c. 1997 Religion News Service

LANSING, Mich. _ Dolores DeBacker turns to her faith in God for the answer to the suburban sprawl chewing away the fields near her family’s dairy farm 30 miles south of Jackson, Mich.”There are a lot of moral issues involved in this (sprawl),”said DeBacker, who takes on such land use issues as a member of a rural life agency of the Roman Catholic Church in Michigan.

Sue Cook sees similar ethical dilemmas as she coordinates an ecumenical effort to attract a grocery store to serve an inner-city Muskegon, Mich., neighborhood that has none.”The only reason I can get involved in this is that we see this as a justice issue,”said Cook, director of the Campaign For Human Development for the Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids.

DeBacker and Cook’s efforts are examples of a growing awareness among religious groups in Michigan and elsewhere around the country of the social impacts of the urban sprawl that attacks open space while eroding the economies of central cities.

It is an awareness giving new hope to frustrated city planners, farmers, environmentalists and others battling what several studies call the state’s most pressing environmental problem.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

From 1990 to 2020, the amount of open space converted to urban use in Michigan will increase 63 percent to 87 percent, while the population increases only 11.8 percent, according to officials at the Michigan Society of Planning.

Religious groups could be a significant force for change,”if church leaders and congregations not only became more sensitive to the issue, but started to engage in dialogue with each other across political boundaries,”said former state House Speaker Paul Hillegonds, now president of Detroit Renaissance, a non-profit group seeking to revitalize the Motor City.

The Frey Foundation, a private philanthropic group interested in land use issues, targeted church leaders among those invited to a spring conference in Grand Rapids to discuss the issues and in Detroit, 56 area churches invited national land use speakers to a similar meeting.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Building low-income housing and other traditional church efforts serve the poor only in the short term if middle-class citizens continue to desert the cities, said Sister Cheryl Liske, interim director of the Metropolitan Organizing Strategy for Empowerment and Strength.

Like Cook, Liske sees sprawl as a matter of injustice for those left behind. “Oftentimes the majority of people in the metropolitan region are subsidizing sprawl at the edge, which is benefiting a very rich and small population,”Liske said.”It’s true of water, it’s true of sewage and we suspect it’s true of transportation dollars.” It’s easy to blame welfare mothers for poverty, she added,”when in reality the problem is disparity and the unregulated gobbling up of the environment and of the land.” It is an argument that”connects with virtually every denomination there is,”said Calvin DeWitt, director of the Au Sable Institute, a Mancelona, Mich.-based ecumenical think tank linking environmental issues with religious teachings. And the concerns raised in Michigan are being raised around the world.

For example, the Sultan of Oman is restoring species to desert lands, calling it a matter of Islamic stewardship. A rabbi in Portland, Ore., recently argued that expanding that city’s urban growth boundary is against Torah doctrine while in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America brought together an ecumenical coalition to lobby the state on anti-sprawl measures as diverse as tax-base sharing and investment in polluted urban land.

In Cleveland, Ohio, Roman Catholic Archbishop Anthony Pilla has created a land use task force to attack related rural, suburban and central city issues involving eight counties and 1 million Catholics.”At the very least, (sprawl) makes us more separate from each other,”said Len Calabrese, who is coordinating the Cleveland effort.”We have less interactions with each other and certainly with people who are different from us in many ways.” Churches also have a pragmatic interest as they struggle to maintain their presence within the city while serving growing suburban congregations, he said.

In addition to the justice issues in the cities, religious mandates to be stewards of creation fit well with the desire to preserve open space, DeWitt said. “I really see the Bible as a kind of ecological handbook,”he added. Last year, in testimony on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., over reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act, DeWitt gave an example of what he means when he argued the story of Noah’s Ark shows the spiritual value of species.

He said lawmakers’ interest in religious arguments on environmental issues may signal that such arguments can slice through partisan politics.”The question is not do we answer to Bill (Clinton) or to Newt (Gingrich), but that we might answer to the creator on this one,”DeWitt said.”That’s where the power is.”

MJP END POULSON