Being in the alpenglow

Last night we held our "Longest Night" service, with readings, healing prayers and candle lighting. The service is more low-key and especially for those who find the holiday season a little too intense. Below is my homily, and the photograph is me sitting on the ridge described (in the Alpenglow):

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If you’ve ever hiked in the mountains, above where the trees won’t grow, you know that the sun can be very bright in the daytime, much brighter than in the lowlands.

The air is thinner above the tree line and it is easy to get sunburned. 

But dusk high in the mountains, that is something all together different.

There is a place I go in the high Sierra. I’ve not been there in a few years, so mostly I go these days in my mind’s eye.

This place is on a high ridge in the heart of Yosemite. It takes about a half-day to hike up there. The ridge faces east, looking out across Tuolumne Meadows, and toward the sharp, glacially polished spires of the aptly named Cathedral peaks.

 I like to sit on this ridge at dusk. As the sun sets behind me, it casts a reddish-orange glow, and the mountains begin to shimmer for a few minutes.

It’s called “alpenglow,” and there is no better place to experience the alpenglow than on this ridge high in the Sierra Nevada. The amazing thing about alpenglow is you can feel the warmth of the sun even as the coolness of the night begins to settle over the mountains. And if you can hold the alpenglow in your mind, its warmth will carry you to the dawn and the return of the sun.  

Sometimes the bright lights of the Christmas season can be a little too intense. Religion itself can be like that. Religion can be too bright, too certain, too religious, and we can feel sunburned by it.

Sometimes all we need is the alpenglow. That is enough.

So tonight we will light a few candles, enough to give us the alpenglow. 

As you sit in the alpenglow tonight, there is really only one thing I want you to know. I have only one sermon, really, and it is this: God loves you. God loves you, no matter what. God loves you no matter what you’ve done, or not done, where you’ve been, or haven’t been. God loves you in your triumphs and in your failings, and God’s love comes with no strings attached, no qualifying phrases that begin with “if” or “but.”

It doesn’t matter what you’ve believe or not believe. You are in God’s loving embrace. You’ve met God in the alpenglow every evening of your life, even when you didn’t see the glow.

Moses saw God in a burning bush, and maybe that was just too bright for the rest of us. That is why I believe the divine came to earth as a human being, the One who we know as Jesus, so that we might experience the alpenglow of the creator. That, really, is the point of Christmas, to celebrate the glow of the One who comes among us.

Yet I know that is not always easy to feel or to believe. So tonight, rest in the alpenglow, and know that is enough.

Maybe there is something weighing on you tonight, a burden you are carrying, or a problem that just won’t resolve, or a relationship that is complicated, or a situation that is difficult. Or you miss someone close who is far away or gone. Rest tonight in the alpenglow of God’s love.

Maybe there is something deep inside you that needs healing. Soon we will offer prayers for healing, prayers for you and prayers for the people you love. I would urge you to come forward, don’t be shy. Come be open to the prayers that are a gift to you tonight in the alpenglow. And then light a candle.

And then I would offer again the words of St. Paul, written long ago to a small isolated community of Christians who were just trying to figure out how to get from one day to the next. He might as well have written these words to us:

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

AMEN

Winter's departure and a great photo from Yosemite

Winter is not quite through, with another blast covering many parts of the country.


Jay Mather, my friend and former Sacramento Bee colleague, who is truly one of the most talented photographers of our generation, shared this photo yesterday that he took in 1988.

 Jay has taken many photos at Yosemite and quite a number are in books. Enjoy this one as Winter departs.

Fiat Lux: Marking the 900th posting with a virtual trip to Half Dome

This is the 900th posting to Fiat Lux since launching this blog in June 2008. I thought we should mark the occasion with something fun and spiritual, and with a light theme (after all, this is Fiat Lux, "Let There be Light").

What else would fit that bill than trip to Yosemite? Below is a delightful time-lapse video taken Nov. 8 from Sentinel Dome, looking across at Half Dome, and note the dusting of snow already on the peaks.

