Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Lauren Kuby: Welcome everybody. I'm the Manager of Events and Community Engagement here, and I wanna welcome you all and welcome to Melanie Bachman who's here who is a school board member. It's great to see you in part of the interfaith movement. We have a lot of community members here, and we're all so glad to see you. I'd like to introduce Doug, who I count as a friend of mine and someone I've met working on Earth Day activities across the valley, and he really can bring out a crowd.

Let me tell you, we had that Walk for Climate Justice two and a half years ago and you got a couple 100 people on a Saturday morning, a scorching Saturday, to come attend that event. I was amazed at your community organizing skills. Reverend Doug Bland has long been the Pastor of the Community Christian Church since 1994, and he's Co-Executor of Arizona Interfaith Power & Light, which is the reason he's here today. That group is an interfaith response to climate change, and it's composed of churches, synagogues and mosques throughout the valley. How many total?

Reverend Bland: Thirty-two.

Lauren Kuby: Thirty-two, so 32 faith-based institutions united to fight climate change. He graduated from the College of Idaho and completed his seminary training at Duke University. Under his leadership, his church, the Community Christian Church which is just North of Broadway on College, it won the City of Tempe's Diversity Award from the City Human Relations Commission. That was in 2003, for promoting interfaith multiethnic storytelling concerts. Doug is a big storyteller, as you'll see from his talk.

Doug is an environmentalist, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and a member of the Arizona Ecumenical Council Environmental Committee. His work with Interfaith Power & Light, the mission is to inspire and mobilize Arizona's faith-based community to build an equitable and just future for all, sustainable future for all as well. With that, we welcome Doug to our sustainability series talks. [Clapping]

Reverend Bland: Okay. Well, I'm glad to be here, and I thank you to Lauren and Geos for making room at the table for a variety of people to speak and to contribute. This is a place that brings scientists together and academicians, but Lauren, especially and others at Geos have been open to other voices as well and have really been a strong supporter for our group and for others, so thanks for that. I got this clerical collar shirt some time ago, and there are not many occasions when you can wear a green clerical collar shirt.

I thought surely this would be one, so—we're talking about is God green and interfaith response to climate change. One of the things that I hope for in regard to connection with the natural world and concern about climate change, is that it will eventually bring us together. People who are opposed for a variety of ideological reasons now, might come together. Science and religion may come together. A little levity with both proclaiming the end is near, the scientist holding a global warming text and the prophet holding the sacred scriptures of some kind.

Science and religion finally agree. There are other examples that I cling to. Does anybody remember the We Campaign? This was from 2008. We've got a video that Leslie can show with Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, sitting on the same cough together and then Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich also.

[Pause]

Reverend Bland: Can you believe that that really happened? I mean, we're so far apart these days, that we'd never sit on the same couch together much less banter like that. It was refreshing. I've got a personal stake in that. On the right is my brother, Al, and I'm on the left, and if you imagine any continuum, whether it's religious or political or taste or whatever, Al is way on one end of the continuum and I'm clear on the other end. Every summer we get together and we go backpacking in some beautiful part of the country, usually in Idaho, where we're from.

The cabin that we sometimes hike to, somebody's written on it, the higher you get, the higher you get. It's the natural world that brings my brother and I together across ideological divides, but whenever voting day comes on November, we make sure we both go to the polls, less the opposition win by one vote. The same kind of commonality or common ground is found in the religious traditions, the religious sacred texts of religions all over the world.

Do you remember Terry Jones in 2010, he was the fundamentalist pastor in Florida, who was planning this Burn the Koran Day and people were very concerned about it. We were afraid for our soldiers fighting in distant lands, that they would be retaliated against, and connections between faith traditions might be threatened. Here in Tempe, we've got a strong interfaith group, and several representatives of that group are here in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be at a meeting. Thanks for their support today.

When Terry Jones was planning on doing this burning of the Koran, we decided we needed to have a show of solidarity and get together. We met at the mosque. We didn't know whether we'd have 20, 30 people there or not. We could see from the courtyard of the mosque that the football stadium was filling up, traffic was bad. Why would anybody wanna come out? We had 350 standing room only at this event where we processed with the sacred scriptures, the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, while everybody stood in respect.

Then we put the sacred texts on a table and everybody—we had the three Abrahamic religions telling stories from those sacred scriptures. If you look very deep into those scriptures, you actually don’t have to look very deep, they're commonalities in a connection with the natural world. From the Koran, "There's no creature on earth or a bird that flies with wings, except that they are nations, communities like you." Again, from the Koran, "Eat and drink from the promise of Allah and do not commit abuse on the earth spreading corruption."

