Exhortations to simplify the holiday season--buy less, drive less, and stay home with the family--could reach fever pitch next year if growing ties between environmentalists and religious communities in the United States bear fruit, according to a report released Thursday by the Worldwatch Institute.

Reducing consumption and buying more selectively--known as "ethical consumption"--are two areas of broad agreement among greens and many religions around the world, argues Gary Gardner, Worldwatch's director of research and author of the report, 'Invoking the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in the Quest for a Sustainable World.'

"The quickening of religious interest in environmental issues suggests that a powerful new political alignment may be emerging, one that could greatly strengthen the effort to build a sustainable world," Gardner wrote.

Environmental groups have long argued that Western societies must reduce their use of key natural resources, such as water and fossil fuels, to ensure their sustainability. That call resonates among many religious groups, with Islam's holy book, the Qu'ran, for example, calling for followers of the faith to "Eat and drink but waste not by excess."

Last week a coalition of religious bodies and other concerned investors called on the world's two biggest carmakers, General Motors and Ford, to take more aggressive steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their plants and products by 2012.

November's "What Car Would Jesus Drive?" campaign by the Evangelical Environmental Network, aimed at discouraging the production and consumption of gas-guzzling SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles), was one of the most recent and controversial statements by a religious group on the topic of global warming.

Faith-based groups also played a key role in this year's decision by Congress to turn down a request by President George W. Bush to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in 1995 evangelical groups weighed in strongly and effectively when the Endangered Species Act was itself put at risk.

A key force propelling religious work on the environment is "stewardship," the notion that mankind is on Earth to care for its natural resources-not deplete them, according to the groups.

"A large motivation for this movement is an increasing understanding that creation is imperiled," said Unitarian pastor Fred Small in an interview with the Catholic Digest following the SUV protest. "When one has that epiphany, one must look at the environment not as a luxury, but rather as a central moral issue."

A number of Protestant denominations are expressing their concern for environmental issues, and those acutely affected by them, by serving only Fair Trade coffee after their services. The beans are bought from small producers or cooperatives at above-market prices in exchange for a commitment by growers not to destroy hillside forest cover when planting their crops.

The result appeals to many in the U.S. concerned both with justice--setting a fair price for coffee producers--and with protection of the environment from slash-and-burn farming techniques, according to Jonathan Freirichs of Lutheran World Relief, who says that some 3,000 Lutheran parishes are serving the fair-trade brew.

Other countries have also seen a growing involvement by religious groups in environmental issues. Efforts to clean up the Ganges River in India, for example, have benefited from both the scientific and technical expertise of environmental groups and the Hindu commitment to preserving the purity of a sacred river.

"Science and technology are one bank of the river and faith is the other. Both are needed to contain the river and ensure its survival," according to V.B. Mishra, a Hindu spiritual leader and professor of civil engineering who has long been working to decontaminate the Ganges.

While acknowledging that U.S.-based faith communities and environmental activists still have a lot to learn from and about each other and have not yet formed a perfect union, Worldwatch's Gardner argues that the profound ethical and spiritual content of environmental issues--including mass extinction of species, growing poverty and inequality, and rapidly increasing climatic changes--are matters of extreme importance to the religious community.

Working together to heal the environment, he says, "is an opportunity to reintegrate society's heart and head."

© 2002 OneWorld.net

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