If the idea of religious groups doing environmental work conjures images of slaying buckthorn with mighty scythes and pulling the weeds of iniquity (e.g., garlic mustard) out by their very roots, you have an inkling of a worldwide and Chicago-wide trend. If the image extends to feeding the masses with locally grown, organic food from farmers' markets, you are right on the mark. And if you further imagine people of faith providing shelter for the poor, with a vision encompassing wildlife as well as human beings, then you begin to understand the impact of a relatively new trend in "ecospirituality."

What Will the Trees Say?
Almost every religious denomination contains teachings that urge believers to care for all living things. They all say, in one way or another, that it's not a matter of us versus the environment but rather that we're all in this together — the birds, the animals, air, water, humans, the Earth, the whole universe. We've met nature and we are it.

Dirk Ficca, executive director of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions (CPWR), a Chicago-based international organization founded on the tenets of peace, justice, and sustainability, has found the concept of sustainability is intrinsic to all world religions. "All religions express their concern for ecology in terms of either sacredness, interdependence, or stewardship," he says.

Children learn of good stewardship of the earth, starting with worms. Photo courtesy of Faith in Place.

The concept of stewardship, for instance, is evident in the Jewish tradition of Tu B'Shvat, New Year for the Trees, which heralds the time of year when sap starts rising, a harbinger of springtime. It's based on the seasonal cycle that eventually leads to the grain harvest. "This holiday is a reminder that the land is more than an inanimate holy entity," says Barry Dredze of Beth Shalom in Naperville. "It's something to grow food on. It's something we need to care for because it sustains us."

Muslims have similar beliefs about the importance of treating others, including the Earth, responsibly. Shireen Pishdadi describes the Islamic belief that everything worships God. "We display our worship by how we live our lives; whether we eat healthy food for our bodies, are kind to our neighbors and parents, or take care of nature. We believe in a judgment day, on which everything — the trees, our bodies, animals — will testify for and against us," she says. "When the trees stand up and speak about how I lived, will they have something good to say about me?"

Buddhist and Hindu traditions both incorporate the concept of karma, loosely translated as "what goes around, comes around." Sri Eknath Easwaran, author of To Love Is to Know Me, comments on the sacred Hindu writings in the Bhagavad Gita: "The very air we breathe is exhaustible.... If we loved our children as we profess to, we should remember that the air is limited, exhaustible, a perishable member of the family of life. Treat it gently, the Gita says; treat it with care."

The Christian corollary from the Bible might be disciple James' letter to Christians in the early church, in which he says, "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith." This means a person's belief in God should be accompanied by actions that reflect the teachings of that faith — in this case, caring for all of the things God made. Sister Janet Bolger helped to establish The Well, an ecospirituality center sponsored by the Sisters of St. Joseph of LaGrange.

"For a long time," she explains, "Christians interpreted the world in a patriarchal manner. This approach put God at a distance above everything else, followed by humans, and then animals, plants, and inanimate objects at the lowest level of importance. Christian theology has always proclaimed that God is everywhere, and now with the emerging holistic worldview, people seem drawn to celebrate creation-centered theology — the realization that everything in creation reveals God." Bolger believes that people connect to God — or to "spirit" — when they recognize this spirit's presence in all of nature.

Steve Perkins, also a Catholic and associate director of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, agrees that religious thought has evolved to make people more aware of their role in caring for the environment. "Catholic theology has a tenet called 'preference for the poor' that says care for the poor and the marginalized — traditionally, lepers, women, and Samaritans — should be incorporated into public policy," he says. "Today, marginalized populations include nature as well as the poor."

Clare Butterfield, a Unitarian Universalist minister and director of Faith in Place, an interreligious environmental initiative sponsored by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, describes another view, called "process theology," which draws a clear connection between our actions and their consequences. Origin-ating in the religious and philosophical writings of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, process theology simultaneously acknowledges the existence of God and the laws of physics, asserting that material reality consists of a series of events rather than a concrete thing. It says all living things exist in relationship with one another, and our choices and actions cannot help but affect every other living thing. Therefore, according to Butterfield, to say that we are accountable to all of creation is not hyperbole. "Ecology itself is perhaps the grandest example of process theology in practice," she says. "As humans who make choices, we play an undeniably accountable role in this process."

Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum. Restoration as resurrection. Photo by Ron Dahlborg.

Action in Solitude
To fill this role, some people act individually, and others within organizations. Cindy Crosby walks and meditates almost daily at the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. She collected her essays about nature and spirituality into a book called Waiting for Morning. She considers nature "an exterior landscape that influences our interior landscapes" — our emotions, our moods, our most deeply held values and beliefs. "The first account in the Bible is that of God creating a beautiful garden," she says. "I think of our physical world as a divine notebook. God has jotted down all kinds of beautiful things about faith through this journal of the outdoors that help us understand this crazy life we are born to."

Because of the spiritual sustenance she derives from nature, Crosby sees the need to protect it and to help educate others. She is involved in Wild Ones, a Naperville-area gardening club that promotes native habitat landscaping. In one of her essays, she writes about her back yard in Glen Ellyn being a harmonizing buffer between her adjacent neighbors' back yards — Jim's, a horticultural masterpiece, and Gerry's, the epitome of native landscaping. (Neighbor Gerry is noted conservationist and author Gerould Wilhelm.) Crosby's yard is a blend of wild native and manicured.