From the Torah, 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," and the first creation story from Genesis where God puts human beings in the Garden of Eden to till and to keep, to tend and defend. From the Christian scriptures, many Christians every Sunday when they gather, focus on the Lord's Prayer where the prayer is "Your kingdom will come, on earth as it is in heaven," not an other earthly world, but focused very much on earth and Jesus' commandment to consider the lilies.

Emily Dickinson, the great American poet, said this was the only commandment that she ever consistently observed. The green Bible, you may have heard of the red letter edition where all of Jesus' words are printed in red text. They published a Bible that is called the green Bible, where every text that has anything to do with creation, nature and our responsibility as stewards, is printed in green. It's literally filling at least a third of the scriptures. I've got people in my church, who whenever I preach and start talking about the environment, I see them roll their eyes. I mean, how can you help it when it's so filled with so many texts.

Actually, the Bible and Torah and Koran are in many ways secondary text. The primary text is nature itself. What the Bible does is tell stories about how God leads Abraham and Sarah out underneath the stars at night and says, "Your descendents will be as many as these stars in the sky, as many as the grains of sands on the beach." The Bible takes us to the river Jabbok, where Jacob wrestles with an angel and doesn't let go until Jacob's finally blessed. The 23rd psalm where God is a Shepard who leads us beside still waters and helps us lie down in green pastures.

Probably the best nature writing that the world has ever known, not just scriptures, but the world, comes from Job. Job is doubting and God speaks from the world wind, takes him outside and just asks him questions. "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Do you know what gives the horse its strength or helps the eagle glide so gracefully? Do you know the house where the snows are kept?" Page after page after page, and by the end of it, Job is schooled in wisdom and also comforted.

I don’t know how many of you find yourself comforted when you go out into the natural world and find a connection there. It's caused people like Augustine to say, "Some people in order to discover God, read books, but there is a great book, the very appearance of created things. Look above you. Look below you. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, he set before your eyes the things that he has made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?"

Martin Luther, "God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees and in the flowers and in the clouds and the stars." This is my pantheon of eco-justice saints. A new one, we'll see how this unpacks, but the new Pope has taken the name of the patron saint of ecology, Francis, as his own name. On his inaugural homily, he said, "That the vocation of being a protector, involves everybody, not just Christians, but everyone, and it means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world."

The Dalai Lama, 'Today more than ever before, life has to be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not just nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life." Bill McKibben is the genius behind 350.org. The print that I've got here is too small probably to read, but let me summarize. It's a great quote. He says that they've done this poll in American, and they've asked Christians or they've asked Americans where did this quote appear, "That God helps those who help themselves?"

Seventy-five percent of Americans say, "Well, it's in the Bible. It's obviously in the Bible." He's saying, "It is not in the Bible, in fact, it's the opposite of what the Bible teaches." The Bible has this radical love of neighbor, not just of self. He says he would be like a group of scientist getting together and concluding that Newton's Laws say that apples fall up from gravity. They're just plain wrong. Americans are wrong when they say that, "God helps those that help themselves," is part of the biblical message.

The Patriarch, leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians in Constantinople has been called the Green Patriarch, and he's saying here in this quote that we've traditionally thought that for one human being to sin against another was our definition of sin, but he's saying if you exterminate a species, make it go instinct. If you drain a wetland, if you clear cut a forest, if you devastate the nature world, that's a sin as well. He takes people on boats to visit some of the most polluted places in the world, so he's got political leaders, scientists and religious leaders on the boat together.

These are people who don't know how to talk to each other, but they're on this boat for a week, and they've got no choice. By the end of the week, the Patriarch has them dialoguing and looking for solutions. Wangari Maathai was an African Nigerian woman, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for empowering women and planting trees. I've added others in my pantheon, Annie Dillard, Tuesday was her birthday, and one of my favorite books is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where she just spent a year in the Blue Ridge, living in this cabin and reflecting on life and religion.

Then also Mary Oliver, The Summer Day, ending with that question, "Tell me, what will you do with your one wild sacred life?" This is just a few of dozens and dozens of environmental groups, faith-oriented, that have been established. Evangelical Environmental Network, Southern Baptist Environmental Climate Initiative, I don’t know if that was a surprise to you, but it was to me, National Council of Churches, 34 denominations working together on environmental eco-justice.

