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This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

***

“The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations,” a 2014 study of more than three hundred environmental groups in the United States, concluded that the state of racial diversity among those organizations was “troubling,” with ethnic minorities constituting a scant 12 percent of leadership positions and 16 percent of board members and general staff. While the study found the organizations had made significant progress on diversity in terms of gender, most of the gains went to white women, and men were still significantly more likely to hold the most powerful positions. In terms of membership and volunteers, the organizations remained “predominately white.” The report concluded that people of color had been unable to break the “green ceiling” that had barred minorities from leadership positions over the previous fifty years, despite the fact that minority communities demonstrated greater support for environmental protection than whites.

Developing initiatives to chip away at the “green ceiling” was a central goal at Faith in Place. A report the organization’s leaders submitted to the nonprofit reporting service GuideStar stated that their long-term success would be measured by the degree to which environmental activities became mainstream among faith communities and “the degree to which our efforts bring new voices and new faces (especially those of people of color) into the overall environmental movement.” The weatherization project featured in this introduction’s opening was specifically designed to contribute to that goal by involving African Americans in the work of Faith in Place. As coordinator of African American outreach, Kyle developed new tactics and programs intended to meet the needs of African Americans while simultaneously advancing the goals of Faith in Place. To that end, she developed the weatherization project to promote environmental literacy, provide immediate (albeit short-term) employment, and offer experiences that would lead to greater opportunities in the future. Kyle fundamentally changed the work and demographics of Faith in Place, seeming to overcome challenges of diversification that environmental leaders had struggled with for five decades. In this book I set out to understand how that happened.

I do not anticipate that readers will disagree with my contention about the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in our understandings of religious environmentalism. The dearth of people of color in the mainstream environmental movement is an important issue that has been discussed by scholars and activists alike. It is clear that a more effective and equitable form of environmentalism must include the perspectives of communities diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and class, and my research at Faith in Place contributes to understanding some of those diverse perspectives.

But Faith in Place enacted a different kind of power dynamic that was not included in the “Green Ceiling” report or in studies of environmental or religious environmental organizations more broadly. Ironically, that dynamic had to do with religion. Faith in Place’s work, and interfaith environmentalism more broadly, entailed certain assumptions about the role and place of religion in the modern world, the nature of humans’ relationship with the divine, and explanations of cause and effect. These assumptions have been shaped by a secularized liberal Protestant culture, whether those who hold those viewpoints identify as Protestants or not. Faith in Place offered a distinctively modern, progressive Protestant way of being religious. Its leaders unknowingly enforced boundaries that designated “good” religion, while excluding religious beliefs and behaviors that did not adhere to their liberal Protestant norms. I provide examples of these distinctions in chapters 5 and 6.

Liberal Protestant domination within religious environmentalism has manifested at two levels, one very concrete and the other less quantifiable but nevertheless quite real. First, mainline Protestants have dominated the leadership positions of interfaith environmental organizations in the United States. IPL, the umbrella organization hosting state chapters in forty states, was founded by an Episcopal priest. Green Faith’s founding director was Episcopal as well. State IPL chapters recruited Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and other religious minority groups to their steering committees and boards of directors, but mainline Protestants filled nearly two-thirds of those positions in 2015. Among the forty-four staff members who provided their religious affiliations on their state IPL’s websites in the same year, thirty-six, or 82 percent, were mainline Protestants. While purporting to represent the viewpoints of every faith, interfaith environmental coalitions in the United States were shaped strongly by mainline Protestants.

Second, whether liberal Protestants or not, those involved with religious environmental projects in the United States tend to maintain progressive religious values and secular understandings of the world. In the past several decades, scholars have identified ways that Protestant understandings of the world—understandings of relations between the human and divine, the natural and the supernatural, that developed from Enlightenment thought and contributed to the Protestant Reformation—have shaped what we now identify as secularism. Rejecting the notion that the secular is merely the absence of religion, scholars now assert that secularism itself is a religious project and offers a particular way of being religious. Secular moderns inhabit what philosopher and political theorist Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” a worldview in which cause-and-effect relationships are assumed to be this-worldly, rather than resulting from actions of the divine. Taylor contends that this secular way of understanding the world is a defining feature of modernity, and he joins scholars such as anthropologist Talal Asad as he disputes the supposedly clear distinction between the religious and the secular. The religious and the secular are always defined in relation to each other, these scholars point out, and in the context of the West ideas of the secular are informed by liberal Protestant Christianity. A defining characteristic of what we might call secular religion is that its assumptions are taken for granted, so leaders at Faith in Place would not recognize the ways in which their organization enforced particular ideas about what counts as “good” religion. The religious power and authority they assert, in other words, are unmarked.

The women and men I met at Faith in Place brought to the organization modern religious worldviews in which they understood their actions within the immanent frame. In other settings they may have expressed belief in a transcendent God. But at Faith in Place they learned to deal with the global water crisis by incorporating native plants and permeable surfaces outside their churches, not by praying to God for relief. They learned to address food injustices by building community gardens, not by looking forward to a better world with the coming of the Kingdom of God. And they learned to curb climate change through policy advocacy, not petitionary prayer. These steps may seem like perfectly reasonable actions to take in light of modern, secular understandings of the world, and as such they seem like logical measures to prescribe to Faith in Place’s intended audience: all people of faith. Yet as scholars such as Taylor and Asad insist, modern secular assumptions are shaped in relationship to particular religious views, and in the Western context inhabited by Faith in Place those particular religious views rely heavily on liberal Protestant thought.

Faith in Place offered one way of being religious, a way that conformed to the dictates of liberal modernity. It offered a “welcoming space” for adherents of what was deemed “good” religion and excluded others by not recognizing their beliefs and practices as properly religious. Religious viewpoints that entailed belief in a supernatural God and allowed for the possibility of God’s intervention in human history were not especially welcome at Faith in Place, where the Unitarian Universalist executive director’s theological outlook was grounded in a rejection of the supernatural. The organization claimed to represent people from “every faith,” but it did not involve representatives of different faiths whose religious outlooks acknowledged the existence of a “transcendent frame,” a contradiction I examine in chapter 6. Just as it is important to underline ways that constructions of religious environmentalism are always racially marked, it is important to notice how constructions of religious environmentalism are shaped by particular religious understandings. I set out to understand those assumptions and the ways they shaped Faith in Place’s religious environmental activism, in the following pages.

Amanda J. Baugh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White.

The post Protestant Assumptions and the “Green Ceiling” appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image courtesy of the National Resource Defense Council.)

I fumbled with my phone, one hand on the steering wheel, trying to get a video titled “Faith, Family and Freedom” to play. The video was a recording of a Christian nationalist event, and in an hour, I was set to interview the speaker, John (a pseudonym). I had reached out to John because he was the leader of a group with roots in the Tea Party, which interested me for reasons I’ll soon explain. But his house was 60 miles away, and so I planned to use the drive to listen to videos on his website. Finally, the video loaded, and I pulled out onto the road, volume turned up.

“We live in perilous times,” John began as the video started. “Today good is called evil, and evil is called good. Our faith, families and God-given freedoms are under relentless attack. We can and must do something, or everything we hold dear will be lost forever.” He painted a dark vision of America, in which liberals were destroying its foundations and the country itself. The once great nation was now “damned, not praised.” Critical race theory was destroying schools, followers of “Judeo-Christian” traditions were being “demonized,” and Marxists were serving up history in bowdlerized forms. My pulse quickened as I listened. Was it safe to be alone with this man? As an academic, I get to choose my research topics. Did I really need to do this?

My reasons for planning the interview began with a book I wrote about the phenomenon of climate skepticism—not accepting that climate change is real, serious, or caused primarily by human activities—within America’s white evangelical community. Many observers of evangelicalism have suggested that their high levels of climate skepticism are simply a side effect of conservative politics. But a survey from 2013 found that 31 percent of evangelicals mentioned religion to explain why they did not believe the climate was changing. I soon discovered that evangelicals were not the only group to justify their climate skepticism with religion. Between 2011 and 2013, 17 percent of skeptics who gave religious reasons were Catholic. Curiously, Catholics explained their skepticism in ways that mirrored evangelicals. One white Catholic from Florida explained that she didn’t believe the climate was changing because “Only God controls the weather.” Similarly, a white evangelical Protestant from Michigan insisted, “God controls everything.”

