This past weekend, concert Live Earth joined stars and starlets from all corners of the globe in an epic rally against climate change. The event harnessed the power of celebrity and music to bridge cultural gaps, from Japan to England, Australia to America, and South Africa to Brazil. But music isn’t the only common language joining environmental activists from around the world. Environmentalists are inscreasingly speaking out in mosques, churches, and temples. Their common language? Prayer.

Tomorrow evening (7/10/07, 9pm e/p), Sundance Channel’s The Green will present Big Ideas for a Small Planet: Pray, as part of its weekly Big Ideas series. Hosted by environmental journalist (and Hindu) Simran Sethi, Pray explores the convergence of religion and environmentalism via three “Big Ideas”: multi-faith green preaching; faith-based protest; and a curious method of green burial.

Multi-faith green preaching is based on the simple idea that people of all faiths share a reverence for life and for the earth. Among the religious leaders pioneering this movement is Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal minister and executive director of a New Jersey-based interfaith coalition called GreenFaith. He brings a spiritual relationship with the natural world to disparate religious communities throughout New Jersey—playing environmental quiz games with children in Muslim mosques, identifying recyclable and biodegradable trash with children in Jewish temples, and hosting conversations about An Inconvenient Truth in places of worship.

There’s nothing falsely sunny about Harper’s multi-faith green preaching; he challenges individuals to consider their faith a call to action to preserve the planet, and to ask through prayer how they might answer that call. Harper sees a long road ahead, and predicts that “things will need to get acutely painful in many ways before we make the changes that we need to make.” In his experience as a pastor, “people only change when they are in fairly severe pain,” he says on the show.

As an illustration of faith-based environmental protest, Pray showcases Judy Bonds, the daughter of an Appalachian coal miner. She has watched the coal industry rape the Appalachian Mountains that were the backdrop to her childhood. Today, Bonds works with Coal River Mountain Watch to try to shut down big coal. Bible in hand, she quotes scripture to college students and activists throughout Appalachia. A force of nature herself, she protests in her own words during the program, “These hills is what cause us to look up to the heavens, and we’re blowin’ em away!”

Eternal Reefs exemplifies the third Big Idea—green burial. The company has responded to the fact that 70 percent of the world’s vital coral reefs are dead or damaged (Pray throws lots of Big Scary Stats in there with the Big Ideas) by figuring out a way to make new, viable coral reefs out of cement and cremated remains to commemorate lost friends and family. Founder Don Brawley was a brave man indeed to challenge the spiritual traditions surrounding death and burial—the thought of a loved one being laid to rest as a coral reef is likely, for some, revolting—but he and more than 400,000 clients call Eternal Reefs the wave of a greener future.

Posted on Jul 9, 2007 at 5:30 PM
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)