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United Nations Environmental Program Archive of E-Articles 2011

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United Nations Environmental Program Archive of E-Articles 2011 United Nations Environmental Program Archive of E-Articles 2011 January 5, 2011 New endowed chair at Yale unites teaching of theology and the environment Yale Daily Bulletin A pledge of $3 million will endow a joint senior faculty appointment between Yale Divinity School/Berkeley Divinity School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES) in honor of H. Boone Porter, a graduate of Yale College, Berkeley and FES, and his wife, Violet M. Porter. The endowment substantially enhances the interdisciplinary study of theology and the environment that has been developing at Yale for many years, culminating in the establishment of a joint degree program in 1997. The gift comes from the children of the Porters through the Porter Foundation. Boone Porter, who died in 1999, was a scholar, priest, writer, and environmentalist, and both he and his wife played an important role in the Episcopal Church. Yale Divinity School Dean Harold Attridge said, “This gift from the Porter Foundation will ensure that the collaboration that has developed in recent years between Yale Divinity School and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies will continue and expand into an even more fruitful partnership. The environmental challenges that we face involve not only scientific and technical issues, but also issues of fundamental values and moral commitments.” Peter Crane, Dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, said, “We are delighted and humbled by the commitment of the Porter family and truly excited by the new opportunity to further develop the already-strong connections between religion and environmental stewardship at Yale.” “For Berkeley, this gift is not only an important contribution to addressing the urgent ecological issues of our day,” observed Berkeley Dean Joseph Britton. “It also places the seminary in the forefront of theological education in the Episcopal Church, vividly demonstrating the larger horizon in a university divinity school.” A leader in the burgeoning field of religion and ecology, Yale created the first joint Master’s degree program in both disciplines in the nation. In recent years, several faculty members with a focus on religion and the environment have come to the University, and a number of major conferences at Yale have explored environmentalism from an ethical and theological viewpoint. An issue of the Divinity School publication Reflections was entirely devoted to the subject and included contributions by the likes of Wendell Berry, Wangari Maathai and Bill McKibben. Many Divinity School alumni are actively engaged in the environmental movement, professionally and in their private lives. Porter Foundation President and Berkeley Trustee Nicholas T. Porter (‘86, M.Div. ’94) said, “As a graduate of Yale College, Berkeley Divinity School, and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, my father knew that his work and life was deeply shaped, informed and enriched by these great institutions. As a memorial to both him and my mother, we are delighted to be able to similarly enrich the lives and studies of future students of Berkeley and Yale.” Porter’s teaching career began at an Episcopal seminary near Milwaukee and culminated with his appointment as the first tenured professor of liturgy at The General Theological Seminary in New York. Later in his career he was editor of the weekly magazine The Living Church, a publication focused on the Anglican tradition. He also had a major role in the development of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. He graduated from Yale College in 1945, then earned degrees from Berkeley in 1950 and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1996. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berkeley. In addition to the endowment for a Porter professorship, the Porter family also donated Boone Porter’s papers to Yale, working especially through H. Boone Porter III ‘72. The papers, documenting Porter’s lifelong commitment to the church and environment, have been deposited in the Yale Divinity School Library. Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School, a seminary of the Episcopal Church, began their affiliation in 1971. Berkeley maintains an independent board of trustees and dean, but both schools are located on the Yale campus at Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. Berkeley students receive Yale degrees, along with a diploma or certificate in Anglican Studies from Berkeley. http://dailybulletin.yale.edu/article.aspx?id=8129 Also see this story from Yale Divinity School – Notes from the Quad: $3 million gift pledged in support of endowed chair in religion and environmental stewardship http://www.yale.edu/divinity/notes/101201/gift.shtml January 5, 2011 Noah’s Ark replica shows conservative Christians are embracing green building By Philip Kennicott Washington Post When the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., opened on Memorial Day 2007, temperatures inside the 100,000-square-foot complex began to spike. Huge crowds