Ascension Lutheran Church, surrounded by trees in South Burlington, has had a focus on faith-guided environmentalism. Photo courtesy of Liv Miller
Kate Kampner is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
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.”
Ascension Lutheran Church, surrounded by trees in South Burlington, has had a focus on faith-guided environmentalism. Photo by Liv Miller
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.”
Ascension Lutheran Church, surrounded by trees in South Burlington, has had a focus on faith-guided environmentalism. Photo by Liv Miller
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.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: To Vermont faith groups, ‘climate crisis is a spiritual crisis’.