of member Protestant and Orthodox denominations to work together to protect and restore God's Creation. 

"Let's Get Real on Climate Change"

Action Alert from United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries

In the coming weeks, your senators will have an opportunity to sharply reduce our country's dangerous oil dependence and slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. On June 12, 2007, the Senate began debating a massive energy reform bill that includes important initiatives to improve energy efficiency, increase gas mileage for vehicles, and reduce carbon emissions.

But to be effective, the Creating Long-Term Energy Alternatives for the Nation Act of 2007 (H.R. 6)  needs to be strengthened in several critical areas. For example, the legislation would increase the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks in the U.S. to 35 miles per gallon. Yet the bill would also allow the administration to waive this modest increase in fuel economy in certain circumstances.

Write your senators and urge them to support amendments to this energy bill that will strengthen the fuel economy provisions to make certain that the standard is actually increased and fully implemented and that it covers all cars, light trucks, SUV’s and minivans.

Click here to send your senators a message.

Religious Leaders Urge Action On Global Warming

Today a United States Senate committee heard testimony from religious leaders on global warming.  Representing the National Council of Churches was Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts of the Episcopal Church USA.  Presiding Bishop Jefferts (a former Oregonian we proudly note) told the committee:

Before my ordination to the priesthood, I was an oceanographer and I learned that no life form can be studied in isolation from its surroundings or from other organisms. All living things are deeply interconnected, and all life depends on the life of others. Study of the Bible, and of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, made me equally aware that this interconnectedness is one of the central narratives of Scripture.  God creates all people and all things to live in relationship with one another and the world around them.  At the end of the biblical creation account, the writer of Genesis tells us that "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good."

I believe that each of us must recall ourselves to the vision that God has for us to realize in our own day.  It is a vision in which all human beings live together as siblings, at peace with one another and with God, and in right relationship with all of the rest of creation. While many of the faith communities represented here today may disagree on a variety of issues, in the area of global warming we are increasingly of one mind.  The crisis of climate change presents an unprecedented challenge to the goodness, interconnectedness, and sanctity of the world God created and loves.  This challenge is what has called our faith communities to come here today and stand on the side of scientific truth. As a priest, trained as a scientist, I take as a sacred obligation the faith community's responsibility to stand on the side of truth, the truth of science as well as the truth of God's unquenchable love for the world and all its inhabitants. 

The Church's history, of course, gives us examples of moments when Christians saw threat, rather than revelation and truth, in science.   The trial and imprisonment of Galileo Galilei for challenging the theory of a geocentric universe is a famous example of the Church's moral failure. For his advocacy of this unfolding revelation through science, Galileo spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.  The God whose revelation to us is continual and ongoing also entrusts us with continual and ongoing discovery of the universe he has made.

As one who has been formed both through a deep faith and as a scientist I believe science has revealed to us without equivocation that climate change and global warming are real, and caused in significant part by human activities.  They are a threat not only to God's good creation but to all of humanity.  This acknowledgment of global warming, and the Church's commitment to ameliorating it, is a part of the ongoing discovery of God's revelation to humanity and a call to a fuller understanding of the scriptural imperative of loving our neighbor.

Global warming is real and a threat to God’s creation (the theme of my sermon this past Sunday).  Unfortunately, despite the scientific reality of this crisis and the theological and social implications of our actions (or inactions) to stop global warming there are still those who insist there is nothing to worry about…or even that global warming is not real.  President Bush has largely adhered to that viewpoint.  And today representatives from the Southern Baptist Convention and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, two groups known for parroting White House views, testified before the Senate and argued quite tragically that the climate change crisis we face is not the problem it is made out to be.  IRD president Jim Tonkowich told the committee:

The kind of radical fideism that some evangelical Christians are exhibiting toward catastrophic global warming is a betrayal of science and a betrayal of the Christian intellectual tradition…. The refusal to engage in thoughtful debate about global warming, while choosing instead to make dubious assertions about the debate being over or all scientists agreeing, is not a Christian approach to the issue—particularly when the livelihood and lives of the global poor are at stake.

IRD and other conservatives have argued that environmental protections will somehow hurt those living in poverty (an ironic position since IRD opposes anti-poverty programs both within the US and abroad).

Presiding Bishop Jefferts offered the committee a more honest reflection on the linked problem of climate change and poverty:

I join many of my colleagues and many of you on this committee in sharing a profound concern that climate change will most severely affect those living in poverty and the most vulnerable in our communities here in the United States and around the world. I want to be absolutely clear; inaction on our part is the most costly of all courses of action for those living in poverty.

The General Convention, (the governing body of the Episcopal Church), the National Council of Churches, and many Christian denominations have called on Congress to address both climate change and the needs of those living in poverty in adapting to curbs in fossil fuel use.  On their behalf, I would like to offer into the record their own statements.

Over the past five years, Americans have become increasingly aware of the phenomenon of global poverty – poverty that kills 30,000 people around the world each day – and have supported Congress and the President in making historic commitments to eradicating it.  We cannot triumph over global poverty, however, unless we also address climate change, as the two phenomena are intimately related.  Climate change exacerbates global poverty, and global poverty propels climate change.

Let me give you a few examples.  As temperature changes increase the frequency and intensity of severe weather events around the world, poor countries -- which often lack infrastructure such as storm walls and water-storage facilities -- will divert resources away from fighting poverty in order to respond to disaster. A warmer climate will also increase the spread of diseases like malaria and tax the ability of poor countries to respond adequately. Perhaps most severely, changed rain patterns will increase the prevalence of drought in places like Africa, where only four percent of cropped land is irrigated, leaving populations without food and hamstrung in their ability to trade internationally to generate income. By 2020, between 75 and 250 million Africans are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change.

Conversely, just as climate change will exacerbate poverty, poverty also is hastening climate change. Most people living in poverty around the world lack access to a reliable energy source, an imbalance that must be addressed in any attempt to lift a community out of poverty. Unfortunately, financial necessity forces many to choose energy sources such as oil, coal or wood, which threaten to expand significantly the world's greenhouse emissions and thus accelerate the effects of climate change. This cycle—poverty that begets climate change, and vice versa—threatens the future of all people, rich and poor alike.

This relationship between deadly poverty and the health of creation was not lost on the world's leaders when, at the turn of the 21st century, they committed to cut global poverty in half by 2015. Their plan, which established the eight Millennium Development Goals, included a specific pledge of environmental sustainability. This year marks the halfway point in the world's effort to achieve these goals, and while progress has been impressive in some places, we are nowhere close to halfway there.  Addressing climate change is a critical step toward putting the world back on track.

Climate change and poverty are linked at home as well. We know that those living in poverty, particularly minorities, in the United States will suffer a disproportionate share of the effects of climate change.  In July of 2004, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation released a report entitled African Americans and Climate Change: An Unequal Burden that concluded "there is a stark disparity in the United States between those who benefit from the causes of climate change and those who bear the costs of climate change."  The report finds that African Americans are disproportionately burdened by the health effects of climate change, including increased deaths from heat waves and extreme weather, as well as air pollution and the spread of infectious diseases. African American households spend more money on direct energy purchases as a percentage of their income than non African Americans across every income bracket and are more likely to be impacted by the economic instability caused by climate change, than other groups.  That report makes a strong case for our congressional leaders to propose legislation to reduce carbon emissions that does not put a greater share of the cost on those living in poverty.

Presiding Bishop Jefferts was joined by “John Carr of the department of social development and world peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops; Jim Ball, director of the Evangelical Environmental Network; and Rabbi David Saperstein, Religious Action Center,” in urging action to stop global warming before it is to late (according to ENS).   

You can add your voice to those religious leaders trying to save creation by clicking here. 

Oregon Center for Christian Values Presents Caring for Creation

Press Release from Oregon Center for Christian Values

BEAVERTON – The Oregon Center for Christian Values is presenting a conference called “7 Days of Creation Care” at Oak Hills Church in Beaverton, on Saturday, April 14. The conference is a response to the rapidly emerging Christian movement to care for the environment not only out of ecological concern for nature, but also out of a desire to follow the biblical call to care for all God’s creation.

