BY YSABELLE KEMPE BELLINGHAM HERALD UPDATED MAY 16, 2022 11:29 AM
Jillian Froebe stands next to the Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice’s Net of Interconnection at a community forest walk in Whatcom County on Saturday, Feb. 26. Each strip of cloth added to the net contains the writer’s earnest blessing for or pledge of commitment to earth justice for all beings. The net is intended to travel through Whatcom faith and wisdom communities to be continuously added to.
Bellingham’s Lairmont Manor was bursting at the seams with attendees during the first event held by the local Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice in September 2019. Despite a pandemic that upended how we gather, the Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice has continued to meet via Zoom and correspond online, sharing information about policy, events and news.
Leaders from over a dozen spiritual traditions — including Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism and Paganism— spoke at the first gathering, held during the city’s annual ALL IN for Climate Action Week. “No matter how superficially different people perceive them as being, all of them expressed a profound deeply rooted belief that their religion calls them to protect this earth,” said Betsy Gross, a retired mental health professional who co-convened the multi-faith network.
The Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice is a group of Bellingham residents from faith and wisdom communities that gather monthly to discuss climate change and justice. Gross said the group fills participants’ unmet craving to explore the intersection between their faith and human-caused climate change, which is bringing more frequent, severe extreme weather and disrupting ecosystems around the world. “People came because their own faiths weren’t talking about it, and they wanted to,” Gross said.
The digital meetings begin and end with a centering moment that is reflective and meditative. “It changes the whole tone,” said Jillian Froebe, a community minister involved with the network. “It doesn’t take the fire out of it, but it takes the judgment out of it.”
Participants do not have to be part of an established faith or wisdom community, and meeting attendance ranges from 30 to 120 people, Gross said.
The network is Gross’ brainchild. After attending a 2019 climate leader training in Atlanta, Georgia, led by former Vice President Al Gore, Gross came back to Bellingham with her “hair on fire.” Filled with indignation that climate change would hit the poorest people the hardest, Gross decided she needed to engage a community in Bellingham that hadn’t been as outspoken about climate change issues: the faith community. “This is a labor of love,” Gross said. “To me, that’s the niche that spiritual traditions have to offer to the conversation about climate.”
Linda Conroy Courtesy to The Bellingham Herald
‘CLIMATE CRISIS IS A MORAL CRISIS’
What do faith and spirituality have to do with the environment and climate change? This is a question that Jason Brown, who teaches at Western Washington University and British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, has dedicated his career to exploring. “The climate crisis is a moral crisis,” Brown said. “That means that the climate crisis is a religious issue as much as it is a political, technological or ecological issue.” Different faiths and spiritual worldviews define the relationship between humans and the natural world in contrasting ways, Brown said. Some frame the earth as a “material blessing from a divine source,” while others perceive the nonhuman world as sharing in God’s presence, he said. Indigenous peoples tend to have a more entangled relationship with the natural world and a “diverse view of persons,” he said.
Froebe, the minister involved with Bellingham’s Multi-faith Network, said the group has much to learn from the way local Indigenous communities interact with the environment. Part of the value of an interfaith group is that it allows participants to clarify their own faith’s position on the environment and climate in relation to others, Brown explained. “Do animals have souls? Is the Earth sacred? Can we say Mass outside?” Brown said. “You start to come up against the limitations of your own faith.”
A climate-focused group rooted in spirituality and philosophy also serves as a space for people to process the emotions elicited by a warming planet, Brown said. Many young people have already begun to move away from religion, and it can be this loss of the “sense of the sacred” that makes the ecological crisis feel even more daunting to them, he said. “There’s goodness in gathering and talking about grief,” Brown said. “People should talk about how scary it is right now and move to that place of certainty that other people feel the same way. You are not alone.”
SACRED EARTH FAIR ON THE HORIZON
The Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice is more than a space to talk. It is a vessel for climate action and policy. “The idea now is to try and get those faith communities not just to acknowledge this portion of their spiritual path but to put them in a position where there is action taken, so we can do what we can to preserve what’s left of creation,” said Deb Cruz, a participant in the network from the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship. The network doesn’t mark the first time that faith communities and climate action have crossed paths in Whatcom — statewide nonprofit [Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power & Light] supported efforts to fight the proposed Gateway Pacific coal terminal at Cherry Point years before the Multi-faith Network for Climate Justice was convened. The network formalized a partnership with [Earth Ministry/WAIPL] in early 2021.
It’s been more difficult to get large fundamentalist Christian churches out in the county involved with the Multi-faith Network than groups in Bellingham, Froebe said. The network is also not as intergenerational as she would like, but she has high hopes that the network’s Sacred Earth Fair this summer will change that. The Sacred Earth Fair, which will take place at Bellingham’s Center for Spiritual Living from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 31, is an outdoor event that will bring together community members for an afternoon of speakers, yoga, listening circles, Zen nature walks, booths and children’s activities. Violinist and Lummi Nation member Swil Kanim will perform, and Nooksack Tribal storyteller Tammy Cooper-Woodrich and her daughter Angela Letoi will speak.
Gross hopes community members walk away from the fair feeling energized to take action. “It seems like the more we talk about this and offer 80 different ways you can see, know and understand it, the more we all get involved in doing something about it,” Gross said.
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