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By Kate Kampner, Community News Service
Sam Swanson understands people can feel hopeless in preventing climate change. “You can feel the despair,” he said. “No one needs to be doing the things that need to be done.”
As a member of Vermont Interfaith Power and Light, he and colleagues are taking an approach to environmental advocacy they hope can provide a bit more hope — by looking at climate solutions through a religious and spiritual lens.
The group is a faith-based organization group that educates religious communities on the environmental movement. It provides spiritual comfort and material, like when members held an event last fall at Burlington’s Rock Point where they reflected on the recent floods through workshops and meditations for spiritual guidance. There, organization board president Ron McGarvey said, people could share in their pain — and their hope.
Faith leaders see that sense of resolve as another way to rally people to action.
“What drew me to this job is that climate change as an individual can feel overwhelming and abstract,” said Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, the organization’s coordinator. “This group is well equipped to look at climate change as a community.”
“Faith communities have a real power,” she said. “The climate crisis is a spiritual crisis.”
The group works with close to 90 congregations and religious organizations in Vermont and funds climate change protection and education for many of them. It can help churches pay for weatherization, heat pumps and other equipment, and in 2023 the organization gave more than 200 free energy assessments statewide.
“Faith communities in Vermont are respected voices,” McGarvey said. “They do their best to enact moral responsibility.”
In 2018, the group supported the Rev. Nancy Wright, former pastor at Ascension Lutheran Church in South Burlington, and Richard Butz, a congregant there, to co-author a pair of watershed care manuals with a religious and spiritual lens.
A grant from the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church allowed the Care for Creation Committee of the church to roll out environmental education programs, like sending children in the Sunday school to the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain or working with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum to take boat trips.
Butz found test tubes to give to families in the church and showed them how to test water near their homes. He would then look at the water and share his findings.
“All of us working with the environmental crisis are trying to phrase it as a moral and a spiritual issue,” Wright said. “We say we’re being refreshed all the time and renewed by nature and by deep spiritual practices.”
Why does Wright emphasize watershed education? “You can really see the influences of pollution, you can really talk about justice and it’s clear to people — it’s clearer than climate change,” she said.
Randy Kritkausky is the president of Ecologia, an international nonprofit based in Middlebury that provides environmental education, spaces for discussion and initiatives for businesses, organizations and grassroot groups. He is also a member of the Potawatomi tribe. One of his biggest focuses is using Indigenous spiritual teachings to change people’s mindsets about environmentalism.
“How many times does Mother Earth need to send us a message of, ‘You can’t build right next to the creek or river and not expect Mother Nature to do what Mother Nature does,’ which is, assert her right to flow freely,” said Kritkausky.
“It has driven home the message of Indigenous people that we need to look at Mother Nature as our coequal and not some thing that we can dominate,” he said. “It just doesn’t work.”
Kritkausky said he often holds a lecture called “After the Floods,” which looks at the Potawatomi creation story to inspire people to be more reciprocal with nature. In the story, which takes place after the Earth has been flooded, a muskrat sacrifices himself to bring a clump of dirt back to the surface for his compatriots to rebuild the planet.
“Those who’ve come before us, other than human kin, have prepared a path, and the way we can respectfully engage is with reciprocity,” Kritkausky said, explaining that people need to act selflessly to let those other species thrive.
“We all need to listen more intimately with what the natural world is telling us about how it works, not imposing our own constructs and our own assumptions,” he said. “It’s about listening, it’s about being respectful and about being humble before nature, which is our co-equal.”
Kritkausky points to urban wilderness interfaces, a term used by the government and scientists to describe where land populated by humans and unoccupied wilderness meet. People in those zones tend to see wildfire burnings or crossovers from bears into their backyard. Kritkausky said that as humans are negotiating with the natural world, the natural world is reoccupying it back.
“They were here before we are, and they finally figured out how to cohabit that space,” he said. “We have not, as humans, and that is what Indigenous people have learned and lived with for millennia.”
“We have just for so long felt that we dominate everything that when we’re reminded that we don’t, it’s a shock,” he said.
Some Vermonters may want to get politically active or go to lectures to engage with the environment, but others might just want to go outside. Spirit in Nature, an interfaith sanctuary in Ripton, offers an array of paths to do just that by connecting nature with religion.
President Rob Slabaugh said Spirit in Nature looks at Christian, Quaker, Jewish, Indigenous and other spiritual beliefs and asks what they say about nature.
The group of volunteers takes quotes from religious texts, prints them on plywood boards and mounts those onto trees scattered across the paths. But the signs merely serve to guide, Slabaugh said, because it’s nature that does the teaching.
“Humans are a part of nature. We need to start acting like that,” Slabaugh said. “(The path) touches people, reminds people that we are a part of nature. We feel that by touching people like that, we’re motivating in a way that people will be more tuned in to what we need to do as humans.”
He’s felt that since the pandemic, more people have used the paths. They come out for events in the forested area, too, such as forest bathing — a type of therapy or meditation — yoga and poetry walks.
“It’s clear that public awareness has increased over time,” Slabaugh said of climate change and the movement to combat it. “I think Spirit in Nature has helped with being a supportive connection.”
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Categories: Environment
Romans 1:25
2 Kings 2:23-25
2 Kings 2:23-25 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 25 And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.