Then interfaith groups, like the National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Green Faith and Interfaith Power & Light, which I'll say more about. Jewish group, Council on Environment and Jewish Life, is that right? Does somebody know other than that? Then a Muslim environmental group. They've done some creative things. This happened in Thailand. The monks are trying to save this forest.

It's scheduled to be clear cut, and they don’t know how to do it. They ordained the trees, and they wrap the saffron robe around the trees. The loggers arrive to cut down the trees, and they didn’t dare desecrate the forest by cutting down the trees. The Anglicans have given us the carbon fast during Lent, so between Ash Wednesday and Easter, different activities you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. The low watch Shabbat and, of course, "What would Jesus drive," and the real profound question if you're a biker, "why would Jesus drive?" [Laughter]

All of this sounds really so good, but it's not as simple and as straight forward as this part of the story that I've shared with you goes. Every good story has to have a conflict, and this has certainly got a lot of conflict in it. This was a campaign called Resisting the Green Dragon, a biblical response to one of the greatest deceptions of our day. People saw people of faith getting involved in being stewards of creation and they were sought as a direct attack on capitalism, on America, on Christianity.

That's what the green dragon is, is this environment concern. The green dragon threatens your children, and it's sponsored by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and for the Heartland Institute. This is two organizations that are funded mostly by fossil fuels, Exxon primarily, Chevron and the Koch Brothers. They've got a campaign for the Heartland Institute with the Unibomber saying, "I still believe in global warming, do you?" Agenda 21 was something that came out of Rio in 1992, and it's just motherhood and apple pie, non-binding, involuntary.

It combats poverty, especially in developing countries, promotes health and sustainability, protects the atmosphere, combats deforestation, empowers children and youth and NGOs and local authorities and indigenous people and farmers. Well, this is dangerous. Glenn Beck says so. He's got this new thriller, and it's called Agenda 21. This used to be called America, now it's just the republic. There's no president, no congress, no freedom, there's only Agenda 21. It's a plot to take away our God given right to make money, capitalism.

We did a statement on climate change and there are copies of a reflection back there on this letter. We got over 100 religious leaders in Arizona that have signed onto it. Basically it says, climate change is real and it's a threat. We affirm the scientific findings and say that sometimes scientists, though there's often a divide between science and religion, scientists are often God's contemporary prophets. There are things that individuals can do, but even more important, it's not enough to change light bulbs. We need to change public policy as well.

In the process of trying to get people to sign onto this, I've run into some of the conflict. I heard from a bishop of a church, whose denomination I won't mention, that we shouldn't be involved in modern things, like ecology. I'm thinking, "Where in the world have you been?" [Laughter] Then on the other end, I've got a colleague, who I kept calling and emailing, "Would you sign onto this letter?" Finally, I cornered her, and she said, "We're an open and affirming congregation, so we welcome gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual people to our church, but to introduce an environmental issue is really controversial." [Laughter]

I'm thinking, "When did the environment become more controversial than homosexuality?" Sort of predicted by Lynn White, the "Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis" was an article that he wrote in Science Magazine in 1967, and he said basically the problems we have with our relationship with the natural world, comes from the Judeo-Christian story and focus on dominion over rather than relationship with. Of course, James Watt, former Secretary of the Interior, who testified, and this is the Secretary of the Interior, who says we don’t need to worry about natural resources.

After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back. This is just a graft that shows the ideological political divide between republican and democrat, respondent saying that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news, Republicans saying mostly yes and democrats not as much. It's astounding to me, I remember historically, many of the strongest conservationists have been conservatives. You can hear the connection in the words between conservation and conservative.

I wanna tell you a story about one congregation that I know best in our struggle to be more faithful stewards, this is Community Christian Church, where I've been for 19 years. I'll tell you a little bit about the things we have done and try to put our stewardship in the context of the wider efforts that we're doing. As Lauren said, we do a lot of storytelling events. We see storytelling as a way to bridge the differences that exist between different cultures and religious traditions. We’ve done a program called I Help along with a number of other congregations.

The Methodist church next door has been a leader in this, so we open our Fellowship Hall to homeless people on a regular basis and feed them. We decided after a year and a half of prayer and Bible study, that we were gonna be open and affirming to GLBTQ people. We take water to the desert through an effort called Humane Borders. This is a group of—average worship of this church is 75 people, so a small group of people doing I think good, creative, courageous things. The hardest thing has been trying to do something about being good stewards of creation.

