The Earth is the Lord's

Green My Hood

Does caring for the environment always come at the expense of jobs? Is creation care something that must be traded off against people care? I'm reading a great book right now that addresses just that issue. I'm reading it with my pastor, Leroy Barber, because we care about the beautiful but broken South Atlanta neighborhood our church calls home. Leroy is president of Mission Year and is a speaker at this year's Flourish Conference for church leaders on creation care.

The book is Van Jones' The Green Collar Economy. Van Jones is the founder and president of Green For All, and his work is significant for Christians who want to do community development in environmentally-friendly ways and for those who want to find ways out of the "environment vs. jobs" debate. Jones points out the many ways in which solving environmental problems can be done with justice. His position is that as long as we're going to all the trouble to create a clean energy economy, we might as well make a renewed effort to tackle discrimination and inequality, too.

He addresses the involvement of faith communities directly and challenges the "so-called progressives [who] snarl the word 'Christian' as if it were an insult or the name of a disease." He presses activists to become problem-solvers, to become more about "proposition" than "opposition." In a short list of principles for a new movement, Jones advocates fewer "issues," more solutions; fewer "demands," more goals; fewer "targets," more partners; and less "accusation," more confession.

Leroy's recent post on Sojourners blog captures how he thinks about environmental issues:

Is it possible to create a new economy in the hood that would create jobs, lower energy costs, reduce the carbon footprint of an urban neighborhood, and allow neighbors to get to know one another at the same time? I think there just might be a way to make this a reality. I would like to green my hood.

The problem in urban neighborhoods is that they are some of the most dangerous places, environmentally speaking. Trash dumps, tow lots, expressways, and chemical plants create places that are quite unsafe. Our neighborhoods can begin to help themselves and lower some of the risk by starting their own green projects. We could hire and train people to do home audits for seniors and families in homes that are full of lead paint, leaky windows, clogged gutters, and uninsulated water heaters. This training would give jobs to people and lower energy bills for residents, as well as reduce the carbon footprint of the neighborhood.

We can grow neighborhood gardens and farmers’ markets, which would offer places for neighbors to have better access to nutritious food and vegetables that are otherwise very costly. When we make neighborhoods walkable and livable, neighbors can get around without driving, and that means less asthma-causing air pollution, fewer emergency room visits, and fewer sleepless nights for worried parents. Caring for the environment has hit the hood and is now a major urban issue, and people of faith have opportunity to offer good news in a new way. This is no longer just an issue of global warming and saving rain forests — it is about protecting some of our most vulnerable citizens.

Clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, and feeding the hungry now needs to include providing clean air, safe streets, and healthy neighborhoods for our poor urban neighbors. I am committed to greening my hood for a number of reasons. If you want to learn more about it, you should check out The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones. This is his idea, and I have become a fan.

Leroy and I are searching for other Christians who have read The Green Collar Economy—or the related work by Thomas Friedman, called Hot, Flat and Crowded (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)—and who have ideas and stories to tell about environmental actions that create rather than threaten jobs, especially in this economy. Please write me if we can feature your work or the work of others you know.

To meet Leroy Barber and other Christian leaders who are looking at environmental issues in a new way, check out the Flourish Conference, May 13-15, 2009 in Atlanta.

Gas Taxes with justice

Whew! Gas prices are back down nationwide, to levels not seen in years. Most people are rejoicing, since the last thing they feel they need in uncertain times is to be sending their hard-earned money to oil companies who are already producing record profits.  

But the fact is, we probably weren’t paying enough for gasoline even at its highest levels, because we weren’t paying the full costs of producing and using it. [See this great post for economics students for more details]. Full-cost pricing for gasoline would include not just the extraction and transport costs of crude oil, the costs of refining and shipping gasoline, and the costs of distributing it through a retail network to your local gas station. Full-cost pricing would mean  paying the full social costs of gasoline, the private costs and the public costs imposed on others, including in the price of gasoline the impacts of pollution on human health, the damage mining and shipping does to the ecosystems that provide economic benefits to people, and the cost we impose on future generations by using up non-renewable resources….

Smog season and kids

Atlanta's smog season started May 1, and runs through September 30. That means weather conditions are more likely to create unhealthy air out of the pollution that comes from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Smog requires pollution, heat, and sunlight to form. That's a recipe for asthma attacks and asthma development in children, the elderly, and people with chronic heart and lung diseases.

It's worth it to be smart about being outdoors in smog season. My friend Rebecca Watts Hull runs a cool program called Mothers and Other for Clean Air (www.mothersandothersforcleanair.org). She and her organization are reaching out to families, child care providers, summer camps, schools and churches to help them learn about the proper precautions to take to protect children against pollution.

Children have are especially sensitive to air pollution, because their little lungs are still developing, and they breathe much more air per body weight than adults, and they also spend more time outside (which is usually a good thing). But you should pay attention to Smog Alert days, especially Orange or Red ones, and adjust your behavior (like limiting outdoor time at certain times of day).

Our church's 8-week summer day camp in inner-city Atlanta is moving outdoor recreation time from the afternoons (which are more likely to have toxic air) to mornings (before smog has a chance to form). Even then, on some days all activity will have to be indoors.

The way we build our city (requiring Atlantans to collectively drive the distance to the sun and halfway back every day) and power our homes and businesses (with antiquated, dirty coal-fired generating plants) has side effects on our most vulnerable and precious family members. Taking personal, protective action is one thing. What can we do as Christians to create a culture whose economy respects life and safeguards health?

