Just as environmentalism and social activism are inextricably linked, so are environmental stewardship and spirituality. That’s the theme of “God Is Green,” an article by associate English professor Cheryl Fish published recently in BustedHalo.com, an online magazine. The article reflects Fish’s long-standing interest in environmental justice, and her research into environmental justice-themed literature and film, for which she has received a BMCC faculty grant.
Attending a local environmental action meeting recently, Fish writes, “I was surprised and encouraged by the diverse grassroots efforts at stewardship taking place all around me.” But none of the topics discussed fascinated her as much as the fact that the meeting took place at a synagogue lunch featuring a panel comprised of the synagogue’s environmental action committee.
“I’d had no idea of the extent to which people’s spiritual identity could provide the bridge to their desire to live more sustainably,” she says.
Post-9/11 awakening
The more Fish looked, the more she saw “how people’s spirituality, personal passions, and political commitments were converging.” In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, she says, many people were energized “to go beneath the surface of what happened here and what is happening all over in terms of environmental, social, spiritual, and political interconnections.”
It turns out that “this productive connection between activism, spirit and the contested meaning of nature and commerce has a long history in the United States,” she says. For example, Aldo Leopold, the early 20th-century ecologist who is widely considered the father of wildlife management, “the idea of the need for a land ethic is based at least in part on the idea of the Ten Commandments, which deals with an ethical contract between humans and society, handed down by God.”
Praying and working together
To illustrate present-day links between environmentalism, social justice and spirituality, Fish cites the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots organization in Boston’s Roxbury section, where residents won the right to reclaim trash-strewn vacant lots for community use.
“Their local church was a meeting ground and a minister was one of the leaders of the struggle,” she writes. Notwithstanding their cultural diversity, the residents “prayed together as they cleaned up their neighborhood, holding vigils to keep out drug dealers, planting trees, and forming a youth committee to make sure the voices of the next generation were a part of the ongoing work.”
Like the Dudley Street Initiative, environmental justice is often born out of personal experience or exposure to toxicity, “but its heart is in a holistic sense of justice that incorporates the realities of policies, politics and compromise,” Fish writes. “Let’s hope our spiritual institutions will become places from which we can find the support to become stewards of our local areas.”
Fish to teach English 350-141 in the Fall
Professor Fish has informed the Office of Public Affairs that her article is related to a new special topics elective course that she will be teaching in the fall, English 350-141. The course, which is titled “Enviromental Topics in Literature and Film” will also include the issue of spirituality as one of the topics–not only Western, but Native American, indigenous, and how that relates to nature and sustainability.
Click here for more information about English 350-141
Excerpts from “God Is Green” are reprinted here with the permission of BustedHalo.com. To read the complete article, please click here: http://www.bustedhalo.com/features/GodisGreen.htm