I've got a theory. I think those other things, ask us to write a check, ask us to donate a little time, but any time we delve very far into environmental issues, it really questions deeply engrained habits and calls into question our lifestyles. There's some real resistance there in me and in other people I think, too. I've been preaching about this stuff for years without hardly any effect that I could see, and then we were having a planning retreat. We were planning Bible studies and retreats and different things we were gonna do, and at some point, Mia Sharp stood up, this is Melanie's daughter, and said, "What about the animals?"

It was like one of those E.F. Hutton moments, everybody stopped and everybody said, "Yeah, what about the animals?" I thought to myself, "Like I haven't been saying what about the animals for years?" [Laughter] Nobody listened to me, but they listened to Mia. Then somebody said, "We ought to have a green team," and everybody said, "Yeah, we ought to have a green team." I thought to myself, "Like I haven't been saying we ought to have a green team for years?" We formed a green team, and they helped us look at our carbon footprint, and we did an assessment of our facilities.

This is our sanctuary [laughter], maybe not quite that old, but my idea was, let's just slap some solar panels up on that baby, and that'll be sexy and it'll be a witness to the community and we'll be leaders in solar energy. There were wiser heads than mine that said, "Before you do that, you need to plug up the holes." This building is 50, 60 years old, and every time we put in a new air conditioning unit or electrical system, we didn’t worry about plugging up the old holes. Energy was cheap.

You'd just go up through the ceiling so they suggested we needed to start plugging up the holes, so we started doing that. Replacing windows, planting trees around the property, and the biggest bang for the buck was changing more efficient lighting. Finally, we did get solar panels in the back parking lot. We've got shaded parking as well as the solar panels. One of the best things we did was join Interfaith Power & Light, and I wanna tell you a little bit about that. We were the 32nd state affiliate of this organization, and now there are 40.

Before I forget it, we've got board members from AZIPL that are here. Would you mind standing up? Chuck is our Treasurer and Mary Elizabeth is Co-Executive Director [clapping]. Craig is our marketing finance person and George is a leader who has spoken here at this event before. Thanks for their support [clapping]. We’ve got 14,000 congregations around the country now, and as I said, we've got 32 in the state. We've got one mosque and one synagogue and most of the rest are Christian.

The tagline is a religious response to climate change, and the mission is to mobilize people of faith in Arizona to reduce the causes of global climate change through education, advocacy, action and prayer. Each one of those, to educate, one of the programs we do is called Cool Congregations where we teach people how to reduce their carbon footprint in their household. We also call it Cool Hacienda. We work with churches to help them reduce their carbon footprint and save energy.

Mary Elizabeth has taken the lead on that, and her estimate is that with St. Matthews Catholic Church, a Hispanic church in or near 85040 which has been called the most toxic zip code in the country, not in the city, not in the county, but in the country, a real blatant example of environmental racism. In this area is St. Matthews Catholic Church, and we save them, because of mostly lighting retrofits and changing out refrigerators, an estimated $9,000.00 on their energy bill which can go to mission and ministry and work rather than to the utility companies.

We try to help people reduce their carbon footprint, and we've got a program called Cool Harvest, where we take a look at the role of our diet in our carbon footprint. They say 18 to 19 percent of our carbon footprint is made up of the food that we eat, mostly because it gets transported so far to come to our table. We have a potluck dinner, usually vegetarian, and we watch a video, this one was narrated by Carmen Diaz and has little clips about the role of food and our health and the health of the planet.

We’ve taken Ollie the Trolley to four green congregations around the valley just to give people ideas of what they might do. One of the passengers at the time was Sally Bingham, who founded what was at the time Episcopal Power & Light, and then became Interfaith Power & Light. Advocacy, we just got back from Washington, DC, where were we lobbying congress on the Clean Air Act, especially on regulations for new power plants, that they are cleaner than they have been. Every year it's a different issue.

We had eight appointments with representative and senators from Arizona. We encourage people. We sent out action alerts and encourage people to write letters and send postcards, and we testify before the Corporation Commission. You all are an astute group, but I don’t think may people in Arizona know just how important this group of people is and what important decisions they make about renewable energy and energy efficiency. Last January, we were testifying there about energy efficiency, and we were able to tell the story about how Jewish members of our groups had just celebrated Hanukkah.

They tell the story about how one measure of oil lasted eight days miraculously, which I said to them was a perfect example of energy efficiency and we ought to do the same. We've done events around action. Lauren mentioned the Moving the Planet event that we had here. We started downstairs here at Geos and we had 250 people that were here for the walk. We went across the street to the Newman Center and then to the mosque and to the Congregational Church and to the Hillel Center and back to the Methodist church.

