c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Efforts by the U.S. religious community to generate American support for an international global warming treaty are moving from national denominational policymakers to state and local leaders and activists.
On Monday (Oct. 26), as they concluded a two-day training and strategy conference in Columbus, Ohio religious leaders unveiled what they called the Ohio Interfaith Global Warming Campaign _ the first of what is expected to be a nine-state effort to raise local awareness about global warming and create grassroots support for an international global warming treaty.
The campaign is designed to specifically bolster Senate support for the global warming treaty signed by 160 nations, including the United States, last December in Kyoto, Japan.
Global warming, speakers told the mainline and evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish participants, is a disruption of”God’s creation.”Organizers described the event as a chance to”teach people how to talk about these issues”and to train people on ways to bring the religious community’s message on the volatile issue to other sectors of society.
But developing support for the treaty will be a tough sell in Ohio and other high-polluting states where there is bitter opposition to environmental restrictions from both the industrial and agricultural sectors. The interfaith campaign faces the the well-funded lobbying efforts of the automobile and coal industries.”Climate change violates moral and religious principles of justice,”the Ohio religious leaders said in a statement.”The rich of the world, the industrialized nations, are primarily responsible for the increase of greenhouse gases which cause global warming. Yet burdens fall disproportionately upon the most vulnerable of the planet’s people: the poor, sick, elderly, and those who will face still greater threats in future generations.” Specifically, the campaign aims to generate grassroots support for the so-called Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement reached in Kyoto, Japan last December and signed by the United States.
Under terms of the accord, the United States is required to reduce the emissions of”greenhouse”gases to 7 percent below 1990 levels beginning in 2008. The countries of the European Union are committed to a joint target of an 8 percent reduction below 1990 levels, while Japan’s target is 6 percent.
Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto pact, it has not submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification because it knows it does not have the necessary votes.
Conference participants, who said they represented some 1,000 congregations in Ohio, called upon the president to submit the treaty and urged the state’s two Senators _ Democrat John Glenn and Republican Mike DeWine _ to vote for ratification.
They also promised to offer sermons and convene study groups in their congregations, to become active in politics and business and improve the environmental efficiency of their own facilities. They will also distribute a public service announcement in support of the pact and narrated by poet Maya Angelou to Ohio television stations.”As Christians, I know that we are supposed to take care of God’s creation,”said Bernice Tyson, a lay leader at Gaines United Methodist Church in Cincinnati.”The conference not only provided that information, but also how we can do it,”she added.”I think my church will respond to it very well and I think it is my responsibility to introduce them to it.” Conference speakers addressed issues often brought up by opponents, including the concern a global warming treaty would put people out of work. In the long run, the pro-treaty experts argued in response, reducing greenhouse gases will create jobs, not destroy them _ an argument welcomed by such participants as Tyson.”They dispelled the myth about people losing their jobs,”she said.”So saving the environment is not the lesser of two evils _ the only evil is not doing anything. It is not a matter of taking something away and not replacing it with something else”because all the jobs in the world are worthless if life becomes impossible.”If people are dead they don’t need a job,”she said.
Signaling that the Columbus conference was merely the first step in a longterm, local organizing effort, approximately one-fourth of the 100 conference participants were representatives from eight other high-polluting states _ West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota _ where resistance to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol is also expected to be fierce.
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The conference was also another of the growing signs that secular environmentalists and religious greens are overcoming their mutual suspicion of one another, generated in part by believers traditionally wary of”worshipping the creation rather than the creator”and ecologists suspicious of the”dominion over the earth”attitude of some faith communities.
This friction was exasperated by the economic recession of the Reagan years when faith groups, faced with limited resources, were reluctant to take money away from food programs to save wetlands, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. “It is absolutely fair to say the faith community was slow to react to the environmental crisis,”he said.
But religion-based green movements like the Ohio campaign are popping up in church and synagogue basements nationwide, Gorman said, with a stress on the faith dimensions of the crisis.”We speak not as members of the environmental movement,”the Ohio religious leaders said,”but as people of faith in seeking God’s intentions for creation.” Peter Kelly of the National Environmental Trust compared the Ohio Interfaith Conference training session to the famous civil rights”freedom riders”training session held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in the early 1960s. “Thirty-five years later, the environment is an issue of comparable power to the civil rights movement of the 1960s,”he said.”When churches got involved, they held up the mirror. Now, 35 years later, the religious community says destroying the environment is analogous to destroying God’s creation.” Among the signers of the Ohio statement were Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati; Episcopal Bishop J. Clark Grew II of the diocese of Ohio; Bishop Judith Craig of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church; Metropolitan Maximos of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Eastern Ohio; Rabbi Mark Goldman of the Central Conference of American Rabbis; and Rev. Jeff Woods, executive minister of American Baptist Churches of Ohio.
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