The curiously matching responses of white Catholics and white evangelical Protestants became a footnote in my book, but I kept wondering about their connections given that these traditions have such different histories. Several years later, when sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead published a book about an ideology they called Christian nationalism, I began to wonder if I had finally found the answer.

A core belief of Christian nationalists, who comprise about 20 percent of the American populace, is that America was founded as a Christian nation. This view has long been popular among white evangelicals. But what Perry and Whitehead showed was that people in other religious traditions also shared this view. Indeed, almost 19 percent of Christian nationalists were Catholic. For Perry and Whitehead, Christian nationalism helped explain why so many Americans (not only evangelicals) supported President Trump. But intriguingly to me, Christian nationalism was also associated with climate skepticism, suggesting an underlying explanation for the matching survey responses I had observed years earlier.

I wanted to better understand the nature of this connection, but there was a problem. Christian nationalism is a term used to describe survey results; few people self-identify as a Christian nationalist. How could I identify them, other than by going back to the same evangelical churches I had already visited? (About 55 percent of Christian nationalists are evangelical Protestants). Eventually I settled on the Tea Party, which has been linked to both anti-environmentalism and to Christian nationalism. Intriguingly, a 2016 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 38% of Tea Party members agreed with the statement that, “God controls the climate, therefore people can’t be causing global warming.” Surprisingly, this was 8 percentage points higher than the percentage of evangelicals and born-again Christians who also agreed with that statement. Hence the Tea Party movement and its successors seemed like a useful place to begin my inquiry about the connection between Christian nationalism and climate skepticism.

***

John, a white, retired educator in his seventies, has strong opinions about climate change, but less important than these views are the underlying connections to his two primary concerns: “free and fair elections” and “no vaccine mandates.” Notably, in all three cases, John held views that had been debunked by experts. John thought the 2020 election was riddled with voter fraud (it wasn’t); he thought the COVID-19 vaccine was more dangerous than COVID-19 (it’s not); and, regarding climate change, he argued that “the climate is changing, always has been changing. But man doesn’t affect it much.” (It has been clear for decades that human activities are the primary cause of climate change.) How did he end up on the opposite side of experts in all three cases? What was the common thread?

Before I consider the answer, I should clarify why it matters. John is only one person, to be sure, and the Tea Party may only have had, at its strongest, 200,000 active members. But if scientists have known for decades that human activities are causing climate change, why hasn’t the U.S. (as of this writing) passed national-level climate legislation? Why did the U.S. exit the Paris Climate Agreement in 2020? (We rejoined in 2021). The delays in action on climate change are not rooted in science. And the Tea Party’s remaking of the Republican Party, with its activism against taxes and disparaging view of the role of government, has had tremendous implications for the climate movement in the U.S. More broadly, Christian nationalism seems increasingly to be uniting disparate segments of the political right, in ways that have unclear, but inauspicious, implications for our nation’s ability to deal with climate change.

(Tea Party Protest. Photo credit: JEWEL SAMAD for Getty Images.)

Based on my earlier observations among evangelicals and my new work among Tea Partiers, I am convinced that one angle we should examine closely to explain the connection between Christian nationalism and climate change skepticism is media, especially conservative media. Through television, radio, magazines, websites, and podcasts, conservative media has grown tremendously since its origins in the mid-twentieth century. Without media to convey misinformation (misinformation refers to false information that is unintentionally spread, while disinformation is intentionally spread), only small segments of the population would be able to hear these ideas, much less take them as fact.

As historian Nicole Hemmer explains in her book Messengers of the Right, the individuals who first laid the groundwork for today’s conservative media, beginning in the 1950s, did so not simply for commercial reasons, but as part of an ambitious, culture-shaping agenda. Up through the 1970s conservatives believed that liberals “controlled the institutions that disseminated ideas and shaped public opinion: the schools, the media, the publishing industry. And the people who controlled those institutions controlled the culture. . . If conservatives wanted a better America, they would have to invest in better media.”

In the early days, conservative media often represented the interests of its funders by disparaging union leaders whose activism threatened to reduce owners’ profits. But in order to succeed in remaking American culture, conservative activists needed to get large numbers of Americans whose interests were not served by conservative media to consume it. A strategy they eventually came up with—which is still in use today—was to charge the media establishment with liberal bias. This tactic had the benefit of playing to the public’s instinctual desire to hear “both sides of the issue,” while also flattering the common man’s belief that he was smart enough to judge for himself which argument was most convincing.

It was not until the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, and two of its corollary rules that prohibited personal attacks and political editorials, that the “outrage media” we know today began to flourish (the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, while the corollary rules were eliminated in 2000). In the post-Fairness Doctrine world, broadcasters no longer had to devote programming time to both sides of an issue, and on-air personalities could make outlandish personal attacks without facing legal repercussions. Both changes incentivized broadcasters to produce outrageous, inflammatory content, which attracted listeners and advertising dollars. Hence, what the political scientist Jeffrey Berry and sociologist Sarah Sobieraj call “the outrage industry”—media that is consistently offensive, hyperbolic and controversial—was born.

These changes transformed the media landscape. But the alterations were not politically neutral. Rather, the new format was vastly more favorable to conservative media, which soon outstripped its mainstream counterpart. One study from 2007 found that 91 percent of total weekday talk radio programing in the U.S. was conservative.

Media deregulation also enabled misinformation to proliferate. A 2011 Pew Research Center study reported that nearly half of regular Fox News viewers wrongly believed that Affordable Care Act legislation would include “death panels.” More recently, a study published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science found that right-leaning media viewers were “more than twice as likely to endorse COVID-related misinformation.”

Climate change, I believe, belongs in this history as well. One study on conservative media’s impact on climate change attitudes found that Fox News chose to interview a greater proportion of climate change deniers than CNN and MSNBC, giving Fox viewers the false impression that denialist views were mainstream. Not coincidentally, even after controlling for other possible influences, Fox News viewers were less likely to accept the scientific consensus on global warming. Another study found that when conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh spent more time disparaging climate change on his show, Republican concern about climate change declined. Limbaugh was actually named “Climate Misinformer of the Year” in 2011 by Media Matters for his dismissive, misinformation-ridden coverage.

(Fox News coverage of climate change denial)

Sure, conservative media may spread misinformation, but what of critical thinking, one might ask? What keeps people like John convinced of alternative facts, especially when there is so much counterevidence available? Curious, I asked John about how he decided which sources to trust. “I don’t like to turn on the radio or the TV to be propagandized,” he told me. “Give me facts, give me something interesting, but . . . don’t pretend I’m stupid.” He named Whistleblower magazine as a valued source. (Whistleblower is published by the far-right publisher WorldNetDaily and ran a July-August cover story that boasted, “Yes, the 2020 election was stolen”). He also positively assessed Epoch Times, a far-right religiously-affiliated newspaper, saying it was “like a very good version of the Wall Street Journal . . . They have good reporters. They have to verify their sources.”

A few days after interviewing John, I met an associate of his who led a different Tea Party group, whom I’ll call Patrick. Still curious about media consumption, I posed some of the same questions. Patrick had different preferences, but a similar attitude toward mainstream sources. He named Newsmax (whose CEO, Chris Reddy, is a fervent Trump supporter) as trustworthy, while he disparaged CNN as “Constantly Negative News,” NPR as “National Propaganda Radio” and MSNBC as “off the wall.” He noted matter-of-factly that there was “a night and day difference” between what he was hearing from the sources he trusted and what was appearing in mainstream news. But what I found fascinating was that he interpreted this as evidence that consumers of mainstream news were the ones being misled. Like John, he was worried about consuming mis- or disinformation. But he had latched onto both in the process of trying to avoid them.