Scripture tells Christians that not only was the earth created by God (Genesis 1), but that “since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -his eternal power and divine nature -have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Caring for creation is part of honoring God.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together local Christians to discuss and reflect on the biblical response to concerns about the environment as God’s creation. The keynote speaker for the event, Peter Illyn, a minister and the founder of Restoring Eden, has been a leading figure in the national movement for creation care. He says of the emerging Christian voice for the environment: “There is a revolution happening. We see it on campuses and we see it in churches. For many, many years we have spent our time defending the fact that Christians should care for creation. It’s no longer a question of why should Christians care, but how should Christians care.”

One of the most compelling aspects of “creation care” is that it provides a Christian voice for a traditionally secular issue. Numerous pastors, theologians, politicians, business leaders, and students have joined together to form the Evangelical Climate Initiative, calling on action to reduce global warming. Most recently, Richard Cizik, the head of government affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, has made national headlines and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC and PBS calling on Christians to make environmental advocacy a part of Christian ministry.

The conference will be a full day, including worship, the keynote address, a panel on both the theological and ecological aspects of creation care, and breakaway sessions that will give Christians practical tools for environmental stewardship. The event will kick-off with 7 days of Christian meditation on creation, ending with a Creation Day celebration on Sunday, April 22. Participants will be given “7 Days of Creation” prayer guides with scripture and meditation for each day.

The creator of the event, the Oregon Center for Christian Values, is a network of active Christian citizens, working together to promote Christ-centered values for the common good, such as care for the poor, care for the sick and care for God’s creation. They are hosting the event in collaboration with a local partner, Oak Hills Church.

Other featured speakers at the event include Jenny Holmes, director of environmental ministries at Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Pastor Les Zollbrecht, founder of the Mountain Leadership Institute, Gene Dykema, a Christian economist and author of several books on creation care, Maureen Beezhold from the Northwest Earth Institute, and Brian Swarts, Program Director of the Oregon Center for Christian Values.

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry Talk About Their Faith, Oregon

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry will be in Portland on Monday promoting their new book This Moment on Earth: Today’s Environmentalists and Their Vision of the Future.

Today I had the chance to talk with them both on a conference call with a small group of bloggers. You can listen to a podcast of the call where I have the opportunity to ask the U.S. senator from Massachusetts and his wife, a noted environmental activist, about how their faith informs their decisions on these issues.

I was also able to ask the senator to rank Oregon’s congressional delegation on their dedication to the environmental cause.

Use the below link to download the podcast for your IPod or computer.

Download KerryBookInterview.m4a

(click with the RIGHT mouse button on the hyperlink and choose “Save Target As” and save to your desktop or other folder – once downloaded click on the file to listen).

Click here for more information on the Portland event being held Monday, April 2nd at 7pm.

Related Link:  John and Teresa Kerry Speak With Bloggers

Related Link:  Chatting With John and Teresa Heinz Kerry about ‘This Moment On Earth’

Related Link:  Your mother needs you -- please help her now

Related Link:  Moral leadership needed to stop global warming: Q & A with the Kerrys

World Council Of Churches Calls For Action On Climate Change

This past week the United Nations held a conference on climate change.  Stewardship of God's creation is a primary obligation of all people of faith.  At the UN gathering were representatives of the World Council of Churches. Dr. Jesse Mugambi, a member of the WCC’s Working Group on Climate Change, spoke to those assembled to offer the council’s views on this critical topic:   

Mr. President and fellow participants in this UN Climate Conference:   

We believe that caring for life on Earth is a spiritual commitment. People and other species have the right to life unthreatened by human greed and destructiveness. 

The World Council of Churches is present at this 12^th Conference of the Parties as we have been at every other COP. Our ecumenical team includes representatives of Christian faith communities around the world and ecumenical relief and development agencies.   

Science and the experiences of our members around the world confirm the reality of human-induced climate change. Pollution, particularly from the energy-intensive wealthy industrialised countries, is warming the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere is leading to major climate changes. The poor and vulnerable communities in the world and future generations will suffer the most. Though we have concerns about all regions, we focus in this statement particularly on Africa and the Pacific.   

Kenya is my home. The impacts of climate change are radically altering this land in which we are meeting. As you know, Mt. Kenya means “mountain of whiteness”. The snow and glaciers that covered the mountain for generations have almost disappeared. We depend on the snow and glaciers of Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro as critical sources of water for growing our food and quenching our thirst. The rains are becoming much less predictable. Drought and severe storms alternate making agriculture less sustainable. 

Faith-based organizations in Kenya are responding. We have formed a partnership through the All Africa Conference of Churches and Caritas and have sponsored a number of public awareness and advocacy events here in Nairobi during COP12. In conjunction with some of our partner ecumenical relief and development agencies in developed countries, we are working on a variety of community-based projects that address impacts of climate change, particularly water-related problems. 

In the Pacific, churches and communities cannot wait any longer for the world to agree on the effects of climate change and its consequences on isolated communities and hence have taken initiatives to address the issue of climate change in their own ways and within their own means. We commend them and note with appreciation those nations that have contributed human and financial resources to address adaptation and resilience measures. The position of Australia only adds insult to injury for the Pacific as it continues to refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Pacific churches are thankful for the ecumenical solidarity of churches in Australia to look at ways of addressing the issue in the Pacific region. 

Faith-based organizations in Africa and the Pacific are mindful of the link between climate change and disasters in these regions. We call for more resources to be directed at the linkages between climate change impacts and disaster preparedness. emergency relief, rehabilitation and development. We are grateful for the increasing response of ecumenical agencies working on disaster relief and development and encourage them to intensify their focus on climate change as a significant cause of disasters.   

As the World council of Churches, we issue a life-affirming call to delegates at COP12/MOP2:

1. listen to the scientists and the cry of the Earth and address the reality of climate change with the extreme urgency that it demands;

2. governments of the rich industrialised nations must keep the promise that they made in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The world is rapidly approaching the point of “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The rich nations bear the primary responsibility for causing climate change and must adopt strategies to drastically reduce their emissions.

3. the Kyoto Protocol must be fully implemented by all those who ratified it and industrialised nations that did not ratify must meet targets at least as strict as those included in the Protocol. The emissions of some industrialised countries have risen rather than fallen since the 1990 baseline year. This means even greater reductions are required than the Kyoto Protocol targets and reinforces the urgency that actual reductions start now. We dare not wait.

4. the rich industrialised nations use far more than their fair share of the atmospheric global commons. They must pay that ecological debt to other peoples by fully compensating them for the costs of adaptation to climate change.

5. drastic emission reductions by the rich are required to ensure that the legitimate development needs of the world’s poor can be met.

6. all countries must agree to and participate in a climate policy framework for post-2012 that ensures equitable development for all while maintaining greenhouse gas concentrations within limits that keep a warming of the global mean temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

The World Council of Churches believes that the whole Earth community deserves to benefit from the bounties of creation. Equitable development for all is possible while maintaining the ecological integrity of the biosphere. Faith communities are addressing climate change because it is a spiritual and ethical issue of justice, equity, solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability. The situation is critical. We must all act now. We pray that you will demonstrate leadership in responding to the cry of the Earth. 

Thank you.

Related Story:  WCC says rich countries must face reality on climate change

At The Lord's Table: Everyday Thanksgiving

Oregonian Chloe Schwabe, now working as an Ecojustice Specialist for the National Council of Churches Ecojustice Program in Washington, D.C., sent along this information earlier today:

Thanksgiving evokes the tastes of turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. As we thank God for the glorious bounty of the harvest, we can look at ways to be good stewards of farms and farming communities. For Thanksgiving and the harvest season, the NCC Eco-Justice Program is offering a new resource entitled, At the Lord’s Table: Everyday Thanksgiving.

This resource highlights the need for justice for the land and farming communities and includes sermon starters, liturgical pieces, adult and youth education materials, and ideas for action.

Sign up through the NCC Eco-Justice Network to download your free copy at www.nccecojustice.org/network from the NCC Eco-Justice network site.

There is perhaps no greater cause right now than the protection of God’s creation.

Institute on Religion and Democracy Fights Evangelical Environmentalists

One of the best developments this electoral season has been the growing bi-partisan consensus (not to mention ecumenical consensus) over the importance of sustaining our environment.  Americans, fueled by Al Gore's superman-like crusade, have come to see the Bush Administration's environmental policies as shortsighted.  Republicans are starting to turn green and that is good for the planet.  Those who aren't on board won't be around after November. 

