Report on Religions for the Earth and the People’s Climate March

by Andras Corban-Arthen
This article was originally published on December 31, 2014 by Earth Spirit Voices in two parts.
This is an end-of-the-year report (in two parts) on my participation in some interfaith activities this past fall. Brief commentaries about these events were previously published on EarthSpirit’s Facebook page, and a version of this report appears in the latest issue (#119) of Circle Magazine. I’d like to thank all the members and friends of EarthSpirit, whose generous donations to our community support our participation in events such as the ones I describe here.
Two important and related events were held in New York City over the weekend of the autumnal equinox, 19-21 September: the People’s Climate March, a 3-mile long demonstration through the streets of Manhattan as a call for awareness and action regarding environmental deterioration; and the Religions for the Earth Conference, held at Union Theological Seminary to bring together some 200 leaders from diverse spiritual traditions, to discuss how teachings of the various religions can address the climate change crisis. I attended both events, which were timed to coincide with the Climate Summit scheduled to take place a few days later at the United Nations, at the behest of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The Religions for the Earth Conference was organized by the Union Forum, a platform within Union Theological Seminary which promotes dialogue about religion and social ethics in order to bring about positive civic engagement. In her message of welcome to the conference participants, Karenna Gore, director of the Union Forum, had this to say about the purpose of the event:
“Spiritual and religious leaders have a place in this conversation precisely because it is their vocation to call for sacrifice and reverence to something larger than oneself. Religious leadership is at its best when challenging the status quo, including the powerful, wealthy institutions and individuals who will resist being moved. Our religions are organized differently, but each has the potential for exponential effect throughout our interconnected world. Those of you gathering at Union this weekend hold extraordinary strength within you and also the kindness and love to bring out the best in each other.”
I attended Religions for the Earth representing the three main organizations with which I am affiliated: my community, EarthSpirit; the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which was one of the co-sponsors of the conference; and the European Congress of Ethnic Religions, of which I am president. The Parliament’s delegation also included our Chair, Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, our Executive Director, Dr. Mary Nelson, and several other trustees, among them Phyllis Curott, the other pagan who serves with me on the Parliament’s Board.
Most of the presentations at the conference took the form of panel discussions, in which participants from several different religious traditions addressed topics such as “Climate Change, Gender & Human Rights”; “Integrating the Earth into Worship, Liturgy and Devotion”; “Environmental Racism and Climate Justice Initiatives”; “Engaging Ecological Despair and Grief”; and “Race, Class & Hemisphere: Regional Identity and Climate”, among others.
I was asked to be one of the members of a panel entitled “What Moves Us: Values, Narratives & the Climate Crisis – the Indigenous Traditions”, moderated by Tonya Gonnella Frichner of the Onondaga Nation, and founder of the American Indian
Law Alliance. The other panelists were François Paulette of the Dene people from northwest Canada, Mindahi Bastida-Muñoz of the pueblo Otomí from México, and Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota Nation. My role on the panel was to represent the indigenous European traditions. I had met most of the other panelists at previous interreligious events, so I was very glad to be in their company once again.
One of the most important points made by everyone in our panel was that the environmental crisis has grown out of a prevailing sense in Western culture that we are separate from the Earth, which fosters in people the entitled delusion that we can treat the natural world any way we want to. In my own remarks, I pointed out that, in Western culture, this sense of separation has specifically been fostered and transmitted by the dominant religion. The notion that Nature is fundamentally base, and eventually destined to be replaced by an otherworldly paradise (or its opposite) has been a deeply-ingrained Christian paradigm for many centuries. The same is true for the notion of a divinely-appointed human supremacy over all other beings of the Earth: the human arrogance and greed, and the objectification and devaluing of Nature that are such predictable corollaries of that notion, lie at the very core of the environmental disasters we are now facing.
Our discussion also underscored the fact that, for many decades, indigenous peoples have been issuing warnings about growing changes which are affecting climate and, therefore, everything that exists upon the Earth; but Westerners have not listened, because they are in the habit of dismissing anything which indigenous people might say.