At each station, we told stories about different environmental refugees. The bog copper butterfly was one of them that Sarah Porter, from Arizona Audubon told about how in New England, this species of butterfly, because of climate change, is having to move, migrate further and further north, the whole population or die. Sandy Barr from Sierra Club told us stories about she had just been to Glacier National Park to see the glaciers before they finally disappear.

This was Jan Flaaten, he was Executive Director of the Arizona Ecumenical Council, he's telling the story about the Pacific Island Nation of Tuvalu, where the sea level is rising and they're having to move to New Zealand or Australia. As he's telling this story, he's raising the shower curtain around him, until at the end of the story, just his nose appears. It was a very dramatic presentation. We've done Great Solar Cookout at Daley Park. We did it a couple, three weeks ago. This was our fourth year.

We've got steel drum band and storytellers telling earth stories, cooking food for potluck in solar ovens and teaching people how to live more sustainably. We pray together, so we had a national preach in on global warning. This happened on the weekend closest to Valentine's Day. We had 1,000 congregations around the United States that participated and sent 30,000 postcards to Obama encouraging him to be proactive about caring about climate change. Then we did an Ash Wednesday service in front of SRP.

The idea was, not just to call attention to SRP, and they're the ones that operate the Navaho Generating Station, but all of us are complicit in this fossil fuel economy. The ashes that we used on that day came from the Kayenta mine, and we put them on peoples' foreheads. Marshall Johnson spoke. Denay, an environmental activist, about the impact of NGS on his tribe. This is John Dorhauer, he is the Conference Minister for the United Church of Christ, that this summer is voting on whether or not they are going to divest as a whole denomination from fossil fuels, the first denomination to consider that.

Andy I think is here. Where are you? There you are. He was part of the Ash Wednesday service, Unitarian Universalist pastor. I wanna advocate a little bit for having the faith voice represented at the table. Often it's an economic issue, climate change is economic issue or it's a political issue, but our contention is it's first and foremost a spiritual issue. That it impacts—if we're called to love our neighbor, how can we love our neighbor when we're polluting their air, their water? It's an ethical issue.

This is Gus Speth, he was Dean of the School of Forestry at Yale, who said in 2007, "I used to think that the big three were climate, biodiversity and pollution, but after many years, I think pride, apathy and greed are even bigger. We need a cultural and spiritual transformation, and science doesn't do that." Religious communities, religious traditions do do that. Robert Doppelt was a speaker here, maybe last year, from the National Climate Ethics Campaign. Donald Brown is from Penn State, and he specializes in the ethics of climate change and the impact on the world.

He says in order for a legislation to be ethical, it needs to be environmentally sufficient. It has to have a real impact on reducing carbon in the atmosphere. There has to be just adaptation so the people who contribute the least carbon, also suffer the most currently, are helped in the process. There needs to be equity between different nations and people. He said that, "Cancun failed these criteria and so has every effort, and now there's no effort at all from the U.S. Congress."

He's made news recently. He says, "Climate skeptics are guilty of crimes against humanity," for preventing us from doing something for 25 years, to laying any constructive action. This is a map that depicts for me the poor ethics of our current situation. The U.S. is 4 percent of the world population and the next shows that we're 28 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. Just look how bloated we are compared to the rest of the world with our emissions, and look at Africa. It looks like Africa there with population, that it almost disappears completely on the map, except for South Africa.

This was a map from 2006, so it's changed a little bit. India and China are bigger now than they were in 2006 as far as their emissions, but gross inequities. A great book that I recommend by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson, On Moral Ground, so all these different leaders, political leaders, religious leaders, academicians, poets, writers, are reflecting on the morality of a planet in peril from all these different perspectives, our children's sake, human survival, the integrity of creation, honor is due to evolve lysis systems, justice and a variety of others.

Think about the great social changes and movements in the history of the United States. For a while, slavery was purely an economic issue. Finally, voices of faith insist, no it's a moral, it's an ethical issue. Only when that happened was there some traction and some movement. I think it was true of other efforts for social justice, with women's suffrage and civil rights, Martin Luther King giving a moral voice to the disparities between races and endangered species, recognizing that they're our partners on the earth as well and that the Endangered Species Act was not just a political act, but also a moral movement.

It takes a voice to speak out on behalf of these issues, and if you can't do it by yourself, I'd say find a child to help you. Some little cute kid who will say, "What about the animals?" Then people will sit up and pay attention to them when they don’t pay attention to you. That's my presentation, and I'd really covet dialogue and questions and discussions. [Clapping]