Over the last three decades mainline churches (the historical Protestant churches) have been addressing the environmental crisis through various ways.  These days even some prominent conservative evangelical leaders are joining the movement.

A coalition of Green Democrats and Green Republicans alongside mainline churches and evangelicals concerned about the care of creation could be a force that literally changes the world.

That scares the Republican Party aligned-Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).  IRD spends a lot of time attacking mainline church leaders and "liberals" but now they have also turned their guns on conservative evangelical leaders who have broken from the White House over the state of the environment.  IRD and their allies are so close to George W. Bush they routinely confuse his policies for the Gospel. 

If pro-environmental candidates and ballot measures win across the U.S. this November the winners will be generations to come.  The losers will be those finally unmasked who have tried to question the science behind global warming in an effort to pump up their struggling campaigns and fading electoral chances.    

Religious Right: Profit Over Creation

As the Faith in Public Life Blog noted, conservative evangelical Christians gathered this week to promote their view that global warming is not the result of human actions and that American economic interests trump environmental concerns. 

Their event, hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation, was held to announce that the new Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) would release their document:

...Call to Truth, Prudence and the Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Endorsed by more than 100 leading evangelical scholars, theologians, scientists, economists, pastors and others, this paper is a direct response to the Evangelical Climate Initiative's "Call to Action" released earlier this year. The ISA paper lays forth solid scientific, economic, ethical, and theological arguments against mandatory carbon-emissions reductions called for by the ECI to mitigate global warming, identifies unintended consequences that would be of serious harm to the world's poor, and articulates a reasoned approach to environmental stewardship.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative is a group of conservative Christians which broke with the Bush Administration earlier this year by claiming that global warming was in fact caused by humans (which they note is the conclusion draw by the world scientific community) and that:

Christians must care about climate change because we love God the Creator and Jesus our Lord, through whom and for whom the creation was made. This is God's world, and any damage that we do to God's world is an offense against God Himself (Gen. 1; Ps. 24; Col. 1:16).

Christians must care about climate change because we are called to love our neighbors, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and to protect and care for the least of these as though each was Jesus Christ himself (Mt. 22:34-40; Mt. 7:12; Mt. 25:31-46).

Christians, noting the fact that most of the climate change problem is human induced, are reminded that when God made humanity he commissioned us to exercise stewardship over the earth and its creatures. Climate change is the latest evidence of our failure to exercise proper stewardship, and constitutes a critical opportunity for us to do better (Gen. 1:26-28).

Love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action.

The Republican Party-aligned Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) helped to form the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.  It is worth noting that the Heritage Foundation is a think-tank closely aligned with the Bush White House.   

Greed clearly motivates the work of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.  There is no real scientific debate anymore over global warming and despite their claim they care little for the poor.  Many of the people involved with ISA - including IRD and the Hertiage Foundation - have supported economic policies that benefit the weathly at the expense of the "least of these." 

But truth matters less to these folks than God's call for us to be responsible stewards of creation.  The release of this statement from conservative evangelicals is really a sign of desperation on the part of Republicans concerned that their political reign in Congress may end come November.  History will remember the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, IRD and the Heritage Foundation as groups that have abandoned God in the pursuit of profit.    

"Making a Democratic Ass of Jesus"

Another attack against progressive Christians came out today and it wasn't from the Religious Right.  It was the Rolling Stone magazine blog.  Tim Dickinson wrote:

CBS has an intriguing story about the growing momentum of the "Religious Left."

It quotes Dr. Bob Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, as saying:

"Jesus never said one word about homosexuality, never said one word about civil marriage or abortion."

Adds the Rev. Tony Campolo:

"We are furious that the religious right has made Jesus into a Republican. That's idolatry. To recreate Jesus in your own image rather than allowing yourself to be created in Jesus' image is what's wrong with politics."

So what's the Religious Left's answer to this `idolatry'? Why, to turn the Lord into a liberal Democrat, of course:

The Christian left is focusing on:

Fighting Poverty
Protecting the environment
Ending the war in Iraq

Did I miss the gospel where Jesus said, "No Drilling in ANWR"?

The remarks show more ignorance about the Christian faith than anything else.  Dickinson is correct that Jesus never mentioned drilling in ANWR but the Scriptures are filled with God's call for us to be responsible stewards of creation and to be peacemakers. 

The risen Christ still speaks to us today as we attempt to discern God's will on contemporary issues through Scripture, reason and our own experiences. 

It would be wrong if the "Religious Left" turned Jesus into an instrument of partisan political warfare in the way that the Religious Right has done for the Republicans. 

But as far as I know no one in the progressive Christian has suggested such a thing. 

It isn't liberal or conservative to talk about fighting poverty, protecting the environment or ending wars.  All we are doing is articulating how we understand Jesus' teachings.  The Religious Right (which is a political movement more than a religious one) by and large argues against environment protections, supports U.S. military campaigns without questions, and argues in favor of economic policies that abandon the poor to market forces. 

Anyone who places emphasis on Jesus' teachings on the environment, poverty and peacemaking would seem to take Scripture more seriously than those who argue the Bible is simply a manual on sexual relations.   

Dickinson and his colleagues at Rolling Stone would better serve their readers if they spent more time studying Scripture instead of mocking those who attempt to faithfully follow the teachings of God.   

Read the comments on this post from Street Prophets

Oregon Evangelical Seminary Professor Writes About Environment And Politics

Paul Louis Metzger, a professor at the conservative evangelical Multnomah Biblical Seminary, writes today in The Oregonian:

Many younger evangelical Christians today -- especially those known as "emergents" -- are troubled by the reduction of their movement's moral vision to nothing but the issues of abortion and gay marriage. For these young people, a more expansive frame of reference is emerging, which among other things includes concern for the environment, particularly global warming.

These younger evangelicals reflect a wider trend in our culture. Harvard University's Institute of Politics recently released a poll that concludes that many college and university students today are religious centrists. They don't fit neatly into traditional political party classifications. The study contends that these religious centrists will likely be the most influential group in American politics for years to come. Republican and Democratic candidates alike risk losing out if they don't take these religious centrists seriously.

Religious centrists vote their morals, which include environmental stewardship. Politicians should not assume that championing traditionally conservative stances on abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage will attract the young evangelical vote. While some evangelical leaders have raised doubts about global warming and initiatives to reduce it -- even appealing to science in their arguments -- their young evangelical critics often wonder if such leaders actually care about the breadth of creation. For these critics, the question is not, "Does global warming exist?" The questions are, "What are the causes -- human, nonhuman or both -- and what are the long-term risks if global warming continues unabated?"

The environment - care of creative - ought to be an issue beyond partisan politics for Christians.  Even the conservative Southern Baptist press hailed Al Gore's recent movie - despite their political views.

Too bad the president, majority party in Congress and the political leaders of the Religious Right aren't getting the message.   

Dillard University: A New Orleans Resurrection Story

Dillard University, the United Church of Christ and United Methodist Church related school destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, held commencement exercises yesterday back on their own campus. 

The Times-Picayune reports:

Standing on land that drowned under 6 feet of floodwater last August, 354 members of Dillard University's Class of 2006 returned to the Gentilly campus Saturday to receive their diplomas in the first ceremony there since Hurricane Katrina plowed through. 

They had fled the campus two days before Katrina struck, and they spent the fall semester on 200 campuses around the country before returning in January to temporary headquarters in the New Orleans Hilton. In recognition of their diaspora, the graduates marched down the Rosa Freeman Keller Avenue of the Oaks with pennant-like banners bearing the names of the schools where they had found temporary academic homes. The school names and colors differed, but each had this in common: the words "Thank You."

"They were very welcoming, but I'm glad to be back. I feel great," said a beaming Victoria Johnson, whose banner showed she had landed at Harold Washington College in Chicago.

As the graduates marched toward Kearny Hall on a muggy morning to the strains of the triumphal march from "Aida," they were surrounded by hordes of camera-clicking relatives and friends. Among them was Idalene Williams, who was waiting to spot her daughter, Jenna Marie Williams.

