Churches Going Back To The Garden: Faithful Take Small Steps To Address Global Warming

[Doondoo]

Global warming is prompting a growing number of Connecticut churches and synagogues to go green, and to redefine what keeping the faith means. They are conducting energy audits of drafty sanctuaries, learning how to insulate stained glass windows and selling low wattage light bulbs instead of cookies at fundraisers.

You could call it counting kilowatts for God. Though the immediate goal is energy conservation, and maybe even saving on the monthly utility bill, the ultimate purpose is bigger. The congregations want to do their part, small as it may be, to burn less of the fossil fuels that produce the greenhouse gases threatening the world.

"God put man in the garden to care for it - that's the first call," said the Rev. Thomas Carr of the First Baptist Church in West Hartford, citing Genesis 2:15. "A lot of people see this as part of our mission. It is as important as feeding the hungry and caring for the poor."

Carr said his church spent $10,000 to insulate the sanctuary and, along with Asylum Hill Congregational in Hartford, was one of the first to buy electricity through the state's "Clean Energy Option," which delivers power, at a slight premium, from generating stations that run on wind, water or landfill gas. Carr emerged as a leader of the churches' new environmentalism from the campaign begun in the late 1990s to clean up pollution from older power plants known as the Sooty Six. Back then, people worried more about the health hazards of dirty air than greenhouse gases.

"My main reason for getting involved was the global warming association," Carr said. "But I didn't know how to talk about it so it wouldn't seem so overwhelming."


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