Check out Mothers and Others (www.mothersandothersforcleanair.org), or email Rebecca to get involved (rwattshull@gaconservancy.org). You can get Rebecca's "Smog Season Safety Tips" at http://georgiaconservancy.org/mothersandothers/Smog%20May%2008.pdf. And if you live in Atlanta, you can sign up for emailed smog alerts, sent a day in advance based on weather and pollution predictions, by going to the Clean Air Campaign's website http://www.cleanaircampaign.com/tools/sign_up_form. If you don't live in Atlanta, you can still find out smog alert information in your area by going to the EPA's site http://www.airnow.gov.

Conservative solutions to global warming

My colleague Alexei Laushkin alerted me to a Slate interview with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is a small government conservative, and he's not afraid of science, so he understands the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming. He's not in favor of mandatory caps on carbon dioxide. As an economist, I disagree: I think some sort of policy to give a price to carbon pollution is necessary to get us where we need to be on greenhouse gas pollution.

But a price on carbon is not sufficient--there need to be positive policies in place to stimulate the right kind of investment, and that's where Gingrich's perspective is especially helpful. He talks about introducing policies that will allow the entrepreneurial free market system put its energies into finding technological innovations that will create the new energy economy. He discusses them at length in his book "Contract with the Earth". 

Gingrich would pay for these incentives with tax dollars--essentially diverting wealth from every taxpayer into the pockets of corporations to incentivize the necessary inventions. I think either a cap-and-trade system with auctioned permits or a carbon tax are better public policy, and the revenues from those policies could accomplish what Gingrich proposes.

Check out the left/right ad in which Gingrich appears with Nancy Pelosi to promote climate solutions. They disagree on the policies, but agree on the science and the urgency behind solving anthropogenic global warming. 

A Perfect Storm Hits World Food Supply

Throughout the developing world, food riots are occurring. Corn (maize) prices are 50% higher than they were at the beginning of 2007, wheat prices are almost double, and rice prices have nearly trebled. American feel a little of this pinch, but poor people in the developing world are most affected.

Josette Sheeran of the UN’s World Food Programme was quoted in The Economist newsmagazine  on the impact of food prices increases in poor countries:

“For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”

For perspective, consider that one billion of the world’s people live on less than a dollar a day, and another one and a half billion live on between one and two dollars a day. That’s almost half the worlds population affected by the problem.

Location, location, location: Residential choices and Creation Care

By Rusty and Joanna Pritchard

Worth a listen: Last week NPR’s Morning Edition aired a pair of stories by Elizabeth Shogren, one about a family that moved out to the Atlanta suburbs, and one about a family that moved intown to a “new urban” development. It’s part of their Climate Connections series. Both stories are about parents trying to do their best by their families, making decisions under lots of constraints. Neither of them created the environment they inhabit; they’re just trying to do their best to live in it.

An Environmentalism for Us All

What Rebecca Solnit is arguing in her excellent Orion Magazine article this month is that environmentalists have become the caricature the right paints of them. They often really are a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

And, Solnit adds: they hate country music, without actually knowing country music. [To a southerner like me, that's a lot more unforgiveable than a penchant for four-dollar cups of coffee.] Liberal elites don't much like poor white people, or their music.

Solnit isn't addressing issues of faith, but I know many folks who have often felt similarly despised by the left for their evangelical beliefs.

Such elite, exclusivist attitudes have weakened the environmental movement. It might even be time to get beyond the idea of an "environmental" movement and to think more broadly about family, economics, class, race, simplicity, and justice than the title "environmental" allows.

Spend some time with the article--it's free on the Orion Magazine website, but I'll tell you, there is no more valuable use of forest resources than the print version of Orion, and this issue is still on the bookstore shelves. You have permission to buy the dead-tree version, just keep it or pass it on.

 

Pollution, virtue and second-hand smoke

Second-hand smoke is a nuisance for non-smokers. When you smoke, you get the enjoyment of the nicotine and you get some health risks too. Other people, third parties, get only costs and no benefits, including your wife, kids, dog, the servers at your favorite pub, etc. Everyone knows now not to smoke around kids. Kids deserve better. Those that do it are despicable sociopaths, and people will let them know. Social pressures are brought to bear.

Pollution is the same kind of problem, but on a larger scale.

Dallas Morning News on new evangelicals

There was a story in the Dallas Morning News about "new evangelicals" about the wider range of issues they are addressing. It makes me think that maybe the monicker "evangelical" will not continue to be wholly corrupted by unChristian connotations. Check out the article and the link to the Beliefnet dialogue it describes.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/national/stories/012408dnpolevangelicals.2b6d111.html

Fear Not!

A Different Shade of Green
(originally published in PRISM magazine, Jan/Feb 08)

Fear is a powerful motivator. If you can inspire fear, you can get people to do almost anything. (If you can also inspire loathing, you can get them to do anything.)

Evangelicals and environmentalists have a good deal in common. Fear, accompanied by an apocalyptic vision, is a standard tool in their toolboxes. Anyone watching those computer-animated maps of coastal cities flooding in An Inconvenient Truth knows that Al Gore may have a richer end-times imagination than Tim LaHaye. Enviros long ago mastered the knack of making you fear for your life, your health, and your family--and then giving you just enough information about environmental injustice for the poor to take the edge off your self-interested attitudes.