Berkley Center

Lyndsay Moseley worked with the Sierra Club to build alliances between environmental activists and the faith community. The true costs of our energy model are born by the weak and powerless, to the profit of those with money and influence. Challenges range from extraction, such as mountain-top removal, to transportation, with pipeline ruptures, to pollution from consumption, such as childhood lung ailments brought on by coal fire power plants. Clean alternatives are available, including wind and solar power, battery-based automobiles, and infrastructure improvements to energy grids. But there is real opposition to this kind of reform, primarily from energy companies who benefit from avoiding the real costs of the status quo. The faith community has a crucial role to play in overcoming this opposition, especially in raising up the fundamentally ethical stakes of these debates. Who is my neighbor? What responsibilities does society have to our most vulnerable members and to creation? For the faith community, this type of advocacy has become more commonplace, from evangelical “creation care” to the “Green Patriarch” Bartholomew’s leadership in the Orthodox community.