Circles of Activism
Others prefer to marshal the collective energies of like enthusiasts. The efforts of Beth Shalom's Barry Dredze have spurred the Social Action Committee at that congregation to encourage members to schedule periodic Sundays as restoration days at West Chicago Prairie Preserve. Dredze says Judaism's teachings about ethical and social responsibility motivated him to organize a regular Mitzvah Day of restoration work at Danada Preserve in Naperville for the past two years. "Our religious beliefs are reflected in how we treat each other and all living things — the old 'we all live downstream' theory," he says.

Dredze is also involved in a possible start-up of a Chicago chapter of the national organization Coalition of the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), which he feels would enable individuals to extend their reach by taking advantage of educational opportunities and tools provided by the organization.

Steve Perkins is founder and co-director of Faith in Place, formerly named the Interreligious Sustainability Project. Faith in Place grew out of a publication, "One Creation, One People, One Place," which was written by a committee of individuals who were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Unitarian Universalist, Bahá'í, and Buddhist. "We pray in different languages and we express our deepest commitments in different religious terms," their mission statement reads. "But we share a place on this planet — the area at the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan, around the great human settlement called Chicago." Within its pages is a call for regional sustainability — a challenge to act with the knowledge that everything is interdependent and that we must "use our gifts responsibly as citizens, not as owners, of Creation."

Perkins, who has been a political and environmental activist for most of his 60 years, says there's a different tenor in the Faith in Place organization that doesn't exist in secular organizations. "If your passion for caring for the world around you stems from your personal spirituality, participation in a strictly environmental organization doesn't allow you to fully express your reason for being there," he notes. "Faith in Place offers permission to share greater depth around issues you care about."

More than 100 individuals, representing nearly 70 congregations throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, participate in one of seven regional Faith in Place "circles." These people are members of Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Bahá'í, Unitarian Universalist, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoro-astrian, and Ifa (an East African animist tradition) congregations. Circles exist in Austin, County Line, DuPage County, Evanston, Humboldt Park, Oak Park, and Hyde Park, and each group determines its own projects, which range from advocacy on public transportation, affordable housing, and energy policy to seed planting at habitat restoration workdays. Circle members educate neighbors and local businesses about illumination pollution from night lighting, and help coordinate and promote farmers' markets. The County Line circle even built a labyrinth, a circular, gridlike walking path surrounded by native plants, which will become a seed source for prairie restorations.

The Humboldt Park circle chose an urban agriculture theme. One of their programs is called From the Ground Up/De la Tierra Para Arriba, in which congregations from the Episcopal Church of the Advent, Nuestra Señora de las Americas, Bethel Lutheran Church, and San Lucas UCC Church make boxes for worm composting. They also grow organic vegetables and are planning to start a system to raise food fish in indoor pools.

Clare Butterfield says, "I find it irresistible to spend time with the Humboldt Park kids in the worm farms and gardens. I've seen statistics about their school dropout rates and low reading levels, and I see how beautiful and smart and curious they are. I know the numbers aren't intrinsic to these kids. I take it for granted that the natural world is a wondrous and astonishing place, but these kids wouldn't know it if someone didn't share the experience with them."

She adds, "I love working in a setting that's based on the positive assumption that people have the capacity to act for the highest good and will do the right thing if they are informed about the consequences of their choices."

Sister Bolger makes similar observations about the people who participate in The Well programs. The organization is committed to a mission of "unity, in communion with God and all creation." In striving to promote an ecologically sustainable and socially just world,

The Well's programs include workshops, concerts, retreats, and creative approaches through art, music, and labyrinth-walking to foster awareness of our spiritual connection to this Great Lakes bioregion.

Without this positive motivation, says Ficca of CPWR, people will never fully respond at the level required to heal the environment. "Sharing doomsday data is not motivational," he says. "As alarming as the facts might be, they paralyze us. Unless we recover some sense of sacredness about the creation in which we live, we won't be able to make it or ourselves whole again."

A Blip or a Trend?
So, are these just scattered examples of good works by several isolated groups of well-intentioned souls? Some group leaders detect an optimistic trend.

Perkins now hears the word "sustainability" from the pulpit of St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Evanston on a regular basis. He didn't used to. "It's as though an ethos has permeated the congregation," he says.

In the three years that Butterfield has been organizing the Faith in Place circles, both the number of congregations and the number of individuals participating within each congregation have grown. When the County Line circle hosted a labyrinth-building day in April at the Sisters of St. Joseph ministry in LaGrange, the event drew 60 people from eight congregations. And Dredze says it's a lot easier now to find a Tu B'Shvat seder to attend than it was a few years ago.

As for Sister Bolger, she says, "We can't worry about numbers. We are seeing real people whose hearts are changed because of their faith." And with their hearts, Chicago Wilderness.

The Biodiversity Project has just published Ethics for a Small Planet: A Communications Handbook on the Ethical and Theological Reasons for Protecting Biodiversity. The book is available for $30 via e-mail at project@biodiverse.org, or call (608) 250-9876.