"I'm going to cry," she said. "I'm very excited. I'm blessed that all three of my children have graduated from college, especially Jenna, considering the temporary setback from Hurricane Katrina."

The Williams family lives in Omaha, Neb., and Jenna enrolled at the University of Nebraska campus there last fall.

"She was determined to come back to Dillard," her mother said. "This is so special because of the disruption that happened, yet almost all of the seniors came back because they were focused on getting their degrees -- not just from any university, but from Dillard University."

Bill Cosby was the commencement speaker.  "It's not the first time devastation ever hit, according to the Bible, according to history. Some of it is made by nature, and a great deal of it is made by human beings," Cosby said according to Reuters.  "Look at this event as you sit to leave as an important, prophetic event," he said. "This is God's garden, and you are in charge of it."

Everyone who watched the events of last summer knows of the heroism of those who fled New Orleans.  The students who graduated this weekend did so under enormous circumstances.  We can learn much from their perseverance. 

Let us continue to pray for the Gulf Region and do our part to both support the recovery and to be responsible stewards of God's earth.      

Related Link:  UCC Related-Dillard University Evacuates

Related Post:  Update On Dillard University

Related Post:  "Dillard University Announces Plans to Commence Classes as Early as January 2006"

An Inconvenient Truth

One of the critical moral and political questions facing Christians today is the care of creation (or the environment).  Mainline Christians and some conservative evangelicals have called on the United States and other world bodies to do more to stop global warming (use these links to see how the Christian community is addressing these critical concerns).  But is anyone listening to that message?  They might after seeing Al Gore's new film.  An Inconvenient Truth opens soon in selected theatres:

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late.

With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.

How important is this film?  Big oil (friends of GWB) is running television advertising attacking the claims made in the film.  They reject that global warm is caused by human actions.  Scientist disagree and Gore's film provides a platform for their voice to be heard.

This is a film everyone should see.

Check out the film's blog for more.

Earth Day 2006

Saturday, April 22 is Earth Day.  This Sunday congregations across the nation will mark the occasion with special worship services and prayers.  We are the stewards of God's gift of creation.  The National Council of Churches USA reports:

Earth Day Sunday is being celebrated across the nation in more than two thousand congregations this weekend.  Nearly 2,500 worship resource materials, entitled Through the Eye of a Hurricane: Rebuilding Just Communities, were downloaded or mailed by the Eco-Justice Program of the National Council of Churches USA. [www.nccecojustice.org] "While the 2006 [Earth Day Sunday] resource describes the devastation of the Gulf Coast region in particular, the issues raised of environmental justice and racism, toxics, and consumer lifestyles poses a challenge to people of faith around the world," says the resource. "It is critical that we do all that we can to keep the victims and survivors of the hurricanes in the hearts and minds of Americans and others around the world," said Cassandra Carmichael, NCC Director of Eco-Justice Programs. Congregations were encouraged to use this resource to re-energize ongoing hurricane relief efforts by planning a special worship service, study groups, a day of action, a fund drive for hurricane survivors or any event that resonates with congregants and the church's mission.  Typically congregations have observed Earth Day on the Sunday closest to April 22.

Click here for more.

For examples on how congregations can get involved with this issue on a local level checkout the website of the Oregon Interfaith Network for Earth Concerns. 

Related Post:  "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action"

Related Post: God's Mandate: Care for Creation

"Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action"

Evangelical Christians - including best selling author Rick Warren - broke with the Republican Party this week by launching a campaign to stop global warming.  The campaign includes a letter (reprinted below) calling for congressional and presidential action on global warming, a website, and also includes a television commercial to be aired later.

The campaign was launched after the National Association of Evangelicals caved under pressure from leading activists in the Religious Right and refused - as hoped - to release their own statement on global warming. 

"James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family; Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University; Donald Wildmon, head the American Family Association; and the Rev. Louis Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition," were among those reported by MSNBC who signed a letter telling the National Association of Evangelicals not to release a statement. 

The Republican Party-aligned Institute on Religion and Democracy also called on the National Association of Evangelicals not to question President Bush's policies.

However, many prominent evangelicals put their faith ahead of politics and did release a statement:

Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action

Preamble
As American evangelical Christian leaders, we recognize both our opportunity and our responsibility to offer a biblically based moral witness that can help shape public policy in the most powerful nation on earth, and therefore contribute to the well-being of the entire world.1 Whether we will enter the public square and offer our witness there is no longer an open question. We are in that square, and we will not withdraw.

We are proud of the evangelical community's long-standing commitment to the sanctity of human life. But we also offer moral witness in many venues and on many issues. Sometimes the issues that we have taken on, such as sex trafficking, genocide in the Sudan, and the AIDS epidemic in Africa, have surprised outside observers. While individuals and organizations can be called to concentrate on certain issues, we are not a single-issue movement. We seek to be true to our calling as Christian leaders, and above all faithful to Jesus Christ our Lord. Our attention, therefore, goes to whatever issues our faith requires us to address.

Over the last several years many of us have engaged in study, reflection, and prayer related to the issue of climate change (often called "global warming"). For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority. Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough to offer the following moral argument related to the matter of human-induced climate change. We commend the four simple but urgent claims offered in this document to all who will listen, beginning with our brothers and sisters in the Christian community, and urge all to take the appropriate actions that follow from them.

Claim 1: Human-Induced Climate Change is Real
Since 1995 there has been general agreement among those in the scientific community most seriously engaged with this issue that climate change is happening and is being caused mainly by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. Evidence gathered since 1995 has only strengthened this conclusion.

Because all religious/moral claims about climate change are relevant only if climate change is real and is mainly human-induced, everything hinges on the scientific data. As evangelicals we have hesitated to speak on this issue until we could be more certain of the science of climate change, but the signatories now believe that the evidence demands action:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's most authoritative body of scientists and policy experts on the issue of global warming, has been studying this issue since the late 1980s. (From 19882002 the IPCC's assessment of the climate science was Chaired by Sir John Houghton, a devout evangelical Christian.) It has documented the steady rise in global temperatures over the last fifty years, projects that the average global temperature will continue to rise in the coming decades, and attributes "most of the warming" to human activities.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as all other G8 country scientific Academies (Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy, and Russia), has concurred with these judgments.

In a 2004 report, and at the 2005 G8 summit, the Bush Administration has also acknowledged the reality of climate change and the likelihood that human activity is the cause of at least some of it.2

In the face of the breadth and depth of this scientific and governmental concern, only a small percentage of which is noted here, we are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity's responsibility to address it.

Claim 2: The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest
The earth's natural systems are resilient but not infinitely so, and human civilizations are remarkably dependent on ecological stability and well-being. It is easy to forget this until that stability and well-being are threatened.

Even small rises in global temperatures will have such likely impacts as: sea level rise; more frequent heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events such as torrential rains and floods; increased tropical diseases in now-temperate regions; and hurricanes that are more intense. It could lead to significant reduction in agricultural output, especially in poor countries. Low-lying regions, indeed entire islands, could find themselves under water. (This is not to mention the various negative impacts climate change could have on God's other creatures.)

Each of these impacts increases the likelihood of refugees from flooding or famine, violent conflicts, and international instability, which could lead to more security threats to our nation.

Poor nations and poor individuals have fewer resources available to cope with major challenges and threats. The consequences of global warming will therefore hit the poor the hardest, in part because those areas likely to be significantly affected first are in the poorest regions of the world. Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.

Claim 3: Christian Moral Convictions Demand Our Response to the Climate Change Problem
While we cannot here review the full range of relevant biblical convictions related to care of the creation, we emphasize the following points:

Christians must care about climate change because we love God the Creator and Jesus our Lord, through whom and for whom the creation was made. This is God's world, and any damage that we do to God's world is an offense against God Himself (Gen. 1; Ps. 24; Col. 1:16).

Christians must care about climate change because we are called to love our neighbors, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and to protect and care for the least of these as though each was Jesus Christ himself (Mt. 22:34-40; Mt. 7:12; Mt. 25:31-46).

Christians, noting the fact that most of the climate change problem is human induced, are reminded that when God made humanity he commissioned us to exercise stewardship over the earth and its creatures. Climate change is the latest evidence of our failure to exercise proper stewardship, and constitutes a critical opportunity for us to do better (Gen. 1:26-28).

Love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action.