While perhaps surprising, John and Patrick’s sentiments were exactly what we should expect from consumers of outrage media. As Berry and Sobieraj note in The Outrage Industry, debunking mainstream media stories is a core strategy in conservative media, given the many opportunities it offers for crafting dramatic, emotionally-engaging storylines. In fact, outrage media addresses most social and political subjects “not as serious issues in need of examination but as golden opportunities to gain footing in the ongoing contest to re-inscribe the sense of political superiority and aggrieved solidarity that proves effective in validating audience preferences and winning the ratings game.” Bad for society, but good for the bottom line.

If media and misinformation were relevant to the climate attitudes of my Tea Party interviewees, one might wonder where, if at all, religion enters the picture. Both men were serious about their faith (John was Catholic and Patrick was a non-denominational Protestant). But there were not any teachings specific to their faiths that seemed to influence their attitudes toward climate change. Rather, it was the kinds of outlandish persecution narratives that thrive in outrage media, especially the idea that environmental policymaking might become a pretext for religious persecution. For example, John had argued in his “Faith, Family and Freedom” video that, “Our children are being terrified, traumatized and propagandized [by climate activists] to do the Left’s bidding.” Similarly, in explaining how people of different religious backgrounds felt comfortable attending his Tea Party meetings, he underlined that they all faced a common threat: “It’s not going to matter if you’re a Baptist, evangelical or Catholic . . . when they decide to do away with religion in America, they’re going to put us all in the same gulag.” Patrick told me he believed that the U.S. was entering an era of religious persecution that mirrored what had happened in Germany in the 1920s through the 1940s (incredibly, though somewhat predictably, he was thinking of the persecution of Christians, rather than Jews, during this period). Some of this persecution had environmental ties, he added, mentioning a controversy in Maryland where, he said, churches had been forced to preach “green sermons” to avoid paying a “rain tax” (“rain tax” is a term critics coined to refer to an unpopular storm water run-off fee implemented in Maryland in 2013, which applied to private properties, including churches).

Overall, John and Patrick’s comments suggested that climate change and environmental issues served primarily as additional grist for their mill of grievances. Ultimately, that means we are unlikely to see substantive discussions of climate change, or see climate policy initiatives replace inflammatory and misleading diatribes, anytime soon—unless something changes.

But what, then, should we do about this situation? In the short term, we may be able to convince more people in our communities that climate change is a real and serious problem by focusing less on the science and more on shared values, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe argues. But in the long term, this kind of one-on-one approach is futile. We cannot address the climate crisis—not to mention vaccine hesitancy and claims of election fraud—until we can have a substantive debate about them. And we can’t have a substantive debate about them until our citizens have accurate information.

At the root of this problem, then, are the incentives of commercial media, which are misaligned with the public’s need for high quality information. As media scholar Victor Pickard argues, the best way to fix our “misinformation society” is to dispense with the notion that the marketplace will deliver us the news we need. Good information is not a commodity; it is a public service—and an essential one in a democracy. To get back on track, we urgently need a well-funded public media system.

***

Other than the misinformation he preached, John seemed like a kind man who had devoted his career to special education, and choked up when he talked about hoping for a better life for his grandkids. Sitting with him at his cluttered table, with board games stashed in a corner by the window, and the Virgin Mary looking down on us, my pulse slowed. The problem is not bad people, but inaccurate information. The solution is neither to demonize nor to proselytize its victims. The solution is to fix the system.

Robin Veldman is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Texas A&M University and the author of The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change. As part of her broader interest in how religions shape perceptions of the natural world, she is working on a book on the environmental politics of Christian nationalism.

The post Christian Nationalists and Climate Skepticism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo courtesy of Robert Wright for the New York Times.)

On a hot Friday in July 2015, I spent the afternoon trying to find and clear space for a few rows of squash that were so overrun by weeds that the plants were hard to locate. This was not the kind of careful weeding I had done previously in other areas of the farm at Adamah, the Jewish Farming Fellowship in Falls Village, Connecticut, one of several Jewish farming communities in the United States. The Adamah farming fellowship is an immersive social justice agricultural program for young Jewish adults. The Farm Director, Janna Siller, scheduled the farm fellows for speed weeding just one afternoon a week at the Sadeh, Hebrew for “the field.” They had only planted crops in one quarter acre of that four-acre field. While the Sadeh’s soil is especially rich, planting there was risky because it was susceptible to flooding. After a complete and devastating loss when the field flooded after Hurricane Irene in 2011, Adamah moved their main operation to another field. The weekly weeding session at the Sadeh was part of what Siller called their “hail Mary” effort. If anything survived the season, it would add to their fall harvest; if not, at least they hadn’t wasted much time. Unfortunately, the Sadeh has flooded almost every year since then and Adamah has stopped using the field completely.

At Jewish farms like Adamah, the climate crisis and its resulting extreme weather patterns are neither a future problem nor a political issue to debate. The climate crisis shapes people’s work on their farms and their engagement with Judaism.

Adamah was founded in 2004 as the first contemporary Jewish community farming organization in the United States. Since then, they have been joined by other groups across the country and in Canada. These organizations use their land, resources, and networks to mitigate climate change through diverse methods, including ecological restoration and reforestation, pollinator repopulation, seed development, and political advocacy. Though this contemporary Jewish farming movement is relatively new, Jews have previously turned to farming when faced with similar uncertainty about how to ensure a better world than the one they inherited. They are doing the same today.

A Brief History of Jewish Farming in the United States  

People are often surprised to hear that there are more than twenty Jewish community farming organizations in North America and hundreds more Jewish farmers. But Jewish farming is not new.

In the late nineteenth-century, waves of Jewish immigrants flooded American shores to seek out a more stable future than the one offered to them in Eastern Europe. After Russia instituted the May Laws of 1882, which restricted Jewish access to schools and governmental positions, Jews faced violence from widespread pogroms, massacres that were organized by Russian Christians. As Jewish immigrants fled persecution and violence in Eastern Europe, a number of organizations formed quickly in Europe and the United States to assist them. The Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, or HEAS (now HIAS), formed in 1881 to help Jews fleeing oppression settle in the United States and learn about agriculture. HEAS was joined in this work by Am Olam (“Eternal People”), a movement dedicated to creating socialist agricultural communities in an effort to prove that Jews could be self-sufficient in the United States and what was then Palestine. Historian Uri Herscher quoted a member of Am Olam in his book Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America who declared, “Our motto is labor in the fields, and our goal is the physical and spiritual rejuvenation of our people.” At a time when the future of the Jewish people felt uncertain, farming uplifted Jewish immigrants and gave them hope in a new land.

The Jewish agricultural communities established in the United States were diverse. Early Jewish farming communities, commonly called colonies in the United States and kibbutzim in Palestine, were based on communist models of shared labor, hard work, and simple lives. Later communities permitted individual land ownership and bound colonists together with a shared set of beliefs. Jewish farming colonies were established in the Dakotas, Oregon, Louisiana, Michigan, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Jersey, and Ohio.

None of the American Jewish farming colonies lasted more than a few generations, even as the kibbutzim thrived. But the legacy of those American Jewish farms continues today with a new cohort of farmers who, faced with the climate crisis, are concerned about the future of the Jewish people, the Earth, and its inhabitants. And just as the Jewish farmers of the nineteenth century turned to their ancient agricultural roots when they faced crises of antisemitic violence, so too is the contemporary Jewish farming movement drawing on ancient Jewish teachings to face the climate crisis head on.

The Contemporary Jewish Community Farming Movement

The Jewish communal farming movement is, to use a term a bit too on the nose, a grassroots effort. Each farming organization was created to address the specific goals and needs of a defined community. Jewish farming organizations are joined by a common dual focus on environmental and food justice and each is responding to environmental degradation and the climate crisis, even as their strategies vary widely.

Some organizations have small plots of land, others have hundreds of acres, and some own no land at all. The farms are located in urban, suburban, and rural spaces. There are farms at summer camps, synagogues, Jewish day schools, private homes, Jewish Community Centers, and retreat centers; there is even one at an envelope factory owned by a Jewish family. Farmers, educators, administrators, and program participants at these organizations include both Jews and non-Jews. These organizations prioritize different aspects of food justice, but many of them engage with the climate crisis in their missions, programs, and agricultural work.

