Marquette, Michigan - Faith leaders across eight Great Lakes states are urging their members to participate in an Earth Day 2008 challenge to collect one million pounds of electronics and more than one million pills because trust is needed between all people to stop "an environmental crisis."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge has moved into high gear more than 100 projects involving hundreds of communities are collecting pharmaceuticals, electronics and household poisons.
An EPA grant to the non-profit interfaith Earth Healing Initiative (EHI) is mobilizing religious communities in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania.
A Lutheran Bishop who has participated in interfaith Earth Day recycling projects for three years in a row encourages people of all faiths to get involved and help protect the environment.
"We are in an environmental crisis in many ways," said Lutheran Bishop Thomas A. Skrenes of the Northern Great Lakes Synod (NGLS) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). "The Great Lakes watershed is really kind of a mother to all of us here in the populated areas of the upper Midwest."
Interfaith environment projects like the EPA Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge will help ensure a better future for all humans, Skrenes said, adding "sometimes its relationships and trusting each other that really count in environmental work."
"The culture, the society and the environment are now connecting in some fantastic new ways to build relationships between people," Skrenes said. "We are building trust along and across denominational lines, in the Christian communities and into the wider faith communities of the whole country."
The EHI is "a coalition and partnership of churches, temples, synagogues and other faith traditions joining together and sharing their projects and resources to heal, protect and defend the environment," said founder Rev. Jon Magnuson of Marquette, Michigan.
Skrenes said "the church is called to bring people together to be part of the healing."
"This interfaith earth healing effort is really a great gift that has been given to all of us," Skrenes said. "It is our calling and our responsibility to assist in renewal and rebuilding - it's God's work and it's the work of God's people."
Examples of established interfaith organizations that are assisting the EHI include the University of Minnesota Lutheran Campus Ministry, the Arrowhead Interfaith Council in Duluth, the Marquette University Ministry outlets in Milwaukee, several Catholic interfaith groups and the ELCA office of Ecumenical Formation and Inter-Religious Relations.
While some of the projects have been running all month, the bulk of the events will be held thourhg Saturday, April 26. Collections, rules, times and dates vary from city to city.
The EHI is one of numerous environment projects founded by the non-profit Cedar Tree Institute in Marquette, Michigan including the Earth Keepers, known for removing more than 370 tons of e-waste, pharmaceuticals and household hazardous waste during three Earth Day clean sweeps across the Upper Peninsula.
Bishop Skrenes is among the faith leaders who have signed the northern Michigan Earth Keeper Covenant pledging to actively participate in environment projects, build bridges with other faiths, and reach out to Native American tribes.
The ongoing Earth Keeper project involves the congregations of over 150 churches and temples representing ten faith communities: Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist Church, Unitarian Universalist, Bahá'í, Jewish, Zen Buddhist and the Religious Society of Friends commonly known as the Quakers. The EHI is coordinating the same relationships with religious communities across the Great Lakes and beyond.
"People of many spiritual dimensions resonate to this work," Skrenes said. "This is a good effort for all of us to be involved with."
"This is about the environment, this is about cleaning up and making things new again and restoring things to the ways they once were and can be," Skrenes said.
"People who are spiritual reflect upon and think about creation," Skrenes said. "We think about the lakes and the streams and the forest and all of the rest that God has produced."
The 2008 EPA challenge project sites include large cities like Chicago, Milwaukee and Cleveland. The EHI works in collaboration with the EPA and other government and non-government organizations, said Magnuson, Cedar Tree Institute executive director.
