A New Evangelical Environmentalism?

I came across an interesting blog post this morning (prompted by a story on NPR) by Dr. Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It's a bit of a mea culpa on the evangelical movement's history of hostility toward the environmental movement.

It has always confounded me that religious leaders, especially southern evangelicals, have enthusiastically adopted the amoral (and in many cases immoral) political and cultural positions of free-market corporate interests and the politicians who shill for them.

A little background: As a child, my parents - both staunch Southern Baptists - shuttled our family to church at least 3 times a week. It was a ritual. We were prompt for Sunday School at 9:45 followed by church at 11, plus Sunday night services and Wednesday night Prayer Meeting. Sometimes, we met on Thursday night as well. Consequently, I became quite a student of the Bible.

I was a curious child. When I was in my early teens, I procured a Greek New Testament; as a closer link to the original text, I figured the translation would be more accurate than the standard King James Version we were required to own and read. My earnestness led me to seek out and focus on the teachings of Jesus since, in Sunday School we had learned that Jesus often corrected misguide disciples - the guys who allegedly authored most of the New Testament - when they offered their misunderstanding of his teachings.

Ironically, that practice is exactly what led me to move away from the Baptist Church as I found a disconnect between many of the teachings of Jesus and the political positions of the church. (That and the fact that, when I served as choir director in a splinter church at the age of 17, the deacons asked me to leave because the music was getting "a little to fast and a little to loud." Another ironic turn of events as today's rock-and-roll praise bands, in comparison, make my efforts to liven up Calvinist hymns seem extraordinarily tame. But that's another story.)

For example, according to the New Testament, Jesus imparted such wisdom as 1) don't attack your enemies, love them, 2) give money to the poor, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, 3) don't judge people, 4) associate with people society frowns upon, and 5) don't covet wealth or turn the church into a business. Sounds a little to the left of Dennis Kucinich, doesn't it? Could you imagine any presidential candidate that ran on this platform getting any significant votes from the evangelical community? Hardly. In fact, evangelical Christians would most likely be the first to crucify - politically speaking - any candidate for public office who campaigned on these very issues.

And in terms of environmental awareness and stewardship, evangelical Christians have been almost uniformly hostile, increasingly so over the past couple of decades. More than one person has suggested that evangelical philosophy is this: "Jesus is coming soon to rapture the saved, so why take care of the environment since we won't be here to witness the devastation?" I don't really believe many evangelicals take this callous position. I think it's more the case that evangelicals adopted the worldview of free market secular forces who agreed with them on a small handful of hot-button political issues such as abortion. Over time, many evangelicals co-opted the inhumane social and environmental positions of so-called market conservatives they otherwise would have nothing in common with.

Cultural conservatives and religion were not always such cozy bedfellows. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, most religious leaders leaned more to the liberal side of the aisle, using biblical texts to underpin their political positions. In my opinion, this country (and the world) has suffered greatly because of organized religion's radical right shift away from many of the basic humanitarian principles laid out by the very guy - Jesus Christ - they named the religion after, and the religions establishment hasn't done itself any favors.

There's an evangelical bumper sticker that's been around for some time now: "Love the sinner, Hate the sin." I think when it comes to many evangelical Christians, the slogan might as well be, "Love the messenger, Hate the message."

So it comes as a refreshing turn that Dr. Moore is openly addressing this disconnect. A few excerpts:

"Every human culture is formed in a tie with the natural environment. In my hometown, that’s the father passing down his shrimping boat to his son or the community gathering for the Blessing of the Fleet at the harbor every year. In a Midwestern town, it might be the apple festival. In a New England town, it might be the traditions of whalers or oystermen. The West is defined by the frontier and the mountains. And so on.

When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. When Gulfs are dead, when mountaintops are removed, when forests are razed with nothing left in their place, when deer populations disappear, cultures die too.

And what’s left in the place of these cultures and traditions is an individualism that is defined simply by the appetites for sex, violence, and piling up stuff."

Sounds almost like a public service announcement from the Sierra Club, doesn't it? Check out Dr. Russell Moore's complete post on his blog - Moore to the Point - here.

Strip Tease

Strip malls are the pornography of real estate development.

Ohhh, they're so titillating, so tantalizing, so immediate. Not much forethought is required. Just show up, pull the curtains, do the deed, and move on. No time or desire to get to know or understand complexities - that might take dinner and a movie.

With a strip mall, a developer needs not cultivate a relationship with the community. In the strip mall paradigm no commitment is necessary.

The formula is simple. Find some property on a busy road, rape the site, lay down a sea of asphalt, throw up a super-cheap building with a pretentious (preferably also cheap) front facade and you're done.

But what about the morning after?

Strip development end to end translates into sprawl, and sprawl gnaws away at the soul of our culture, divides society, and diminishes the health of the citizenry.

In strip mall world, everybody is required to travel by car, regardless of the price of gas, adding to traffic congestion. Owning a car (or 5 if you have two adults and three teenagers in the household) is the ante for getting in the game. It is impossible to walk or bike from anywhere. How could you? There are no sidewalks or crosswalks, only a multitude of zooming automobiles. In fact, you even have to get in your car and drive from one strip mall to another when the two are side by side.

Exploitation of the natural landscape with no regard for the well-being of the environment is pervasive with strip development. Natural beauty, enjoyed by the whole community, is treated with contempt.

In a village setting, where homes closely surround clustered commercial space, you have the option to walk to the store, walk to school, walk to work. A variety of opportunities abound to run into neighbors and have nuanced conversations about life and home and family. Centralized big-box strip development deprives us of the very thing that fosters strong communities - familiarity with, and thus a greater understanding of our neighbors.

Where is the warmth in sprawl? Where is the humanity? Why shouldn't we have a deep sense of affection and, yes, love for the buildings we inhabit?

Strip malls may be salacious for the developer, but everybody else is left with a very empty feeling.

Green is the new Green

Many still buy into the myth that "building green" means a building project has to cost more. Conventional wisdom has been telling us for years that respecting and protecting the natural environment is at odds with healthy economic development.

Conventional wisdom lied.

Let's look at the developer's first "touch" of the land - site work - as an example. Does it cost more to use green building principles in site development?

Consider this.

Clear-cutting and flattening a wooded site, while expeditious for the developer and engineer - it just takes one note on a drawing to "clear all vegetation" - has numerous hidden and direct costs.

Every time you see men and machines moving dirt on a clear-cut site, somebody is paying the tab. Erosion becomes an issue where it was not before, and costs are incurred mitigating the manufactured problem. Additional engineering fees come about because the site's storm water drainage system, which worked perfectly before the site was touched, must now be outfitted with large, buried concrete culverts or an open man-made ditch or stream. Here again, we're adding money on top of money.

Heavy intervention on a building site always costs more than working with the natural elements. Leaving lowlands natural allows for denser development in the highlands with net equality in the development potential while keeping the natural drainage system (provided free by Mother Nature) in tact.

And then there are the hidden costs. A neighborhood with mature trees is more beautiful and more temperate than a clear-cut site. Shade in the summer cuts cooling costs, and natural vegetation cuts the bitter wind in the winter. Ignoring these "comfort" issues by heavy-handed development diminishes the quality of life of the inhabitants, the users, and the public at large.

A few dollars of fast cash to the developer from selling the trees does not even begin to make up for the lack of them. You can wait 30 years for the ecosystem to replenish itself, or you can spend a hansom sum on landscaping (and still wait 10 years) to reclaim the quality of life resulting from leaving well enough alone.

So building green, when done with creative planning and forethought, adds value and contributes to the bottom line of a building project. Sometimes dramatically.

Green is now the new Green.