Many of these farms offer educational programs that strive to reconnect Jews to the land. Participants in those programs learn that the Ancient Israelites, whose stories they read in the Hebrew Bible, were also farmers. Jewish farming organizations enact laws from the Hebrew Bible like pe’ah, based on Leviticus 23:22, a verse that commands Jews to leave the corners of their fields unharvested so the poor will have access to food.

Contemporary Jewish farming organizations also reinterpret laws like those related to the shmita year, a year of rest for the land that occurs every seven years. The law was designed to give agricultural land a respite after six years of work, just as humans were granted a day of rest after six days of labor. Letting land rest allows the soil to replenish itself. The current Hebrew Year 5782, which began this September on Rosh Hashanah, is a shmita year, so this particular set of laws has received a great deal of attention, especially through Hazon’s Shmita Project. As Jewish farmers settle into this year of agricultural rest, many are moving their attention away from the day-to-day operations of their farms and onto the climate crisis and their plans for the future.

Jewish Farms Take on Climate Change through Reforestation

In the spring of 2018, Pearlstone Center, a Jewish farming organization in Reisterstown, Maryland, had recently acquired the land next to its retreat center, which had previously hosted a Jewish summer camp. I walked the land with Pearlstone’s Chief Executive Officer, Jakir Manela, and he explained their vision for their expanded space and made it clear that ecological restoration and reforestation were key components of that expansion. They designated significant areas of their land for conservation with an eye on maintaining the health of the local ecology and watershed, as streams and wetlands surround the property. As part of this work, they will plant native trees like cypress, evergreens, and red maples.

These types of reforestation projects are common climate change mitigation strategies because trees sequester carbon, meaning they pull it from the atmosphere. In spaces that were previously grass fields, Pearlstone is working to convert them to native meadow. And between the farm and the forest, Pearlstone has plans for a food forest of edible plants that will blend into the local ecosystem to connect the two areas of their property. In the places that will be used for housing, farming, and programming, Pearlstone has pledged to build only in areas that are least disruptive to the local ecology and to utilize green building practices and renewable energy. And this summer Pearlstone expanded again when they merged with another Jewish environmental organization, Hazon, making this the largest faith-based environmental organization in the United States.

Pollinator Repopulation at Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs

The staff at Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs in Toronto, Canada focus a significant portion of their land and labor resources on bees. The pollinator population in Ontario has been subject to degradation in recent years because of varied factors, including industrial pesticide use, invasive pests, wild habitat loss, and the climate crisis. The bees at Shoresh are European honeybees and they pollinate more than one-third of global produce.

The Shoresh staff strives to protect and cultivate this vulnerable bee population through an effort they call “Community Supported Beekeeping.” These efforts include dedicating 20 acres of land to their bee sanctuary, where the staff planted 20 million native wildflowers and trees for the bees and other wild pollinators. They also offer educational programs throughout Toronto to teach people about pollinators. They host Honey Harvest programs around Rosh Hashanah so people can learn more about the honey they traditionally consume during the holiday. And Shoresh sells honey and beeswax Shabbat and Hanukkah candles to the local Jewish community; each item they sell includes information about the local bees and how they’ve been impacted by the climate crisis.

Seed Experimentation at the Alliance Community Reboot

When William and Malya Levin decided to acquire land in southern New Jersey that had been in William’s family since his great-great-grandfather Moses Bayuk helped found the Alliance Colony in 1882, they determined that they would work in collaboration to farm their acreage. Calling it the Alliance Community Reboot, or ACRe, William and Malya’s vision was to create a farm with strong Jewish and agricultural components that were rooted in the values of sustainability, food justice, and Jewish education.

With these goals in mind, the Levins entered into an agreement with Nate Kleinman and Dusty Hinz, co-founders of the Experimental Farm Network, to use the land for sustainable agricultural research while their fields began a three year transition from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture. This research has primarily focused on developing crops and growing systems that they hope will sustain humans as the climate changes. The soil at ACRe was depleted after years of chemical fertilizers and intensive crop rotations, but it was the perfect site for experimentation. Kleinman, a Jewish farmer himself, planted rows of sorghum and cow peas in the dry soil at ACRe to see which seeds might do well in drought conditions. He acknowledged that this is a long-term and slow project without much potential for financial gain, which is why they set their network up as a non-profit collaboration. Kleinman summed up their work by simply saying, “We’re farming for a better future.” This past summer, ACRe launched a community supported agriculture program in their now-organic fields and started the next chapter of Jewish farming in New Jersey.

Congressional Advocacy at Adamah

On July 21, 2021, I received a “Hazon Advocacy Alert” in my email inbox. The email came from Janna Siller, the Adamah Farm Director and Advocacy Coordinator, and it offered details for a collective action for a “just and climate smart food system.” Siller knows her audience, a community of Jews who have been attending or hearing about Hazon Jewish food conferences, grassroots agriculture programs, and fundraising bike rides for years.

In the Jewish community, Hazon has been at the forefront of questioning whether processed or factory farmed food is truly kosher, or fit to eat. At Hazon food conferences, presenters and participants discuss the ethical implications of the kosher food laws as they reconsider what is appropriate to eat today. In Siller’s email, she reminded readers familiar with this kind of thinking that the Jewish kosher food system calls us to think about which food is acceptable. She argued that food that “makes our home [Earth] inhospitable to us” should never be acceptable. She explained that what she calls “climate conscious dining” is difficult for many people because of a lack of investment in “climate conscious farming.” She asked readers to join her and Hazon as they lobbied Congress to invest in “climate and agriculture research” to help farmers learn and adopt “climate-friendly agriculture conservation practices.” The email included a script and information about how to call congressional representatives. This type of advocacy encourages Jews to participate in climate activism in their daily lives. Work like Siller’s bridges the gap for Jews who are worried about climate change and who support Jewish community farms, but who do not live or work at those farms.

***

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2014 study, 78% of Jewish Americans say climate change is either a crisis or a major problem, the highest combined percentage of any religious group surveyed. Many American Jewish communities are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. The Shalom Institute in Malibu, California reopened its camp this summer after 95% of the Institute’s facilities were destroyed by the Woolsey Fire in 2018. It was a triumphant time for the Jewish community that returns to the Shalom Institute frequently to attend retreats, visit the farm, and to drop off their kids at summer camp. But as wildfires rage hotter and more frequently, other communities will face similar losses in the future if we do not change course immediately. Jewish farms like the one at the Shalom Institute are taking action because they see the effects of the climate crisis all around them.

Climate change is only the latest of many crises Jews have faced. Just like Jews in previous eras, Jewish community farming organizations are taking action to ensure a future not only for themselves, but for the planet. And as they engage in efforts like ecological restoration, reforestation, seed development, and political lobbying, they are helping others remember that rebuilding is possible after disasters. And there is still hope for the future if we are willing to work for it.

Adrienne Krone has a Ph.D. in American Religion from Duke University and is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Allegheny College. She studies religious food justice movements in North America and her current research project is an ethnographic and historical study of the Jewish community farming movement.

The post Jewish Farming and the Climate Crisis appeared first on The Revealer.

(A woman with a sign over her mask that reads in Spanish, “We are in a climate and ecologic emergency.” Photo credit: Natacha Pisarenko for AP.)

When Pope Francis issued Laudato Si in 2015, media outlets treated this historic encyclical on climate change and the environment as a “game changer.” One Jesuit priest told National Public Radio that the encyclical would have “far-reaching impact,” because it would encourage Catholics “to make major changes in what they consume and how they live their daily lives.”

While most media attention has focused primarily on the grassroots action, policy advocacy, and greening campaigns of certain politically progressive, predominately white religious activists, it has not begun to address the eco-friendly values and behaviors of communities like the Spanish-speaking Catholics whom I have met across Los Angeles. Well before the publication of Laudato Si, Latinx Catholic communities were already engaged in the types of sustainable behaviors that the encyclical encourages, such as cultivating their own vegetable gardens, reducing food waste, and abstaining from rampant consumerism. Yet their actions seldom attract outside attention because working-class, immigrant communities and other communities of color are rarely considered as authoritative leaders on matters of religion or the environment.