Claim 4: The need to act now is urgent. Governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate changestarting now.
The basic task for all of the world's inhabitants is to find ways now to begin to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are the primary cause of human-induced climate change.

There are several reasons for urgency. First, deadly impacts are being experienced now. Second, the oceans only warm slowly, creating a lag in experiencing the consequences. Much of the climate change to which we are already committed will not be realized for several decades. The consequences of the pollution we create now will be visited upon our children and grandchildren. Third, as individuals and as a society we are making long-term decisions today that will determine how much carbon dioxide we will emit in the future, such as whether to purchase energy efficient vehicles and appliances that will last for 10-20 years, or whether to build more coal-burning power plants that last for 50 years rather than investing more in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

In the United States, the most important immediate step that can be taken at the federal level is to pass and implement national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through cost-effective, market-based mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade program. On June 22, 2005 the Senate passed the Domenici-Bingaman resolution affirming this approach, and a number of major energy companies now acknowledge that this method is best both for the environment and for business.

We commend the Senators who have taken this stand and encourage them to fulfill their pledge. We also applaud the steps taken by such companies as BP, Shell, General Electric, Cinergy, Duke Energy, and DuPont, all of which have moved ahead of the pace of government action through innovative measures implemented within their companies in the U.S. and around the world. In so doing they have offered timely leadership.

Numerous positive actions to prevent and mitigate climate change are being implemented across our society by state and local governments, churches, smaller businesses, and individuals. These commendable efforts focus on such matters as energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy, low CO2 emitting technologies, and the purchase of hybrid vehicles. These efforts can easily be shown to save money, save energy, reduce global warming pollution as well as air pollution that harm human health, and eventually pay for themselves. There is much more to be done, but these pioneers are already helping to show the way forward.

Finally, while we must reduce our global warming pollution to help mitigate the impacts of climate change, as a society and as individuals we must also help the poor adapt to the significant harm that global warming will cause.

Conclusion
We the undersigned pledge to act on the basis of the claims made in this document. We will not only teach the truths communicated here but also seek ways to implement the actions that follow from them. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, we urge all who read this declaration to join us in this effort.

View signatories

1 Cf. "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," approved by National Association of Evangelicals, October 8, 2004.

2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2001, Summary for Policymakers; http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/007.htm. (See also the main IPCC website, www.ipcc.ch.) For the confirmation of the IPCC's findings from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, see, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (2001); http://books.nap.edu/html/climatechange/summary.html. For the statement by the G8 Academies (plus those of Brazil, India, and China) see Joint Science Academies Statement: Global Response to Climate Change, (June 2005): http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf. Another major international report that confirms the IPCC's conclusions comes from the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. See their Impacts of a Warming Climate, Cambridge University Press, November 2004, p.2; http://amap.no/acia/. Another important statement is from the American Geophysical Union, "Human Impacts on Climate," December 2003, http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_position.html. For the Bush Administration's perspective, see Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005, p.47; http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2004-5/default.htm. For the 2005 G8 statement, see http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7881.asp.

(Read the comments on this post over at Street Prophets)

Care For Creation

Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel;

  for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land.

There is no faithfulness or loyalty,

  and no knowledge of God in the land.

Swearing, lying, and murder,

  and stealing and adultery break out;

  bloodshed follows bloodshed.

Therefore the land mourns,

  and all who live in it languish;

together with the wild animals

  and the birds of the air,

  even the fish of the sea are perishing.

- Hosea 4:1-3 (NRSV)

Care for creation is a primary obligation of all Christians and yet our environment continues to decline.

More Christians in the United States – mainline and evangelical – are beginning to take these issues seriously and across the pond this week the Archbishop of Canterbury again lent his moral voice to the cause.

When God tells Adam in the first chapter of Genesis that he is to subdue and have dominion over the earth, many would say that this is the beginning of a tragic and disgraceful story – the story of how human beings ravaged and exploited the earth for their own purposes, exhausting its resources and ruining it for future generations. Those who are now most deeply concerned about our environment often accuse the Jewish-Christian tradition of being responsible for a history of greed and abuse directed at the natural world. If we are at last to take our proper responsibility for the earth, we must leave behind this particular religious legacy and find another way of understanding our place on the earth, a way that is more sensitive to the sacredness of our environment.

This is understandable in many ways. But there is much more to be said; and some of it is said in Genesis, some in this morning’s reading from the Gospel. First of all, let’s look at the rest of what our story from Genesis tells us. It says that human beings are made in God’s image; and it tells us that God looked on the whole of what he had made and saw that it was good….

So if humans are to ‘subdue’ the world, the one thing this cannot mean is that they are licensed to treat the creation with indifference or violence or disrespect. The first thing they must do is surely to look at it as God looks; to delight in the joyful order of God’s mind as it is shown in what God makes. Humans must understand that creation is precious to God because it reflects his joy in his own beauty. Before ever human beings are on the scene, creation is looked at by God with this loving joy.

Click here to read the full sermon.

Related Story: Archbishop of Canterbury makes biblical case against ecological destruction

Read comments on this post from Street Prophets

Sinfully Pro-Development Endangered Species Act Passes House

This week the US House of Representatives passed – with the support of the Bush Administration – a new version of the Endangered Species Act that rips the heart out of this important legislation. The National Resources Defense Council reports:

"It would be scandalous to pass this bill into law. This legislation would do nothing to protect wildlife and, in fact, would lead to more extinctions. "Of the many damaging provisions in this bill, one of the worst would repeal rules that protect endangered species from pesticides like DDT, which nearly killed off the bald eagle years ago.

"The bill also would fleece U.S. taxpayers by paying wealthy developers to comply with endangered species protections. Under a loose compensation scheme, land developers would be able to name their price for lost profits. In America we don't pay people not to pollute.

"Most damaging to species recovery, however, is the bill's complete elimination of essential habitat protections. It defies common sense to expect an endangered species to recover if the place it calls home is converted to condos or paved for a parking lot."

Many mainline Christian organizations – including the National Council of Churches USA – opposed the legislation.

"In Scripture, God expresses awe and pleasure with all of God's creation, paying attention to even the seemingly least significant creature. In the story of Noah's ark, God reveals the desire that all life be preserved. We, as human members of God's family, are called to care for God's creation and all of God's creatures.

In recent decades, one way to show this compassion and fulfill our stewardship duty has been to implement the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act has worked to prevent extinctions, stabilize declining species, and bring some at-risk species to the point of recovery. Scientists have estimated that nearly 200 more species would have gone extinct without the Endangered Species Act and over 40 percent of the species protected by the Endangered Species Act have stabilized or improved their populations.

Legislation championed by Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (HR 3824) would effectively weaken the Endangered Species Act. We urge you to oppose HR 3824 on the moral grounds that extinction is not stewardship and that one of humanity's responsibilities is to care for all living things. We disavow misleading economic interests that would drive us to sacrifice the wonder, beauty, usefulness, and graciousness of the gifts God has given us all. We firmly hold that we are called to live our lives to glorify God and that development and profit at the expense of God's glory, of which the environment and all the species are but part, is sinful.

We oppose bills that would weaken the Endangered Species Act. As people of faith and as a society, let us ensure that species needing protection are put on the Endangered Species list, that science is allowed to inform those decisions, that the habitat of endangered species is safeguarded, and that endangered species programs receive adequate funding.

As part of our commitment to God we must remember and honor God's covenant with us all: "the sign of the covenant I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations" (Genesis 9:12).

Sincerely, Commission on Religion in Appalachia, Episcopal Church, Washington Office, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Washington Office, General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church, Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, Mennonite Central Committee, National Council of Churches USA, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Washington Office, United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

The bill now heads for the Senate.

Judy Bright: "There Wouldn't Be Time To Evacuate"

A battle is brewing between local residents, environmentalists, and a natural gas company that wants to site a pipeline and storage terminal on the Columbia River near Puget Island, Washington and Bradwood, Oregon. Leading the charge to stop this disaster in the making is Wahkiakum Friends of the River, a grassroots organization co-chaired by Judy Bright (my mother). The Oregonian reports:

It (the pipeline and storage terminal) could get the go-ahead as early as this time next year, depending on how its federal application proceeds, said Gary Coppedge, Northern Star's vice president of permitting and development.