Romans 1:25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
funny won’t seem to let me post the scripture of Romans, you quoted, maybe in the auto censoring que……
Would make sense in many ways, that would be the perfect line to censor for them.
🙂
Hopefully it come through.
The only reason these 90 congregations are getting on the climate boat, is the perks. Take away the funding from the organization, tax breaks, grants for heat pumps, namely our tax money, and this wouldn’t even be a thing. The climate cult has overtaken this state from legislature to the everyday peasant. It’s been beaten into our heads, fossil fuels bad, electric cars good. Renewable energy, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. These things can help, not by any means the solution. I’m so sick of hearing about this crap. Is It hard to breath when you go outside? Is the sky full of smog? No, why? Because this is Vermont, not California. Use the brain God has implanted in your skulls. The only people ” falling ” for this crap have something to gain. This is and has always been about money, not climate. Open your eyes people.
Vermont is run by a criminal special interest cult and serve only themselves.
Being yoked to the grubberment by the 5013C – who do you think they’re loyalty lies with and who’s water buckets they carry gladly for tax exemptions and lucrative human trafficking payoffs?
Revelation 2 18-24 GNV
18 And unto [a]the Angel of the Church which is at Thyatira write, These things saith the Son of God, which hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet like fine brass.
19 I know [b]thy works and thy love, and [c]service and faith, and thy patience, and thy works, and that they are more at the last, than at the first.
20 Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, that thou sufferest the woman Jezebel which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to deceive my servants, to make them commit [d]fornication and to eat meat sacrificed unto idols.
21 And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not.
22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit fornication with her, into great affliction, except they repent them of their works.
23 And I will kill her children with death, and all the Churches shall know that I am he which search the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according unto your works.
24 And unto you I say, the rest of them of Thyatira, As many as have not this learning, neither have known the [e]deepness of Satan (as they speak) I will [f]put upon you none other burden
Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one.
Where is the discussion about Jesus?
Where is the discussion about loving your neighbor?
Where is the discussion about the Holy Spirit?
These are NOT churches, they are NOT following Christ, these organizations have been subverted by marxist ideology and they are so proud they think they can save the world,
If you had Jesus in your life you’d have Peace!!!!!!
LOVE, JOY AND PEACE
are the first fruits of the Holy Spirit.
They don’t have Jesus, they are pawns for the Devil.
God doesn’t need us to run the world. He can do it just fine.
He only asks for you to submit.
They didn’t even say his name, Lord of Lord, King of Kings, Jesus Christ.
What faith can they truly be of then?
They are but political operatives, making them sons and daughters of Satan.
Perhaps here is the underlying issue, to really all our problems, in Vermont.
We have lost our way.
We worship the sun, the planet, ourselves.
We have no love in us.
We are one of the least “churched” states in the nation. A perfect soil for subversion of Western ideology and values, a perfect soil for perversion of truth.
We are Vermont Strong!
Where are the true followers, leaders of faith in response to articles like this?
God does direct us to be good stewards of the land.
But he’s more interested in us being good stewards to our fellow man.
Perhaps if we weren’t so focused on money, power and debauchery Vermont would be a much better climate, for our people and our land.
We wouldn’t beholden to big ag, to pesticides, round up and monsanto.
We wouldn’t beholden to big pharma,
We wouldn’t beholden to the big medical system
We wouldn’t beholden to monetary debt
We wouldn’t beholden to broken families
We wouldn’t beholden to drugs, sex, crime to meet our needs.
We wouldn’t’ beholden to lust, and sex, thinking that is love.
We wouldn’t beholden to poison our children with vaccines while eating Misty Knoll
We wouldn’t be looking to manage our populations, chronic illnesses caused by Big Pharma, the industrial food complex and propaganda.
No, we are beholden to the cultural marxist cult, thinking it’s a faith, a religion.
Here remarkably is the real problem.
We don’t know Jesus Christ.
It’s interesting, when you really search for the truth, when you really search for answers, when you try and understand the problems of this world, when you really search….everything goes back to Jesus Christ.
There is one way.
There is only one way.
And that is Jesus Christ,
May we be his hands and feet on this earth, as it is in heaven.
TGBTG
…. if they think humanity is wrecking the planet, wait until they see what Jesus does to it. (see 2 Peter 3:7-13)
This earth was never ever intended to be a permanent planet – it is not eternal. We do not have to worry about it being around tens of thousands, or millions of years from now because God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth.
Understanding those things is important to holding in balance our freedom to use, and responsibility to maintain, the earth.
SIDEBAR: Though this earth is our temporary home, do take time to enjoy God’s beauty. Take care of your yard (or neighborhood).
Stop to smell the flowers. Enjoy the forests. Give thanks for the seasons.
God placed those rich resources on this planet for our comfort and His enjoyment. Let us be thankful to Him for that.
h/t Johnny Mac
Yes, there’s a big difference between worshipping the creation rather than the creator.
I agree there is a spiritual component on several fronts: We must learn to trust in God; We must stop being self loathing and appreciate this life we have been granted; We must always search for the truth using the senses God gave us and not simply repeat the lies satin whispers in our ears.
This story reminds me of an article I read a couple of years ago in the VDC:
https://vermontdailychronicle.com/bill-would-re-home-bears-de-home-people/