Too often, people assume that the working-class communities who routinely conserve electricity, take their cans to the recycling center, and ride the bus to school or work, do so because of economic circumstances rather than religious or environmental convictions. This is because “environmentalism” typically involves a classed moral imperative that environmental actions must be explicitly motivated by concern for the Earth. In this line of thinking, people who use public transit in order to reduce their carbon footprints are engaged in a virtuous environmental act. Meanwhile, people who use public transit because they cannot afford a car are excluded from the category of environmentalism.

American environmentalism is often associated with the types of political activism and consumerism embraced by white environmentalists, such as attending climate marches, installing solar panels, and purchasing a Prius. While those all are valid environmental strategies, my research among Spanish-speaking Catholics shows that there are many additional ways to be a religious environmentalist.

Latinx Catholics participate in their own distinct environmental traditions that combine Catholic sensibilities with Latin American culture and identity. These inherited practices include non-consumerist, home-based conservation measures such as backyard gardening, reusing old yogurt containers instead of purchasing Tupperware, and wearing hand-me-down clothing that was donated to a local church. Despite such longstanding practices, neither Latinx communities themselves, nor other self-identified environmental activists, tend to recognize Latinx communities’ environmentally sustainable behaviors as “environmental.”

In what follows, I share the environmental stories of three upwardly mobile, bilingual daughters of working-class immigrants: Rebeca, Elena, and Adriana (all pseudonyms). Each had been identified by local Catholic organizers as promising young leaders in their community and had been recruited to help develop a major project for Spanish-speaking Catholics in Los Angeles. When I met the women through a focus group in 2017, all three were in their twenties or thirties and had earned college degrees. They had gained entry into professional worlds, and all reported annual incomes of greater than $200,000.

Rebeca, Elena, and Adriana were familiar with basic Catholic environmental theology and mainstream white environmentalism. But through their personal stories of environmental practices in their families and communities, they articulated their own distinct definitions of Catholic environmentalism that centered on reducing food waste and caring for the laborers who produce our food. These women’s stories show that religious environmental actions can take many forms beyond monolithic understandings of white environmentalism. They demand that our notions of environmental authority must shift as well. 

Respecting Agricultural Workers and the Gifts of Nature

For Rebeca and Elena, two sisters who were the daughters of working-class Mexican immigrants, environmental values were deeply connected to their Catholic identities and their concerns for the poor. Together, they described a set of ecological principles that they had learned from their mother, a devout Catholic who taught her five children “what it was like to work at a bottom-tier level and struggle.”

By observing their mother’s daily habits and listening to her conversations and prayers, the sisters had been raised to respect the inherent value of the material goods their parents provided them – such as food and toys – and to appreciate the human labor that went into producing those gifts. Rebeca described her environmental values as “just basic Catholic social teaching” that promotes justice for the poor. And both sisters’ stories reflected a degree of uneasiness with their own material success given the ongoing struggles of many in the immigrant community that had raised them.

In response to my question about whether their faith spoke to environmental concerns, both sisters recounted their mother’s lessons about respecting the struggles of agricultural workers and appreciating the possessions they had. Earlier in the conversation, Elena had talked about global environmental topics such as clean energy sources and ocean pollution. But in response to my question about the intersection of environmental values and her Catholic faith, Elena told me that “being Catholic…[her] mom always brought [her] up to not be wasteful, and it was always hand in hand with church teachings, like social justice. You shouldn’t be wasteful; you should take what you need and if you can give to others.”

To illustrate this point, Elena recalled how her mother would purchase flowers from a particular vendor on the side of the road. The vendor had a bad knee and her mother would bring him home remedies to help with his injury. Sometimes she even paid him money for a bouquet without actually taking the flowers so he could sell those flowers to someone else. Elena’s brothers would also seek out that vendor when they wanted to purchase bouquets for their girlfriends, because they felt they were “helping someone in need and someone who is actually trying to work.”

(Photo credit: National Employment Law Project.)

Elena added that her family “always tried to recycle and to not be wasteful” because they were worried about the global environmental crisis. For her, recycling, sharing food, supporting local vendors, and championing green energy were all interconnected aspects of an expansive environmental commitment that she enacted on a local scale.

Rebeca added that their mother’s Catholic environmental teachings were “constant.” By way of example, she offered more stories of purchasing produce from vendors on the side of the road. If their mother saw an orange vendor, for example, she would point out how hard it must be for him to stand outside in the heat all day and how little money he probably earned for his hard work. Rebeca recalled that her mother “would give you this whole understanding of the person, not just some guy selling oranges that you’re buying even though you [already] have oranges at home.”

Elena asserted that these were all environmental practices, and they were all directly tied to her Catholic faith. Yet she struggled to articulate the precise connection. At first, she pointed to her mother’s frequent use of the familiar trope that they must eat their food because children were starving in Africa. The way her mother spoke of those malnourished children was “to use church teachings.” Elena concluded that her mother would always make her “very mindful that [she was] blessed to have the food that [she] did have” while others were lacking. “She always made us aware that we had to take care of nature around us and everything, because even then we could see that things weren’t going great for the environment.”

Elena’s general sense that her environmental values were Catholic, without being able to explain exactly how, makes sense given the context through which the sisters had learned about environmentalism: their mother’s daily prayers. Before each meal, their mother would offer a lengthy prayer asking God to bless everyone who had contributed to the meal they were about to eat, such as the campesinos who had harvested their vegetables. Prayers over Thanksgiving meals were especially detailed, Rebeca recalled, sometimes lasting more than ten minutes because their mother “had to bless everybody! You think about everything that went behind that platter of vegetables in front of you.”

Elena interjected to add that their mother would even bless the truck drivers who delivered the food to the market, a detail Rebeca confirmed. “Even the truck driver!” Rebeca exclaimed. “She would be talking about the person at the supermarket and all that.” Taken together, these lessons and prayers taught the sisters that “there is just all this value from what you can get from the earth… It’s not something to just toss, or take for granted.”

Through their stories, Rebeca and Elena articulated a form of environmentalism that focused on the just treatment of agricultural workers’ and their Catholic concerns for social justice. The local focus of their environmentalism was contextualized within a larger awareness that “things weren’t going great” for the environment, and so they supported the individual workers who produced their local food and showed respect and appreciation for the material blessings they had been afforded.

Concern for Food Waste and the Environment

For Adriana, who had immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico as a teenager, environmental values formed a core part of her identity as a “Catholic with conviction.” In contrast to her many peers who were “Catholic by tradition,” attending church only for social reasons or because of family pressures, Adriana emphasized that she had made an active choice to learn about her faith, cultivate a personal relationship with God, and discern God’s will in her life.

Being a Catholic with conviction meant constantly trying to improve herself and her surroundings by ensuring that her Catholic values affected every aspect of her life. This shaped her decisions about which friendships to pursue and how to spend her leisure time. It also contributed to a generalized environmental ethic of not wasting resources and respecting the gifts of creation – on behalf of the planet itself and also out of a concern for human communities who were suffering from hunger and other climate-related problems.

Adriana discussed the issue of food waste with me as she recounted the struggles that came with her decision to become a Catholic with conviction several years earlier. In her job at a television network that focused on celebrity gossip and entertainment news, Adriana’s turn to faith caused an internal conflict as she regretted “being part of a message that doesn’t go with where [her] beliefs are right now.” She felt bothered by many of the producers’ decisions about what to put on the air, such as structuring a whole episode around Kim Kardashian’s Instagram post while barely mentioning Pope Francis’ visit to the United States.

She also felt disturbed by her colleagues’ unsustainable relationships with food. Every time she looked in the trash, Adriana recalled, she would find perfectly good bananas, apples, and pastries. At first she thought the food had been discarded by mistake, but then she realized that her colleagues were routinely taking more food than they could eat and carelessly tossing the excess in the trash. She would sometimes remove food from the garbage right in front of her peers, even though it made them feel embarrassed.

