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59 chapter฀three “i knoW THaT iT Was a reVeLaTion From god” Religion and Environmental Action By the 1990s, knee-jerk support for local industries had become less prominent in some communities as citizens and elected officials came to embrace more nuanced positions. Media outlets began carrying more environmental stories, and a few churches began to explore the spiritual aspect of environmental stewardship. The women thus helped pave the way for their communities to consider more balanced economic options and values. “You were just literally living in your home and watching it fall down on you while trying to keep it up. Trying to keep it painted and fixing the boards, but nailing them back doesn’t work because the emissions in the air would rust them and the screens. And if it is eating up the screens, the fence, the nails, the boards, and the roof, imagine what it’s doing on the inside of people.” (Debra Ramirez) Louisiana, like other southern states, is known for a conservatism often framed by evangelical practices. Unlike other southern states, it is also known for the predominance of Catholicism, whose members make up 30 percent of the population, and an even larger percentage of residents in the coastal areas of the state. It is not surprising, then, that among the women in this book, twenty-two are Catholic women, alongside fourteen Protestant and two Jewish women. All of them speak of some attachment to religion, and most speak of considerable attachment. They do not, however, emphasize their work as Catholics, Protestants, or Jews,but as believers in the universality of care for the Earth.In the words of one of them, Shirley Goldsmith: The environment is everyone’s responsibility. We live in this world. Our feet touch this ground and we can look up at the heavens, but there is nothing up there that we can be assured of. We do know we have this, so let us take care of it. I feel this world was given to us for us to take care of. We are not the ones that should be destroying it. I have a very 60 religion฀and฀environMental฀action strong belief in God, and it was God’s message to me that you do not tear up my Earth. Two practices unite the women to whom we spoke, practices both ancient and local, seamlessly part of their lives, which have also stood with organized religion since the time of Saint Augustine. First, these women consider the place of the church primarily as a change maker, or at least a support, in assisting communities to remain vigilant in protection of the environment and the health of residents.Various markers in the chronology of the modern environmental movement confirm this centrality of the church as reformer,including the 1972 publication of René DuBois’s The God Within and the 1987 United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice’s Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Second, the women in the Louisiana movement also often spoke of prayer and the need to call upon a higher power.For them,everyday worries as well as care of the world have always meant, literally, attention to silent or shared supplication, and sometimes attention to voices that they perceived as holy guides. Likewise, faith itself sustained many of these women as they trod the difficult, often lonely road of environmental activism. Sometimes the beliefs they saw as religious, as spiritual, led them down paths they had never expected to follow. Some of them changed churches, crossed, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to different churches; others remained socially and politically conservative but emerged as liberals in terms of the environment; still more eschewed categories and continued praying as they had been taught to do as children. Lorena PosPisiL Lorena Pospisil, of Libuse, Louisiana, represents the attitudes of mainstream religion of most of the United States, as well as the work of various religious denominations in the Louisiana Interchurch Conference to address environmental concerns. She started one of the first environmental organizations in Louisiana in 1980, called Concerned Citizens of Cenla (CCC). In 1983, she stopped a proposed solid waste landfill from being built in the small rural community of Pollock,Louisiana.She helped prevent two other commercial solid waste landfills from being built in Rapides Parish. In 1987, she started the first recycling program in Alexandria, Louisiana. Concerned about the aerial spraying of pesticides in her parish, she...

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