This point was likewise made, in eloquent fashion, by the Onondaga faithkeeper Oren Lyons during one of the plenary sessions. Chief Lyons told about a meeting he once had with an Inuit elder from Greenland, who informed him that “the ice is melting in the North” – trickles of water had begun to appear on the surface of the glaciers some years before, and those trickles had now grown into permanent rivers. Throughout the rest of his speech, Chief Lyons ended every new paragraph by repeating the warning that “the ice is melting in the North”; the more he said those words, the more that he powerfully drove home the sense of urgency, and even of inevitability, surrounding climate change. Some people in the audience were visibly flinching. As he was about to finish, Chief Lyons revealed an alarming detail he had been saving for the very end. That speech we had just heard, he told us, was not new; it was, in fact, the exact same speech he had delivered at the United Nations fourteen years before. But no one had listened then, he admonished us, and it had taken the U.N. almost a decade and a half to finally organize a Climate Summit.
Because participation in the conference was by invitation only, and limited to just a couple of hundred attendees, it fostered a sense of intimacy which I have rarely found at other interfaith events, and provided the opportunity for rich, in-depth dialogue. I think that many of the conversations and initiatives that emerged from Religions for the Earth will prove to be very fruitful over the next several years. The conference ended with a deeply meaningful multifaith service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with former Vice-President Al Gore as one of the main speakers.
The Climate March on Sunday was doubtlessly the best-organized demonstration I have ever been a part of. The organizers had anticipated at least 100,000 people, so they had staggered the marchers by dividing us into several different contingents, “penning” each one in a different city block adjacent to the March route. The contingents were defined by “themes” which identified different ways in which people related to climate change: science, for instance, or politics, or religion/spirituality, etc. That way, you could identify whichever theme you were most drawn to, go to that particular city block, and wait with like-minded people until it was your contingent’s turn to start marching.
The Pagan Environmental Coalition of NY led by Courtney Weber, which took on the job of organizing the pagan marchers, wisely had us join the interfaith contingent, and we shared the street with Buddhists, Muslims, Quakers, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Unitarians, Bahá’ís, Sikhs – it was like a mini Parliament of the World’s Religions in the guise of a block party. A Muslim group brought along an inflatable mosque. A Christian group built a Noah’s Ark float to focus attention on how animals are imperiled by global warming. About twenty EarthSpirit members showed up – not only from New York, but from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey as well – bringing drums and rattles, and getting all kinds of people to join in singing many of our community’s chants.
The PECNY also helped to put together an interreligious service to kick off the March, and they were very kind to invite me to offer the pagan blessing in the ceremony. These are the words I spoke:
“In the Spirit of the Earth, we are coming together; 
in the Spirit of the Earth, we are one…” *
We come from the north, and we come from the south; 
we come from the west, and we come from the east. 
We gather from all directions 
to march for this living planet 
who is our home, who is what we are. 
But we do not march only for ourselves, 
we march for all beings of the Earth. 
And so we call to sun, to wind and rain; 
we call to mountains and glaciers; 
we call to all who walk and crawl, who fly and swim; 
we call to our ancestors, both seen and unseen; 
we call to oceans and streams, 
to trees, and grasses and stones 
to guide and bless every step we take, 
that we may once again live in harmony 
with our Mother the Earth. 
As it was, as it is, as it ever shall be; 
with the flow and the ebb, as it ever shall be.
(© 2014, Andras Corban-Arthen; *© 2000, Deirdre Pulgram-Arthen)
By the time my turn came, the crowd had grown to approximately 10,000 people packed like sardines in our block; there was barely enough room to move but a few inches. From my vantage point up on the stage, I was suddenly able to see what those below me couldn’t: just one street away, an unending river of people was flowing along the March route – a surprising and breathtaking sight. I certainly hadn’t expected anything quite that massive; it was quite obvious that there were substantially more than 100,000 people marching.
Just before we finally started to move, I got into a conversation with one of the police officers patrolling our street. He told me that, in his thirty years on the force, this was the first time that the event organizers had more than delivered on what they’d promised. According to him, demonstration organizers tend to grossly exaggerate beforehand the number of people they expect at their events, in the hope of generating enough excitement to actually draw something close to that number. This time, when the organizers had first predicted around 100,000 marchers, there had been a great deal of skepticism among the authorities and the media; except that he had just heard over the police scanner that the line of marchers was over four miles long, and that the current estimate was around 400,000 people. But what really impressed him the most, he told me, was that there had not been a single arrest or similar incident of any kind reported, and that, amazingly, the marchers were not leaving any trash at all in their wake. “Tell you what,” he said, “if what I’m seeing here is what this movement is really about, then I gotta think that maybe there’s still hope for the world.”
Published with the author’s permission.