(Photo credit: Getty Images.)

In one particularly memorable instance, Adriana collected several bananas from the trashcan, took them home to bake banana bread, and brought the bread back to share with her colleagues the next day. While they were initially appreciative of Adriana’s gift, they were disgusted when she told them the source of the bananas. Although aware that her coworkers were probably gossiping about her behind her back, Adriana felt that it was important to talk to them about their wasteful habits. “I never thought about those little details before,” she explained, “but now I perceive every single thing that they do and I always connect it with God. They throw food away and I always think that these are resources that can be used for other people who are in need.”

In Adriana’s story, the conversation easily flowed between superficiality and waste, two key aspects of American culture that she saw as conflicting with her Catholic values. In opposition to an American society that placed high value on things like internet stardom and women’s sexualized bodies, Adriana’s identity as a Catholic with conviction drove her to create a better world. While Adriana did not identify “environmentalism” as a distinct personal priority, demonstrating concern for food waste and the environment were basic parts of her Catholic commitment to being a good person and to creating a better society.

As time went on, Adriana both encouraged her producer to feature Pope Francis over Kim Kardashian, and she tried to prevent her colleagues from throwing precious resources into the trash. Becoming an environmentally-minded Catholic, she told me, “does have a lot of effect.” Environmental commitments like focusing on food, poverty, and waste were one component of that larger whole.

***

With the release of Laudato Si and other pro-environmental stances by leaders in other religious communities, there is growing recognition that religions might offer resources for addressing the climate crisis. But these stories focus largely on how clergy and religious texts might inspire people of faith to participate in environmental acts that look like mainstream, white environmentalism. They overlook the daily contributions of people like Rebeca, Elena, and Adriana, three of the countless Spanish-speaking Catholics in the United States who have been engaged in sustainable behaviors since long before religious leaders began issuing environmental edicts. And these stories fail to appreciate that only certain religious communities need to concern themselves with making “major changes in what they consume and how they live their daily lives” as a result of reading Laudato Si or other religious environmental texts.

Religiously inspired environmental actions, such as installing solar panels or participating in climate marches, are great ways of contributing to a more sustainable future, but they are not the only ways. The stories that Spanish-speaking Catholics have shared with me underscore that there are many different ways of engaging with environmental issues, and not all of them look the same as participation in mainstream, white environmentalism. If environmental leaders want to collaborate with religious communities as potential allies for responding to the climate crisis, it is imperative to recognize that “religious communities” are not a monolith whose actions and interests can be represented by powerful, white spokespeople. It is time to expand our limited conceptions of who can be an environmental authority.

Amanda J. Baugh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White.

The post Beyond Solar Panels and Priuses: The Overlooked Environmentalism of Latinx Catholics appeared first on The Revealer.

(A canal from Bellandur Lake in Bangalore, India is covered in toxic suds. Photo credit: MANJUNATH KIRAN via Getty Images.)

“When the close of the thousand aeons has come and life has been spent, there befalls a drought of many years that drives most of the creatures, of dwindling reserves and starving to their death. . . . The Fire of Annihilation then invades . . . [and] burns down all that is found on earth. . .”
—Mahabharata (c. 500–200 B.C.E. Translated by J. A. B. van Buitenen)

When the Water Burns…

On February 17, 2017, the two-mile-long Bellandur Lake in my hometown of Bangalore, India caught fire. Blueish-red flames broke out on the water. Smoke billowed from the water’s surface, carrying the putrid smell of raw sewage and acrid chemical pollutants across the Iblur village at its shore. For several years before this fire, dense white foam covered the lake. The surface of the water, an oily sudsy smelly grey, could only be glimpsed when the froth broke up. Because of the fire, trees on the lakeshore, green a decade before, were now ashen, ghostly relics. Smoke blackened the walls of a shrine dedicated to the goddess Kateriamman, a wilderness goddess, revered as the keredevaru, or the “Goddess of the Lake.” It charred the branches of the sacred Peepul tree and the snake shrines beneath it. The winds that swirled through the hillsides of the city blew a soapy froth into the streets, where it covered vehicles and pedestrians alike in a stinging sudsy film. 

A month after the fire, someone sent me an unaired video interview for a Bangalorean television network with a woman named Gauri. She was a middle-aged woman of the Tigala (horticulturist caste) and a resident of Iblur village. In the interview, she haltingly said she had grown up near the water in a traditional horticultural family. She spoke powerfully of her memories of the once-verdant landscape: there had been beautiful sacred copses of green trees and the lake’s blue waters were studded with pink lotus blossoms that her family harvested to worship the goddess Kateriamman.

Standing in front of the small temple, Gauri recalled the once crystal-clear underground stream that bubbled beneath the deity and flowed into the sacred lake. She evoked the Hindu poetic myths of the sacred region, in Sanskrit termed the sthalapurana, or “the myths of sacred place,” to describe the area. Visible behind her were the toxic suds that had engulfed the edge of the once-beautiful body of water. 

Gauri gestured despairingly toward the fiery lake and the shore littered with plastic bags, feces, dead fish, and refuse. She exclaimed, “The lake is burning. We live in this world of filth. This sthalapurana has become a terrifying tale.” She paused, rendered breathless by the stench of the water, a mix of sewage and chemical bleach. She asked, her voice rising in anger, “Do you see this mess? The water burns…My lungs are on fire! Look at it… What hell (naraka) is this?” She then pointed to the temple and cried, “The Lake Goddess is now absent, raped by these developers! Maybe She has run away from this hell!”

(Firefighters extinguish a fire on Bellandur Lake. Photo credit: MANJUNATH KIRAN via Getty Images.)

Rocked by a paroxysm of coughing, tired from grief and anger, she asked with rising apprehension, “How can anyone live without water? What life is this?”

Water in Hinduism

The loss of water is a potent question for a religion like Hinduism, where water is thought to be a divine fluid and a gift of the gods’ grace and kindness. For Hindus, water is sacred, the origin of all reality, offering a sense of lucent possibility, a new rising, a birth and a rebirth. Of the Hindu Vedic corpus, the oldest text, the Rig Veda, complied about 3700 B.C.E. speaks of water, (known as ap in Sanskrit,) as primordial, contained in an egg from which everything else was born. The world was said to have been “originally water without light” where “there was darkness, wrapped around by darkness, and all around was water” (Salilam apraketam; Rig Veda X.29.3).

The Rig Veda also suggests that several gods embody water. Apas is the god of waters. Indra is god of the storm. Varuna is god of the sky and upholder of natural law, a god referred to in the texts directly and indirectly as connected to water. And finally, we find Parjanya, the god of the raincloud, who represents water in the form of rain, which sustains life on Earth and creates a bridge to the heavens. Hindus consider the water falling from the heavens to Earth — including the monsoon rains that soak the subcontinent and form rivers and lakes — as a material and spiritual bridge between the two realms of life and death.

Rivers and water bodies are feminine goddesses in Hinduism, known for their fertility and beauty, who were made to descend from the heavens by human vows and penances, bringing abundant life to India’s arid earth through their pure waters. Moral dirt, or what Western traditions call sin, known as papa in Sanskrit, is perceptible as physical dirt in these pure waters, all of which are seen as evocations of the great river goddess Ganga, purifier of all beings.

Hindus have assimilated water into their everyday lives, where its otherworldly origins are made more potent and yet more manageable. Hindus use water to bathe the idols of the gods (abhishkam), to consume as sacred water (tirtha), and to purify the world at large (prokshanam). Water is thus primeval and essential in Hinduism – an elixir of earthly life but also a sacred being with life of its own. Water purifies bodies and ritual spaces. It cools parched people and deities alike.

But water as a godly being also needs care and nourishment.

The tension that Gauri’s despair points to – between the significance of water in Hinduism on one hand, and the sordid, polluted state of water in many populated areas of the subcontinent, on the other – forces us to reflect on Gauri’s existential question of a parched life where watery divinity is desiccated. In cosmological terms the question is one of the potential homelessness of the gods: where can the gods go when their homes are desecrated by pollution? In real world terms the question is of the existence of life on the planet: if water is life, what is a life without water?