of warm bodies will do that to an HVAC system, and it took months of tweaking through the museum's first hot summer to get the system working properly. Mike Zovath, senior vice president of Answers in Genesis, the organization that built the Creation Museum, says he has learned his lesson. As a consortium that includes his group prepares to break ground this spring on a biblical theme park called Ark Encounter, which will include a replication of Noah's Ark built according to the dimensions given in the Book of Genesis, it is turning to the latest trends in "green" architecture. Scheduled to open in 2014, Ark Encounter will include environmentally sustainable technology "from Day One," Zovath said, and will be built by a firm that specializes in LEED-certified construction and design, the industry standard for environmentally efficient buildings. That means geothermal heating, rainwater capture, active and passive solar heating and specialized window glazing. Even the 500-foot-long ark, which its owners say will be the largest timber-framed structure in America, will use sustainable heating and cooling, and lighting designed to reduce energy expenditure. One might say that stories about green architecture have now officially jumped the ark. For a decade, at least, new office buildings, hotels, and even shopping centers have been trumpeted with news of their LEED ratings, which range from merely "certified" through silver, gold and the much-coveted platinum. Churches, synagogues and other places of worship have competed for environmental status through the LEED process. But it is a mark of success of the LEED standards, promulgated by the U.S. Green Building Council, that there is a new comfort level with them among conservative religious groups, including biblical literalists. The Ark Encounter has been in the news recently because of its strict interpretation of the Noah story, a biblical passage that has taken on new resonance as global warming raises fears of larger and more devastating floods and droughts worldwide. Bloggers have pounced on pages from the Answers in Genesis Web site that patiently explain why dinosaurs will be included among the animals represented in its ark display: "God sent two of every (seven of some) land animal into the Ark," it says. "There were no exceptions." They also believe in unicorns. But the appearance of the LEED standards on the organization's Web site is the bigger news, suggesting not only the extent of a trend already well documented - the embrace of environmentalism among evangelical Christians - but a fundamental shift in how religiously conservative Christians think of two basic biblical ideas: dominion and stewardship. And that change could have profound implications for the ongoing debate about global warming. Progress in battling the rise of global temperatures might depend less on consensus about environmental science and more on broad theological agreement about humanity's relation to the cosmos. Roger Platt, senior vice president of global policy and law at the Green Building Council, says the success of the LEED standards among conservative groups has a lot of to do with the fact that they are voluntary and cost-effective. His group not only created the standards and advocates for "progressive building codes" but also lobbies for "climate change legislation, including carrots and sticks." He says there isn't a LEED system for boats, and that includes arks. But his group "is ambidextrous enough" to encourage green building, whether or not the builder believes in climate science, he says. Zovath is a climate change skeptic. "Personally, I don't buy into it," he says. But he likes the bottom line of energy efficiency. "There is a pretty significant return on investment," he says. But it's not just about financial return. It also has to do with how he defines stewardship, the responsibility for the Earth that Christians believe was given by God in several key verses of Genesis, especially 1:28. "We are to be in dominion over everything that He created," Zovath says. "Not to waste it, not try to destroy it." Over the years, and millennia, the meaning of those two words - stewardship and dominion - has changed how Christians relate to the natural world. Fundamental differences in the creation story, and the personalities of the different authors of Genesis, have created a tension between dominion understood as a hierarchical, possessive, even violent mastery of the world, and stewardship as a form of service, to God and the Earth, in God's name. Perhaps only in the past half-century has the more caring, nurturing notion of stewardship taken hold, as man's power over nature has shifted from minimal (in the days of agrarian and herding societies) to near- absolute (atom bombs, deep-water off-shore drilling, plastic grocery bags). Nature today is threatened, not threatening. And younger evangelicals are also shifting away from older patriarchal ideas. "The Book of Common Prayer in the 1950s spoke of 'this fragile Earth, our island home,' but nobody really knew what that meant," says Sally Bingham, founder and director of Interfaith Power and Light, a group that works to make connections between ecology and faith.
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