DWTX from Anaheim – Episcopal News Service – Climate change, global warming, economic and environmental justice, creation care, renewable energy and nuclear energy and weaponry are among the cadre of environment-related resolutions under consideration by General Convention.
The Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations (OGR), based in Washington, D.C., lobbies Congress and the president in response to legislation passed at General Convention. The legislation also sets the agenda for the church’s Advocacy Center, which includes OGR, the Episcopal Public Policy Network, Native American/Indigenous Ministries and environmental and domestic affairs.
As the church has become more involved in environmental issues, and as science has matured, the church has taken a more detailed approach to its official policies. If proposed resolutions pass, the advocacy staff’s work is made easier in some cases, said DeWayne Davis, domestic policy analyst in OGR.
“If these resolutions pass we won’t have to do as much interpreting. For instance C011 [Governmental Policies for Environmental Stewardship] specifically addresses renewable energy standards. We’ve already been working on it in a limited way under the auspices of creation care and global warming.”
That resolution, passed by the House of Deputies but pending before the House of Bishops, encourages the U.S. government to adopt “equitable subsidies for renewable energy (such as solar and wind turbine power, and research into new technologies) … along with balancing its current subsidies for non-renewable energy sources (oil, gas, coal)…” It also supports the adoption of a federal renewable energy standard that would require power plants to produce 20 percent of their electricity through renewable sources.
Another resolution pending in the House of Deputies, C070, Memorializing the Genesis Covenant, would commit the Episcopal Church to a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the facilities it maintains by 2019.
The Diocese of Olympia’s Genesis Covenant task force has created a six-parish pilot program aimed at developing a workable, cost-effective plan to accomplish this goal, said Michael Schut, associate program officer for economic and environmental affairs in the church’s Advocacy Center.
The resolution also “gives a nod” to work done on the federal economic recovery package, which made grant money available for nonprofit organizations, including churches, in their efforts to go green, Davis said.
Two resolutions, C034 and D001, have been filed that would establish a liturgical creation cycle during Pentecost from St. Francis’ Day to Advent, “for the purpose of affirming the sacredness of God’s creation, of spreading hope about God’s reconciling work in creation and an understanding of environmental stewardship and ecological justice.”
“There is both an implicit and explicit curriculum when you walk into a church and the liturgy really is both spoken word and also embodied,” Schut said. “And in the Episcopal Church it is one of the most important realities, practices, mechanisms that define world views and say to people, ‘this is important.’ I think strongly encouraging a creation cycle regularly in the calendar year would be a particularly powerful way for the church to begin in its thinking and feeling to move in a direction that would get expressed eventually in actions.”
– by Lynette Wilson
Tags: environmental, greenhouse