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Quaker Environmentalism - Page 4

© Marshall Massey

But as our understanding has deepened, our activities have gradually been transformed.

For instance, some of us have begun developing new cooperative approaches to agriculture in partnership with the native farmers of Costa Rica's San Luis Valley -- approaches that protect the soils and the forests, and shelter the wildlife, while providing a more reliable income and greater social justice for the farmers. This "San Luis Valley Project" not only reestablishes an environmentally righteous way of living in a fragile environment, but also stands as a witness to the world, of what is possible even for civilized humans in the tropics, if they return to what is right.

Others of us have engaged in acts of civil disobedience in the face of wrongdoing, as for example in the face of reckless logging of old-growth forests -- and have made their acts of civil disobedience, not just angry protests against something we find wrong, but instead, loving and positive and constructive reachings-out to the minds and hearts of those who are doing the destroying.

In these and other ways that I do not have space to talk about here, environmentally minded Friends are coming to focus more and more on the two essential tasks of the prophet: first, to demonstrate, through their own deeds and lives, the possibilities for a greater righteousness that exist here in God's world; and second, to recall the wrongdoers from their wrongdoings, as the prophet Nathan did with King David.⁹ For we have begun to see that such a reformation and redemption of the destroyers -- meaning by "destroyers", both ourselves and others -- is the central business of God's environmental movement. Without such a reformation, without such a redemption, our planet cannot be saved from destruction.

Grassroots Character

Third, since our fundamental source of guidance is not a priesthood but an experience of God, our approach is utterly grassroots in character.

Our major Quaker religious-environmental organizations are not organized or directed from a denominational headquarters, not led by people appointed from such a headquarters, and not subject to such a headquarters' approval. They are self-organized, and composed solely of those who have come to the movement of their own volition, feeling themselves drawn by God's Spirit into religious environmental work.

This has given our Quaker religious environmental movement an important freedom: freedom to keep complete faith with the guidance it receives from the Spirit, without any sort of hindrance from outside -- which includes freedom to rock the boat of convention, and freedom to challenge the world to reform, without hindrance from those who do not yet understand.

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