Ships would deliver natural gas, super-cooled to liquid form, about every three days. The terminal would have the capacity to hold 7 billion cubic feet of liquid natural gas -- enough to fill two tanks roughly 12 stories tall.

After vaporizers heat the liquid back to gas, the terminal could send up to 1 billion cubic feet of gas daily through its proposed pipeline. A third tank may be added in the future. The pipeline would connect to the main supply line that runs along the Interstate 5 corridor.

But grass-roots critics have lined up against the proposals. Local groups have sponsored guest speakers to discuss the hazards of liquid natural gas, passed out bumper stickers, and distributed lawn signs and posters.

Wahkiakum Friends of the River was formed specifically to fight the Bradwood project. Opponents hope to persuade federal officials at Thursday's meeting that the lower Columbia River isn't an appropriate place for a terminal, said Judy Bright, co-chairwoman of the group.

Residents of Puget Island in Washington would be most directly affected by the terminal, Bright said. They fear it will interrupt fishing and boating and put the area at higher risk of a terrorist attack.

But more importantly, she said, the area has almost no emergency resources in the event of an accident. Washington's Wahkiakum County has no hospital, she noted.

"All emergency responders are volunteers," she said. "Our health department has a staff of four people. On Puget Island, there are two ways out -- the ferry, which lands very close to Bradwood on the Oregon side, and a narrow bridge. Even if there were time to evacuate the island, it would be limited and very slow. But the reality is, if there was an accident, there wouldn't be time to evacuate anyway."

The Thursday meeting mentioned in the article will be where federal agencies will hear plans from Northern Star and concerns from residents of the area. Visit Wahkiakum Friends of the River to learn more.

Related Link: Columbia River Vision has additional information on their site.

"Contaminants A Growing Concern"

Reposted from Disaster News Network - written by Heather Moyer

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (September 20, 2005) —
The threat of a huge negative environmental fallout in the South after Hurricane Katrina is very high, say some environmental groups.

To Derek Malek-Wiley, an environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club in Louisiana, the health risks from the contaminated water, soil and air are not being taken seriously enough.

"The (Environmental Protection Agency) monitoring is inadequate," said Malek-Wiley, who is also a resident of New Orleans. "The concern is that this is not the first time we've seen something like this happen - this is like Sept. 11."

Residents and workers in New York City are still dealing with health issues due to the toxins in the air after Sept. 11. Community groups are still arguing with the EPA over proper clean-up methods for buildings that the community organizers say were never cleaned properly in the first place.

"Four years down the road - are we going have an outbreak of disease traced back to this?" said Malek-Wiley, continuing the comparison to post-Sept. 11 issues. "There are a whole range of public health issues that are not being adequately addressed. It's tough because there's a desire to get back home and get back to business, but it's so strong that environmental and health concerns are being put to the side."

The picture being painted by the EPA is one of a contaminated region. More than 19,400 "orphan" containers of household hazardous waste have been collected. Some 44 oil spills have been found by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Officials from the EPA say they are doing all they can. The EPA and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality are monitoring air, water and soil contamination around New Orleans. Last week the EPA collected air samples around New Orleans to test for pollutants like benzene, toluene and xylene. According to an EPA news release about the sampling, "These screening data were evaluated against the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) air short-term health standards in order to provide an initial assessment of air quality. The screening results indicated that chemical concentrations in most areas are below ATSDR health standards of concern."

The EPA sampling also found higher levels of those chemicals in the air near the oil spill at the Murphy Oil facility in Chalmette, and the release states that "These initial results represent the beginning of extensive sampling efforts and do not represent all air conditions throughout the area. As this is a dynamic situation, general conclusions should not be made regarding air safety based on results from this snapshot of data."

That statement in itself angers Malek-Wiley, who says it points to the exact problem. "The contamination is hard to quantify. The EPA talks about its sampling program, but when you take a sample it's just from that time and place. What we need is a movie of what's going on throughout New Orleans."

He is also concerned that there is no sampling plan talking about how the contamination hazards are modified by being trapped in sediment. Another news release from the EPA discusses 18 sediment samples taken last week in New Orleans:

"Preliminary results indicate that some sediment may be contaminated with bacteria and fuel oils and human health risks therefore exist from contact with sediment deposited from receding flood waters. E. coli was deteced in sediment samples but no standards exist for determining human health risks from E. coli in soil or sediment. The presence of E. coli, however, does imply the presence of fecal bacteria and exposure to sediment should therefore be limited if possible."

The same release states that some semi-volatile organic compounds such as diesel and fuel oil "were detected at elevated levels and may persist in the environment," and then lists numerous possible health effects from coming in contact with or breathing in such compounds - such as peeling skin and increased blood pressure. Long-term effects from breathing in fuel vapor include kidney damage and lowering the blood's ability to clot.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced on Sept. 15 that it "would be coordinating technical support for federal responder and federal contractor safety and health during cleanup and recovery operations along the Gulf Coast of the United States."

Yet under the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) recently activated Worker Safety and Health Support Annex of the National Response Plan, that leaves state and local governments responsible for their own workers during the cleanup. According to a U.S. Department of Labor document on the Worker Safety and Health Support Annex:

"Private-sector and Federal employers are responsible for the safety and health of their own employees. State and local governments are responsible for worker health and safety pursuant to State and local statutes, and in some cases...Worker Protection. This responsibility includes allocating sufficient resources for safety and health programs, training staff, purchasing protective clothing and equipment as needed, and correcting unsafe or unsanitary conditions."

An OSHA spokesperson said local and state governments can apply to OSHA and FEMA for money to support the cleanup if it is necessary. Yet people like Malek-Wiley remain worried about a unified response from all agencies involved. Will the emergency workers and the public be properly protected?

"The scale of the environmental health catastrophe just keeps growing," he said. "I think there are a lot more questions than answers as far as what people's risks are going to be and how this will impact folks. Should there be a warning for pregnant women in the city? People and health officials don't know. The guys down there working to clean it all up - what kind of training do they have and what is their protective gear? Are they just wearing jeans and waders? There are all sorts of occupational exposures we need to worry about. There are so many unknowns that I think we need to be better safe than sorry."

As far as moving back into the affected areas across the Gulf Coast, another issue residents must face is drinking water. The EPA and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals are assessing and monitoring the drinking water systems. According to the EPA, more than 490 drinking water systems are now operational and 26 drinking water systems are operating with boil water advisories.

For those with wells, the potential contamination may be a daunting foe. In Mississippi, the state department of environmental quality is urging all residents in flooded regions to have their wells tested for contamination.

The National Ground Water Association (NGWA) is issuing well disinfecting guides to local governments and the public. Cliff Treyens, the director of public awarness for the NGWA, said residents need to be vigilant and remove all contaminated water from their wells.

"When flooded water gets into the well, the well then becomes a pathway for that contaminated water to get into the aquifer," he said. "It's like a sponge, and then it's there."

That is why it is so important for residents to pump water from their wells until the water is clear, Treyens said. He added that almost all methods of killing the bacteria within wells also include chlorinating the entire well system of one's residence.

Treyens said he's not as worried about contaminated soil affecting groundwater. "The ground actually filters the water. So by the time the water reaches an aquifer, if it's sufficiently deep, the ground has filtered out and broken down a lot of the bacterial elements and even chemical contaminants if it's deep enough."

Many NGWA members are signing up via a national professional services volunteer registry to go into the hurricane affected regions and assist the public and local governments, added Treyens. "We'll also be looking at other potential responses for our organization."

Posted September 20, 2005 4:10 PM

Wahkiakum Friends of the River

Residents of Wahkiakum County and Puget Island, Washington fighting the placement of a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) facility on the Columbia River – an environmental nightmare waiting to happen - have a new organizing tool: a blog. Visit Wahkiakum Friends of the River.

Related Post: Help My Mom Save The Columbia River & Puget Island

NCC launches western public lands initiative to address growing threats

Message from the National Council of Churches USA

The Eco-Justice Program of the National Council of Churches USA has launched a new Western Public Lands Initiative to address growing threats to our nation’s public lands and associated resources. Previously, the NCC has conducted ecumenical and interfaith programs addressing a range of environmental issues including air and water pollution, global warming, and energy conservation. Now the NCC will encourage its member denominations and partner organizations to make responsible stewardship and management of public lands an integral part of their efforts to protect and care for God’s creation. Through worship, education, and advocacy, the NCC initiative aims to begin answering the Biblical call to protect and redeem God’s lands. For more, click here.

