The civil rights and environmental movements were once melded together for one glorious moment in time: when Marvin Gaye released the song “What’s Going On.” The song struck a chord, expressing the yearning for both environmental justice and civil rights in a mournfully beautiful way that reached number 2 on the pop charts.

“Tragically,” the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. and Bill McKibben write for The Nation, civil rights and environmentalism “soon diverged—diverged so far that some people still find it odd that activists like ourselves are working side by side again on issues like global warming and poverty.” Today there is a potential to mend the rift between the two movements by enlisting hip hop activists in the fight against climate change.

Yearwood and McKibben write, “The swagger and style that young people and their urban-influenced culture bring to the green movement bear little resemblance to the old tree-hugging brand of environmentalism.” And that could be a very powerful thing.

Which reminds me:

Source: The Nation 

Apparently, it can’t be repeated enough: Chief Seattle didn’t really utter the words so often attributed to him on environmental posters, T-shirts, and websites. The oft-quoted words, frequently dated to 1854, were instead an adaptation of an adaptation of one man’s “poetic impression” of a speech given by the Suquamish chief, writes Gregory McNamee in a profile of the chief in the May-June issue of Native Peoples magazine (article not available online). While the famous quote’s origins have been debunked for years, from the New York Times in 1992 to Snopes in 2007, the myth persists.

The unfortunate part of all this is that Chief Seattle probably said something vaguely like what the various versions convey. But the most widely circulated version contains “anachronisms and inaccuracies,” writes McNamee, and perhaps more significantly, the whole phenomenon has cast the chief as “a spiritual ancestor of the modern green movement” when his real claim to fame was as “a war leader and shrewd politician.”

In his profile, McNamee paints a multifaceted view of the chief, noting that before the arrival of white people Chief Seattle was known as a “persuasive orator and as a tactician who helped the Suquamish and neighboring Duwamish peoples to dominate the other peoples of the area” and who kept slaves from his conquests. When the whites arrived, he employed his oratorical skills to engage with them, and he freed his slaves when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Despite the high regard in which his sentiments are now held, he “then bore witness to the slow decline and impoverishment of his people on the reservation to which they were now confined.”

Image by the  City of Seattle , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The intersection of spirituality and environmentalism is somewhere in Idaho—on a gravel road where a painted turtle is trudging across, making her way from one marsh to another. “My spirits soared,” Rick Bass writes in Shambhala Sun, “at the life-affirming tenacity of her journey, her crossing, as well at this most physical manifestation that indeed the back of winter was broken; for here, exhumed once again by the warm breath of the awakening earth, was the most primitive vertebrate still among us.”

Here’s to that awakening earth, and all the surging, ecstatic feelings it can conjure. For as much time as we might spend talking (and listening, reading, and thinking) about the need to protect the earth, to save our fragile, damaged world: We need to connect with it too. For Bass, it’s all in one: “For me, activism is a form of prayer, a way of paying back some small fraction of the blessing that the wilderness is to me.”

Source: Shambhala Sun

Image by Pvt. Pondscum, licensed under Creative Commons.

Conservationist Calvin DeWitt sees the Bible as our earliest environmentalist treatise: “an ecological handbook on how to live rightly on earth.”

The newly published Green Bible drives that message home by highlighting all verses with ecological and conservationist themes in green ink. It’s a variation on the red-letter editions of the Bible that highlight the words of Jesus. The green edition includes an index of environmental topics, a foreword by Desmond Tutu, a “trail guide for further study,” and “inspirational essays by scholars and leaders,” among them DeWitt.

Perusing the text and zeroing in on the green passages makes for an illuminating kind of exegesis. Most of Genesis is printed in green, concerning as it does the natural world and humankind’s relationship to it. When God says, “‘And have dominion over the fish of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (1:28), the Green Bible and its contributors interpret “dominion” not as free reign, but as responsibility.

The Book of Jeremiah is more to the point, recasting the Old Testament God as an angry environmental activist: “But my people have forgotten me … making their land a horror.” (18:15-16).

The Green Bible hopes to remind the faithful that adherence to their faith includes a responsibility toward God’s creations—an increasingly common theology reflected in the emergence of Christian environmental initiatives. Environmental awareness in this edition also encompasses a mindfulness of the earth’s other human inhabitants, and every exhortation to love thy neighbor, every reminder of our interconnectivity, is printed green. An example comes from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians: “There may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for each other. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:25).

Launching today, the Green Report Card website promises to rank 300 colleges in terms of their sustainability, helping eco-conscious high school seniors make the right choice.

Green Report Card was created by the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The college rankings are formulated using information gathered from the College Sustainability Report Card 2009, which evaluates schools in nine key categories: Administration, Climate Change and Energy, Food and Recycling, Green Building, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment Transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.

Factors affecting a school’s grade range from the presence of “green dorms and car sharing,” according to the program’s press release, to “shareholder advisory committees and renewable energy investments.” Small liberal arts colleges like Carleton and Oberlin were among the 15 schools that got A grades, joining the ranks of such state schools as the University of Washington and the University of New Hampshire, and Ivies like Harvard and Brown.

Peruse the Report Card to see how your current or former institution fared. (I’m embarrassed to say where I went to college, since my alma mater got a D-minus. Ouch!)

Image by redjar, licensed by Creative Commons.