From the City of Lakes… 

A few centuries ago, Bangalore was home to a thousand or more sacred lakes and man-made rainwater catchment ponds called “tanks” in the local English. So ubiquitous were these bodies of water that Bangalore was known in antiquity as kalayananagara, or “the city of lakes.” Every lake had a resident god or goddess, its own keredevaru (gods of the lake) who locals worshipped using the lake’s water and the produce grown around it. 

These water bodies known collectively as kere in Kannada, combined with the sacred river Cauvery, formed a unique watery ecology in the Deccan plateau region. Canals known as rajakaluve (royal canals) led from one kere to another alongside natural streams, distributing excess water by gravity via check dams and locks and thereby allowing the entire region to soak up rainwater and prevent flooding. Far from rivers and oceans, the agrarian area that is now Bangalore depended on this riparian system. 

(Bellandur Lake in 1989. Photo courtesy of Praveen Singh via The News Minute.)

Agaram Lake, a large body of water upstream from Bellandur, has also been covered with toxic foam in recent years. Archeologists have found stone tablets at Agaram’s shore, covered in slime, with inscriptions dating to the 9th century that speak of its usage for drinking water and agriculture. Enlightened medieval rulers of Bangalore, including feudatory lords such as Kempegowda (approximately 1513- 1570) and Muslim rulers such as Hyder Ali (1720-1782), excavated kere and built rajakaluve to save and transport rainwater. Constructing lakes and canals were spiritual endeavors for leaders of all faiths, guaranteeing punya or merit in the karmic scale. Kings gave the lakes as sacred gifts, known as bittuvate, to the gods. In return, the gods granted them the right to farm by the lakes and to fish from them.

In the 1970s, there were still 285 of these sacred lakes in Bangalore, making the city self-sufficient in its water needs. 

…to the Parched City 

But today, Bangalore has fewer than 80 lakes.

In the 1990s the city became home to a successful Information Technology industry. Known as “The Silicon Valley of Asia,” Bangalore has since been subject to unchecked urbanization. The many software companies that sprung up during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s attracted hundreds of thousands of skilled IT professionals from across the country, with thousands more unskilled migrants moving from villages and small towns to the city in search of work. As a result, the city’s population doubled between 2000 and 2020 from 6 million to 12 million.

According to studies by the Indian Institute of Science in the city, rapid urbanization and development is making the city uninhabitable. There has been a 1005% increase in paved surfaces and a decline of 88% in the city’s vegetation between 1973 and 2016. The size of Bangalore has more than tripled in just over a decade to 800 square km– nearly half the size of London — swallowing open land. Developers, in collusion with corrupt city government officials, have encroached upon the sacred kere system, dumping construction rubble and raw sewage into the lakes.

And so, Bangalore can no longer sustain its water resources. The city is perennially thirsty.

The Cost of Thirst 

Every day, Bangalore pumps 1.4 billion liters of water through its pipes, but still fails to meet the city’s needs by over 800 million liters. Rolling managed droughts are a reality of city life, especially in the increasingly hot summers; the government announces which neighborhoods will get a few hours of water supply every few days. 

Most of Bangalore’s drinking water comes from the sacred Cauvery River that is over 60 miles away from the city. The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board was established as India’s first water-supply management board and, as such, it carried the onus of carting the Cauvery to the city, which is elevated over 1,500 feet above the river. The scheme became operational in 1971 with huge pumping stations to pump the water uphill. 

By 2016, the city had pumped 1,400 million liters of water a day from the Cauvery River. And this water comes at a prohibitive cost: $48.9 million in 1993, $150 million each year between 1997-2002, and $450 million in 2013. Today, the city still suffers from a water deficit. As a result of its unchecked development and rapid growth, the city now requires 1,700 to 1,800 million liters every day from the Cauvery River. In summer, the demand shoots up to 2,100-2,200 million liters daily. And over a million liters are lost per day from leakage and theft. This is no well-kept secret; several reports on the state of Bangalore water supply describe the urgency of water scarcity and the disruptive effects of water insecurity on residents’ lives. 

(Bangalore, India. Photo credit: Getty Images.)

As early as 1991, despite the constant and costly pumping of Cauvery water to the city, water was so scarce that residents started digging private piped borewells into the city’s aquifer, where they hit clear, pure water at 100 feet. Bangalore has no laws preventing private drilling and many new communities built on the city’s edge get all their water needs met by draining the aquifer.

Many roadways in the city developed huge sinkholes  that swallowed buildings whole as the groundwater was sucked up through these giant straws, destabilizing the earth underneath the city. 

Today, as the city population climbs to over 12 million, borewells sink deeper and deeper into the earth. Borewell operators say they must now dig 1,000 feet to hit water, almost as low as the River Cauvery. As the water table in the aquifer sinks, the kere get drier and drier as gravity drains the lakes, rivers, and swamps to feed the aquifer.

The story of Bangalore’s galloping water scarcity and the mismanagement of its water resources, raises the question of whether we can nurture nature. Have we so polluted these natural resources that they can no longer recover? Can we come to grips with the intersecting and multiplying problems of climate change? Is it possible to increase the capacities of religion, spirituality, and ethics to meet these challenges?

At the Edge of the Abyss…

A small dark granite image of the deity Kateriamman sits in the temple at Bellandur. She is both the goddess of the lake and, as the priest of the temple tells me, the goddess of the edge, enu nalli, because her temples sit between land and water, between the wilderness and the cultivated. But Kateriamman sits on another edge as well—the edge of the abyss of total ecological collapse.  

An Indian water crisis is looming and Bangalore will be ground zero for it. On June 19, 2018, the National Institute for Transforming India, an Indian government think tank, warned that India’s water shortage is perilous. Over 600 million people will be affected by it. In developing countries like India, women are usually tasked with foraging for water for the family, often carrying it for miles. Water shortages will most likely affect women and the urban poor, women like Gauri. 

As scholars of Hinduism have noted, in Hindu texts there is a close yet oppositional link between dharma (righteousness, duty, justice; from dhr, or that which sustains) and the despoiling of the Earth, particularly of water. When dharma declines, human beings despoil nature.

The lakes of Bangalore have been ruined by rapid urban development. Land prices in the city skyrocketed 1,000% in the last two decades, and so the land under the water of the lakes was more valuable to developers than the waterbody itself. There has been a systematic if erratic process over the past 30 years to deaden the lakes, to desiccate them, so that they can be encroached upon even more. Over 100 lakes have been lost since 1970 to encroachments by the Bangalore Development Authority, to real estate developers, to garbage dumps, and to illegal buildings.

The remaining lakes that have water, such as Bellandur, are dumping grounds for construction rubble, outfalls of sewage and industrial pollutants, and toxic algae, though they are surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in India. An estimated 500 million liters of untreated sewage reaches Bellandur Lake every day, combined with a cocktail of chemicals from small-scale manufacturing – mills, printers, dyers, and metal works plants – creating a “toxic community” around it. People who live around the lake cough constantly, and often get bronchitis and other lung diseases.

The cost of this pollution is staggering. The World Bank noted that in 2017 India spent over $600 million treating water-borne diseases. With increasing pollution, a massive public health crisis is brewing in India’s metastasizing cities. 

At Bellandur, the global and intimate violence of climate change and development have come home to roost. Prime Minister Modi’s high profile 2014 Swachch Bharat (“Clean India”) campaign to address India’s pollution collided with his government’s focus on industry, modernity, and development, leading the campaign to be relegated to a few well-circulated photo-ops of elected officials wielding new brooms in already clean streets. Meanwhile, Indian air and water pollution increased, protected forests were illegally logged and mined, and cities were trashed.