Related Link: NCC general secretary nudges James Watt toward greater greenness

Related Post: God's Mandate: Care for Creation

Help My Mom Save The Columbia River & Puget Island

Judy Bright (otherwise known to me as mom) had this posted on her blog tonight:

Four Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminals are slated for sitting on the Columbia River near our home. They will be importing gas from unstable countries, and the U.S. will not be a buyer of first choice. LNG terminals are huge, dangerous, potential terrorist targets, ugly, and lower property values. One of the terminals is planned to be located about 1/2 mile from the end of Puget Island, on the Oregon shore. Our area, with 800 people on Puget Island and about the same in Cathlamet (1 1/2 miles from the site) is described by the development company as "desolate."

But here is the BIG ISSUE: The congessional house passed the National Energy Bill last week by 45 votes, including a provision that allows the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the authority to site LNG terminals over state objections. This energy bill is slated to to be voted on in the Senate soon. Please contact your Senators, both Democrat and Republican, and ask that they remove this provision from the energy bill. This is a state's rights issue that cannot be ignored! For more information, click onto Columbia RiverVision.

Puget Island is a beautiful farming community on the Washington side of the Columbia River. Could you imagine the environmental damage one of these terminals could create if it exploded (something that has apparently happened in other countries before)? This project has to be stopped. Contact your Senators ASAP.

Update: Senate Endorses Alaskan Oil Drilling

The United States Senate voted today to endorse drilling in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - a step sought by George W. Bush but opposed by envirnomental and religious groups.  Three democrats (Akaka, Inouye, and Landrieu) crossed party lines and joined the majority of republicans in supporting the move.  Landrieu is often named as a possible vice-presidential candidate for 2008.  A ticket with her on it would have to work hard to get my vote.  Seven brave republicans broke ranks with the president and their own party and voted against drilling.  One of those brave republicans was Gordon Smith of Oregon.

The National Council of Churches USA released the following statement after the vote:

Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005--We express profound grief at the Senate's decision to include drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as part of the budget resolution. Rather than reduce our consumption of oil and begin to move our nation toward clean energy alternatives, our elected officials are once again charting a course that is both unjust and unsustainable. Sacred scripture teaches us unequivocally that we have a responsibility to care for God's creation and to be good neighbors. As people of faith, we also bear witness to the Biblical mandate to care for the least among us. Drilling for oil in such a fragile place contradicts both of these Scriptural commandments. Our call to protect all of God's creation extends to communities such as the Gwich'in that would suffer the most from this Senate decision. To risk the destruction of both an untouched wilderness and an ancient culture violates all that Western civilization understands as our Christian responsibility to people and planet. We call on the Senate to prevent the passage of any legislation that includes the possibility of drilling in one of the Creator's most precious places.

Related Post:  Preserve the Arctic Refuge

Preserve the Arctic Refuge

Debate on how we act as stewards of the environment continues in our nation’s capital. The Bush administration has sided with polluters and profiteers over biblical mandates for the protection of creation. All the evidence suggests that care for creation doesn’t count as a moral value for this president or his allies on Capitol Hill. The United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries reports on their latest assault:

The biblical call to be stewards of God's creation has led people of many faith traditions to oppose opening the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil or gas exploration. This is a national treasure, an ecosystem virtually in its original form. It is currently under threat by a backdoor proposal in the Senate to include a drilling proposal in the budget process and thus avoid a full debate. Let your senators know that you oppose opening ANWR to drilling and development, and further oppose any attempt to slip major policy decisions past the American public.

Click here to send a message to your Congressional representatives asking them to do their part to protect the environment.

Religious leaders – including prominent evangelical Christians – are speaking out on the need for protecting the environment.  The New York Times quotes The Reverend Rich Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, as saying recently, "I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created." Over 1,000 mainline religious leaders recently released a statement stating that: “To continue to walk the current path of ecological destruction is not only folly; it is sin.” You cannot find a clearer example of sin than the Republican effort to destroy the environmental health of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Related Post:  Defend God's Creation This November

US AWOL On Kyoto Protocol

Tomorrow 136 nations on earth will enact the environmental protection agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol - designed to help reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  The United States, under the leadership of George W. Bush, has refused to be a participant in the agreement.  Big polluters, which support the president with large financial contributions, didn't want the agreement to go into effect - they want to keep polluting.  FaithfulAmerica.org ran the following advertisement today to help draw attention to this important issue.

Send the President and Congress a message that environmental protection is important to you as a person of faith.  Click here.

God's Mandate: Care for Creation

Over 1,000 religious leaders released a statement today on the connection between faith and the environment. The National Council of Churches reports:

In an effort to refute what they call a “false gospel” and to change destructive attitudes and actions concerning the environment, a group of theologians, convened by the National Council of Churches USA, released an open letter Feb. 14 calling on Christians to reject teachings that suggest humans are “called” to exploit the Earth without care for how our behavior impacts the rest of God’s creation. The statement, “God’s Earth is Sacred: An Open Letter to Church and Society in the United States,” points out that there is both an environmental and a theological crisis that must be addressed. Read more.

You can download the full statement here.

I signed the statement because of a deep concern – reflected in the statement – that our call from God is to protect and nurture creation. Sadly, political and religious leaders have done the earth great harm through bad theology and bad public policy. Part of the statement reads:

To continue to walk the current path of ecological destruction is not only folly; it is sin. As voiced by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who has taken the lead among senior religious leaders in his concern for creation: “To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation . . . for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands . . . for humans to injure other humans with disease . . . for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances . . . these are sins.” We have become un-Creators. Earth is in jeopardy at our hands.

This means that ours is a theological crisis as well. We have listened to a false gospel that we continue to live out in our daily habits-a gospel that proclaims that God cares for the salvation of humans only and that our human calling is to exploit Earth for our own ends alone. This false gospel still finds its proud preachers and continues to capture its adherents among emboldened political leaders and policy makers.

Religious leaders from Oregon are some of the most prominent signers of the letter. Since Oregon is my home state and my affiliation is with the Central Pacific Conference of the United Church of Christ, I wanted to highlight the names of those from Oregon who signed the statement.

Baptist

Glenn E. Camper, Executive Minister Emeritus, American Baptist Churches of Portland, Oregon

Catholic

Sr. Kathleen Carr, BVM, Social Justice Coordinator, St. Mary’s Catholic Church

Joan M. Cassiday, Eucharistic Minister, Christ the King Parish, Archdiocese of Portland

Sr. Patricia Nagle, IHM, Earth Home Ministries, Portland

Todd Schmidt, Youth Ministry Coordinator, St. Mary's Catholic Church

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Elder Audre Bratcher, First Christian Church, Portland

Rev. Roy L. Helms (Ret.), First Christian Church, Junction City

Episcopal

Tricia Dibblee, Lay Eucharistic Minister, St Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

Mary Eick, Candidate for Holy Orders, St. James Episcopal Church

Rev. Janis Hansen, Deacon, St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, Beaverton

Gail Holcomb, Stephen Minister, Member of the Outreach and Liturgical Committee, St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

Rev. Laurence F. Mahon, Ordained Deacon, St Mark's Episcopal Church

Deacon Marla McGarry-Lawrence, St. Michael & All Angels Church

Barbara Tensen Ross, Christian Education Coordinator, Episcopal Diocese, of Portland

Rev. Stephen L. Schafroth, Deacon, St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Alice Speers, Convenor, Environmental Commission, Episcopal Diocese of Oregon

Bob Ullman, Eco Justice Leader, St. Michael and All Angels

Jewish

Rabbi Aryeh Hirschfield, Congregation P'nai Or

Rabbi Yizhak Husbands-Hankin, Temple Beth Israel

Lutheran

Rev. Mark Knudson, Augustana Lutheran Church

Jackie McQuiston, Administrative Supervisor for Morrison Child and Family Services, Eco Justice Leader, St. Luke Lutheran Church

Mardy Stevens, Congregational Coordinator, Trinity Lutheran Church

Presbyterian

Vernadine Anderson, Mission/Peace Caring for Creation Coordinator, Westminster Presbyterian

