By Kathy Chaffin
Salisbury Post
Before members of the Tlingit tribe of southern Alaska harvest cedar bark to use in making clothing, they give thanks to the spirits they believe live in the trees and promise to take only what they need.
Gary Gardner, one of four keynote speakers at the “Faith, Spirituality and Environmental Stewardship” conference under way now at Catawba College, said he tries to follow their example when using the earth’s resources.
First, he gives thanks to God, and secondly, he promises to use only what he needs.
“It creates a completely different relationship between me and that resource,” he said during a panel discussion Thursday morning. “It’s a love relationship.”
Gardner told close to 300 people gathered for the conference about his daughter attending a school that emphasizes self-reliance. Students prepare their own meals and even make their own napkins.
“I can tell you she has a really different relationship to that napkin than I do a paper napkin or something else that is dispensable,” he said.
The senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute ó a leading source on key environmental, social and economic trends ó Gardner is among four keynote speakers and 41 speakers, panelists and workshop leaders participating in the three-day workshop sponsored by the college’s Center for the Environment.
His comments came during discussion of “the question of consumption” in addressing environmental issues from a spiritual perspective with fellow panelists Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth and the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham. Frank Levering, director and producer of PBS’s “Simple Living” series, served as moderator.
Referring to Gardner’s comments earlier in the morning, Levering said consumption “is the issue where we have the least success.”
Dobb, who serves the Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Md., said people of faith consider the act of giving up a sacrifice, which doesn’t play well in today’s “hyper-consumer society.”
“We don’t want to be told to give anything up,” he said.
But the word “sacrifice,” in its Hebrew translation, means to “draw near,” Dobb pointed out, and is derived from the Latin word meaning “get closer to God.”
In earlier times, people who made religious sacrifices didn’t see them as a loss, he said, even though they may have sacrificed a dove or a heifer they could have sold to support their families. In sacrificing, Dobb said, they drew nearer to “their deeper selves, one another and God.”
Before responding to the question, Sleeth, who travels the country talking about “creation care,” pointed out Dobb sets an example as an environmentalist by riding his bike 6.5 miles to work.
Later, the rabbi said he makes the 15-mile commute by bike about half the time.
Sleeth described himself, his wife and two children as “America’s poster family for the downwardly mobile,” referring to Levering’s earlier introduction. Sleeth gave up his job as chief of staff of a New England hospital, and he and his family gave away half their possessions and moved into a small house without a clothes dryer or dishwasher.
“The only thing that I can tell you I really, truly miss is the practice of medicine,” he said.
The drastic change in lifestyle created a void in him, his wife and children that was ultimately filled by a closer relationship with God, he said.
In the two years since his book, “Serve God Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action” was published, Sleeth said he has spoken to more Americans than anyone else about creation care.
In those conversations, people clearly, on some level, realize “that more stuff is not going to make us happy.”
Bingham, president and founder of Interfaith Power & Light and a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of California, said she has found people respond better to the phrase “a change in values” because it doesn’t focus on “giving something up.”
“When I used the word, ‘sacrifice,’ ” she said, “it just didn’t fly.” In current American society, the prevailing attitude is if people can afford stuff, “it’s theirs to have.”
Levering next asked the panelists what motivates their efforts to save the environment. “And how optimistic are you?” he added.
“Time, I think most of us believe, is running short,” Levering said. “We have to do this fairly quickly.”
Dobb referred to the teachings of two influential Jews ó Moses and Sigmund Freud. In Moses’ day, “it was a Mr. Rogers kind of neighborhood,” he said, much different from the lifestyle Freud wrote about in, “Civilization and Its Discontent.”
With modern conveniences come inconveniences, he said, referring as an example, to the delays and other challenges that come with air travel.
Sleeth said he recently spoke to 2,000 elementary students at a school assembly in California, during which they sang several environmental songs with the message of “making the world better.” Their songs reminded him of a song he learned as a child, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white …”
“I remember thinking as a child that that wasn’t true,” he said. At the California school, however, Sleeth said the children made up a rainbow of different races.
Sleeth shared another story of a large church in Baltimore, Md., where leaders, after hearing that another church with 10,000 members had built and given away a townhouse after a four-week series on creation care ó which includes the earth and its people ó decided there was no reason why they couldn’t hold a six-week series and give away four town houses.
“I’m very optimistic,” he said.
Bingham agreed with Sleeth and cited David Orr of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College in Ohio. Orr says hope is a verb that comes from having “your sleeves rolled up.”
An important factor in motivating people of faith to modify their habits to save the environment, she said, is to change the way they view Biblical scripture giving humans dominion over God’s creation. Sleeth may have said it best, she added, when he pointed out that the scripture giving parents dominion over their children does not mean they can give them black eyes and bruises.
Bingham said it simply means they do everything they can to ensure their children become the best they can be.
In talking with people about environmental issues, she said there is a common realization “that we are destroying ourselves.” With the faith community coming together to address the problems, “I see a wonderful horizon.”
It may take awhile before things get better, Bingham said, “but it will get better.”
Gardner said he is also optimistic but realizes the enormity of the challenge.
Earlier environmentalists, for example, presented the need to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent before 1990. “That’s a very conservative level,” he said, and 18 years later, “we’re nowhere near that.”
Organizations like Kiva, a socially responsible investment company, allows people to lend money to global entrepreneurs, Gardner said, and Internet Web sites such as “YouTube” allows ordinary citizens to start affinity groups to help change the world.
Contact Kathy Chaffin at 704-797-4249 or kchaffin@salisburypost.com.