Experts fear that Bangalore will soon be uninhabitable. And though the city municipal government has claimed it will clean up the lakes in 2022, and the National Green Tribunal has issued legal notices to all of the agencies involved, the lake continues to be a toxic mess. Municipal leaders have been apathetic at best and negligent at worst, even blaming the Tigala horticulturists by suggesting that they set the fires to clear vegetation. The city government also claimed there was no toxic smell on the lake and that the air was clear, though citizen activist groups easily disputed such claims, calling Bellandur a huge “septic tank.” 

Manjunatha, a shopkeeper in the neighborhood of Iblur, said, “Issues such as a major fire or toxic foam or an unbearable stench have become a common phenomenon in this area. When these occurred for the first time in 2015 and 2016, they were huge spectacles. But nowadays these appear to have become a new ‘normal’ in our area.”

Gauri and others who live near Bangalore’s remaining lakes say the keredevaru, the divine beings that inhabit water, have fled because of the pollution and the lack of care for their homes.

Where do water gods go when the world is desiccated? How do Hindus, in the creative complexity of how they value, define, express and practice ethics, approach the Age of Climate Crisis? Or, simply put, is the Hindu religious imagination being eviscerated by climate change? 

If, as Mohamed Meziane recently noted, secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then it is natural to ask: did secularization engender climate change? Is secularization an uncomfortable inheritance of colonialism and also a set of eroding ecological processes? This does not imply that we simply critique secularism, or unthinkingly pivot to poisonous Hindu fundamentalism. Rather, we must reject fundamentalism and its unholy alliance with modern neoliberal development. Re-turning to religion, we have to ask ourselves: what does the moral stewardship of this Earth involve? And can religion afford us a vocabulary and tactics to enact such stewardship that restores our ecological resources? 

A Way Forward…

Gauri’s lakeside requiem demands from us, at the very least, to take water seriously, as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich suggests, as “good to think with.” As many anthropologists have argued, we need to re-center water as natural and elemental to life, including religious life. Thinking about water within the context of religion suggests that religions like Hinduism need to be re-examined in light of the current environmental crisis, as religion helps to shape our attitudes toward nature in both conscious and unconscious ways.

Religions provide basic interpretive stories of who we are, what nature is, where we have come from, and where we are going. What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to nature. And religious worlds create ethical and moral frameworks that structure how we think of nature as either exploitable or as needing stewardship.

As life on the planet is unraveling in ways both seen and unseen, Gauri’s elegy for the runaway goddess suggests that the fragile understanding of the lake as a sacred being worthy of protection has dissolved in the face of modern urban development. The question that Gauri leaves us with is this: can people of faith reconstruct an understanding of the wilderness as sacred to win the ecological battle against the forces of development? Can we pledge to restore the planet enough to persuade the goddess to return to the lake?

Tulasi Srinivas is professor of anthropology, religion and transnational studies at the Marlboro Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Her next book The Missing Goddess, focuses upon women, water and eco-violence in her hometown of Bangalore.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out the short documentary The Burning Lake by Tulasi Srinivas.

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The author would like to offer these acknowledgements: I am grateful to the Luce-ACLS fellowship in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs which I received in 2017-18, for allowing me time to think about Bangalore’s burning lakes. The Luce-ACLS invited me to give a keynote at a conference at Arizona State University, where I developed some initial ideas for this paper and some enduring friendships sharing concerns for the environment. I am particularly grateful to Toby Volkman of the Luce Foundation and Prof. Ann Gold for their generous mentorship. My colleagues at Emerson College—Dean Amy Ansell, Professors Wyatt Oswald and Jon Honea—have been invaluable intellectual partners. Prof. Jack Hawley, whose friendship has been such a gift, invited me to speak at Columbia University in the South Asia seminar series, which developed this article further, as did Prof. Tuhina Ganguly at Shiv Nader University for their Monsoon series, and Prof. Vandana Madan at Delhi University. I am grateful to them all. Additionally, I thank Vishwanath Srikantaiah of Biome Environmental Solutions, Bangalore for his time and help. And finally, my gratitude to the editors of the Revealer for inviting me to contribute this piece.

The post A Lake of Fire, A Runaway Goddess, and the Perils of Climate Change in India appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

At the 2012 Republican National Convention, presidential-hopeful Mitt Romney mocked President Obama for saying that rising sea levels were one of the greatest threats to our country. The crowd erupted in laughter. The image of a Commander-in-Chief who worried about water made for an easy joke about a weak and out-of-touch leader. Romney puffed his chest and assured his audience that he would protect America against “legitimate” threats by strengthening our military and securing our borders. The audience loved it.

Earlier in his political career, Romney had actually spoken out against man-made climate change and insisted that the U.S. must do more to protect the planet. But by the time he sought the Republican presidential nomination, Romney changed his tune to appeal to the corporations that resisted environmental regulations and the white evangelicals who opposed climate science.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

In the nine years since Romney lost the presidential election, the United States has witnessed an avalanche of climate catastrophes: destructive and more frequent hurricanes, deadly flooding, excessive draught, dangerous heatwaves, and horrific wildfires that look like scenes from apocalyptic movies. These same years have also witnessed a rise in environmental activism, spearheaded especially by teenagers and young adults. Climate strikes and marches have taken place across the globe as young people cry out for political and corporate leaders to save the planet before it becomes uninhabitable.

Where does religion fit within this matrix of addressing (and denying) climate change? Religious leaders and communities wield incredible power. Many have used their influence to raise awareness of the climate crisis and to lobby for change. But too many others have failed to tap into their power or have outright denied climate change, and we all suffer for it.

The climate crisis touches on nearly every political issue we face, from immigration, war, and housing to economics, crime, and employment. To ignore the climate crisis, or to confront it slowly in ways that are not effective enough, is to invite a host of catastrophes as people are forced to flee their homes, as nativism ramps up to oppose immigration, as resources become scarce, as industries collapse, as products become more expensive, as electrical grids fail, and so on, and so on. The climate crisis could very well be the most important issue of our time. That is why we are bringing you this special issue of the Revealer on religion and the climate crisis.

Our special issue opens with Tulasi Srinivas’s article “A Lake of Fire, A Runaway Goddess, and the Perils of Climate Change in India,” in which she recounts how the lakes in her hometown of Bangalore, India are filled with waste and, at times, literally on fire. She questions if the goddesses and gods, who some Hindus believe reside at those lakes, have fled because of the pollution and what that means for India and the rest of the world. Next, in “Beyond Solar Panels and Priuses,” Amanda Baugh explores Latinx Catholics’ often-overlooked conservation practices, and she reflects on how most environmental activism is centered on white Americans and why that must change. Then, in “Jewish Farming and the Climate Crisis,” Adrienne Krone reports on the Jewish farming movement and how Jewish farming organizations are taking a multi-pronged approach to combat climate change.

Robin Veldman gives us a different perspective on religion and the climate crisis in “Christian Nationalism and Climate Skepticism,” as she investigates the link between Christian nationalists and climate science deniers to make sense of why people who want the United States to be an avowedly Christian nation tend to reject the realities of climate change. Finally, the special issue includes an excerpt from Amanda Baugh’s book God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White to explore how some religious groups are working to make environmental activism more racially and religiously diverse.

Our special issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion and Climate Change.” For this episode, we sat down with three of the writers from this issue to discuss what various communities across the United States are doing, or not doing, about the climate crisis, as well as what needs to happen to make climate change an urgent priority among America’s diverse religious communities. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We need not wonder how future generations will judge our handling of the climate crisis; we already have the answer. They should condemn us. And we should condemn ourselves for not doing nearly enough, for allowing corporations to prioritize shareholder profits above everything else, for letting media give space to ridiculous climate change deniers, and for not joining Greta Thunberg and her comrades in denouncing our political leaders until they make the climate crisis their most urgent priority. Of course, religions have much to say about judgment, and about how people should live their lives. Religious communities must therefore do more to combat climate change. And all of us, religious or otherwise, must lobby our elected officials to make the climate crisis a top concern that demands their action.

I hope the articles in this special issue inspire you to act on behalf of the planet and the people most directly affected by climate change. Addressing the climate crisis may well be the greatest imperative of our time.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Special Issue: Religion and the Climate Crisis appeared first on The Revealer.