Warren Aney, Chair, Eco-Justice Team, Presbytery of the Cascades Congregational Support Committee

Rev. Ben Dake, First Presbyterian Church, Cottage Grove

Carolyn Lindsey, Eco Justice Leader, Westminster Presbyterian

Joan M. Pierson, Minister at Large, Presbytery of the Cascades

Virginia R Robertson, Board Member, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Westminster Presbyterian Church

Martin Thompson, Elder, First Presbyterian Church, Corvallis

Rev. Woodley White, Milwaukie Presbyterian Church

Religious Society of Friends

Cherice Bock, Peace Education Coordinator, Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends

Ralph Beebe, Prof. of History Emeritus, George Fox College, Newberg Friends Church

Jim R. Leeman, Clerk, Peace, Justice and Earth Restored, Reedwood Friends Church

Stan Thornburg, Pastor, North Valley Friends Church

Unitarian Universalist

Sue Staehli, Chair, 2005 Global Warming and Climate Change Conference, First Unitarian Church

Joe Walicki, Chair, Green Sanctuary Program, Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Washington County

United Church of Christ

Eric Canon, Moderator, Forest Grove United Church of Christ

Chuck Currie, Seminarian, Central Pacific Conference United Church of Christ

Rev. Mary Sue Evers, Senior Pastor, Cedar Hills United Church of Christ

Hector E. Lopez, Conference Minister, Central Pacific Conference, United Church of Christ

Jim S. Martin, Moderator, First Congregational United Church of Christ of Ashland

Rev. Cecil Charles Prescod, Director, Public Voice for Peace/Love Makes A Family, Inc., United Church of Christ

Rev. Eugene Ross, Conference Minister, Central Pacific Conference, United Church of Christ

Karl Vercouteren, Pastor, United Church of Christ, Congregational, The Dalles

United Methodist Church

Rev. Ann Bateman, Minister for Servanthood First United Methodist Church, Corvallis

Helen Bennet, Lay Leader, Oregon City United Methodist Church

Pastor Craig Hall Cutting, First United Methodist Church, Albany

Connie Emuson, Chair, Staff-Parish Relations, Oregon City United Methodist Church

Pastor Tom W. Foster (Ret.), Portland First United Methodist Church

Lynne W. Furr, Member, Oregon-Idaho Chapter, Methodist Federation for Social Action

Rev. Vernon Groves, United Methodist, Tigard

Rev. Marcia Hauer, University Park United Methodist Church

Wayne Hill, Retired Minister, Chair of Oregon Interfaith Global Warming Campaign

Patricia S. Hine, M.S., Chair, Creation Care Action Group, First United Methodist Church

David Hites-Clabaugh, Trustee, Forest Grove United Methodist Church

Lucinda Hites-Clabaugh, Certified Lay Speaker, Forest Grove United Methodist Church

Rev. Lisa Jean Hoefner, Executive Director, Camp/Retreat Ministry, Oregon-Idaho Conference United Methodist Church

Louis Jones, Adult Study Leader and Liturgist, Clatskanie United Methodist Church

Sally Jones, Lay Member to Annual Conference, Clatskanie United Methodist Church

David Kenney, Chair, Planet Church Committee, First United Methodist Church

Rev. Paul LaRue, Chair, Church and Society Committee, United Methodist Church of Salem

Lorene J. Lindas, Stephen Ministry Leader, Oregon City United Methodist Church

Rev. Lorenz (Ret.), Hillsboro United Methodist

Rynn Mazur, Former Youth Director and Admin Board Member, Oregon City United Methodist Church

William McCummins, Administrative Council, First United Methodist Church, Salem

Rev. Dr. Ross Miller (Ret.), United Methodist Church of Portland

Rev. Karen Nelson, Pastor of Jason Lee United Methodist Church, Salem

Alice Norris, Chair, Finance Committee, Oregon City United Methodist Church, Mayor of Oregon City

Johnette Orpinela, Lay Leader, St. Paul's United Methodist Church

Marilyn J. Outslay, Chair of Outreach, Portland First United Methodist, Church,

Jane Petke, Camp Director, Suttle Lake United Methodist Camp

Rev. John E. Pitney, Associate Pastor, First United Methodist Church of Eugene

Rev. Barbara Schultz, United Methodist Deacon, Hillsboro United Methodist

Rev. Stuart R. Shaw, Retired Clergy, United Methodist Church, Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference, First United Methodist Church Charge Conference

Ueli Stadler, Lay Member, Lake Oswego UMC

Rev. Wesley Taylor, Pastor, Tualatin United Methodist Church

Rev. Kevin T. Witt, National Camp and Ministry Staff Person, United Methodist Church, General Board of Discipleship

Other

William Brault, Chaplain and Green Team Chair, Unity Church of Portland

Justin Brown, Economics Researcher/Scholar, Watson Foundation

Jeffrey Hammerlund, Chair, Political Affairs Committee, Earth and Spirit Council of Oregon

Jenny Holmes, Environmental Ministries Director, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Portland

David Leslie, Executive Director, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon

Jackie McQuiston, Administrative Supervisor for Morrison Child and Family Services

Dr. Charles Nielsen, Professor Emeritus, Warner Pacific College, Ainsworth United Church of Christ

Rev. Frodo Okulam, Coordinator, SisterSpirit, Special Ministry of Region I, Metropolitan Community Church

Rev. Steve Witte, Executive Director, Oregon Farm Worker Ministry, Woodburn

Those Wacky Green Evangelicals

Are Evangelicals going green? Yes, reports the Washington Post. "The environment is a values issue," said the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. "There are significant and compelling theological reasons why it should be a banner issue for the Christian right."  The big question:  how do they reconcile support for creation with their support for George W. Bush? 

Related Post:  The State of the Union and the Environment: One Christian Response

The State of The Union and The Environment: One Christian Response

President Bush will offer the following words on the environment during his State of the Union address tonight (according to the White House transcript):

To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home, including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology - from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough - I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.

No one can take the president’s commitment to the basic protect of God’s creation seriously. He has a long record of putting the interests of polluters ahead of clean air and clean water. Just today religious leaders testified before Congress to advocate opposition to the president’s environmental agenda.

Washington, D.C., February 2, 2005--Religious leaders representing the National Council of Churches USA and five of its member denominations have joined together to ask members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to reject the proposed "Clear Skies Act" of 2005. In testimony that was submitted this morning during a full committee hearing today, religious leaders from the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and NCC, testified against the bill because it fails to implement policies needed to clean up our the nation's air and excludes provisions to address the threat of global warming.

"[W]e believe the legislation delays the critical action necessary to clean up our nation's air and fails altogether to address the real and present threat of global warming. We urge this committee to adopt amendments that would strengthen standards, speed up implementation, and control emissions of carbon dioxide," says the testimony.

In addition, the testimony states that "clean air is a basic right and necessity for all life" and that "we have too often abandoned (our) sacred responsibility . . . leaving a legacy of pollution that threatens the health of communities and the very future of our planet." Citing the harm air pollution can cause humans, including premature deaths, asthmas attacks, and lost productivity, the religious leaders urged Senators to enact strict emission controls to clean the air.

Visit the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Programs web site to learn more about Christianity and the environment.

Related Post:  Defend God's Creation This November 

Related Link:  Clear Skies Proposal Crafted By Polluters

Global Warming In Our Backyard

Earlier this week it was 75 degrees here in Webster Groves, MO. We took the kids and the dogs out to the Eden campus to play fetch. Later that night we received several inches of rain with some pretty big thunderstorms. The next morning it was snowing and the high temperature - which had been 75 the day before - never reached 30. Missouri isn't the only place getting odd weather this winter. What is the reason? Global warming might be part of it. The National Council of Churches USA Eco-Justice Program reports that "scientists tell us 'global warming is real; the science is sound; and the effects are likely to be severe.' We add 'this is a religious issue!'  We are called to care for all of God's children, especially the most vulnerable, and to protect and restore God's creation. Climate change is a threat to all people and all of creation."  Check out their resource Cry of Creation: an Interfaith Study Guide on Global Warming and see how your congregation can become involved with this issue.  In the meantime, stay warm.  Or cool.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.