This video comes courtesy of the Yosemite Conservancy, which Lori and I have financially supported for years. The Conservancy was formed with the merger of the Yosemite Association and Yosemite Fund. With government cuts slicing deeply into the maintenance budgets of the national parks, the Conservancy is filling a gap by helping to keep Yosemite open and safe for all visitors. For more information about this very worthy organization, and to donate, please click HERE.

And now, please enjoy your journey to one of the most wonderful places on earth...

Photo at top: "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome," by Ansel Adams, 1927.

Clouds, air, summer poems and paintings

Summer is now officially here, the season of outdoor cooking, rose´ wine, sparkling sunsets, and slowing down. The other evening, Lori and enjoyed dinner with old friends at their Craftsman-era home. And we got an additional treat: they showed us five original paintings by Chiura Obata that have never been in a museum or a catalog.

The paintings were inherited from our friend's mother, who studied under Obata at the University of California, Berkeley. Each of these wonderful paintings had lightness and a feeling of motion.

Two were traditional Japanese brush paintings, and three had the more familiar Obata style that makes me feel like I am floating on a cloud. Obata (1885-1975) you may recall is famous for his airy renderings of Yosemite.

The painting at right is of El Capitan at Yosemite; the painting below is of the Topaz Mountains (and not one of our friend's paintings -- we will leave reproduction of their paintings to them).

Here is a poem for summer by Mary Oliver:

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

By Mary Oliver

Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything -
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker -
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing -
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet -
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

A poem and a photo for your day

Alas, friends, I have not had the time I'd like this week to devote to this blog. I have not tackled any of those big-hard-questions I spoke of last week. A few are turning over in my mind, but none have surfaced in the fullness of the limited time of the season. Perhaps next week.

So how about a poem today? Here is a wonderful gift sent to me by our friend Leslie Middleton, and fitting for the brisk days we are now getting.

The photo is another gift. I mentioned last week that in my prayer life I sometimes return in my imagination to particular ridge in the High Sierra. My friend David Link sent this photo of me on that ridge line, at dusk a couple of years back near May Lake in Yosemite.

Enjoy your Friday. Here's the poem...

Starlings in Winter
by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Sacred places, sacred moments

I spent Thursday at a diocesan monthly meeting for clergy new to the Diocese of Virginia, along with Associate Rector Ann Willms. The roads were slick with rain, but we made it to-and-fro Fredericksburg.

Our conversation at the meeting ranged over a lot of landscape, from challenges in our parishes to our leadership styles. But it was not all shop-talk about programs and church dynamics.

We also prayed together, and talked about the sacred times and places, moments of joy and pain, we are called to share with our people. There was much wisdom and considerable compassion in the room, and that made the room a sacred place.

I came across this photo on the internet Thursday evening. It was taken a few hours earlier in Yosemite near Half Dome. Seems it was rainy there, too. I share it with you simply because it feels sacred to me.

Photo by Nick Ahlgrim

A Roadside Shrine for your day: Endless Streams and Mountains, and the art of Chiura Obata

Regular readers of this space may recall that a week or two ago, a friend pointed out that this blog is to her like a roadside shrine, a place to pause to ponder the Holy, or just a place to rest awhile, or maybe smile. I like that a lot, and I continue to ponder anew how to create a shrine in "virtual" space.

Today, I'd like to offer you another shrine: the art of Chiura Obata (1885-1975), whose paintings of the mountains still inspire many people, including me, with their simplicity, shimmering color and rhythm.

Obata first entered the Sierra Nevada in 1927 and he went back again and again over many decades. His paintings were recently featured in the Ken Burns' series on the national parks, and rightly so.

As someone commented in the documentary, it took an artist born in another place (Japan) to help us see our own place.

Obata was a loyal American, and these mountains were his palate. But in the hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was incarcerated in an internment camp with other Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the camp, he taught others to paint. He also painted scenes from the camps, capturing the dust, the wind, and the melancholy. Another day we will feature those paintings.

My favorite poet, Gary Snyder, who spent considerable time in Japan studying as a young adult, chose Obata's art to illustrate his book Mountains and Rivers Without End. The painting at the top of Yosemite Falls, painted in 1930, is on the cover of Snyder's book, which won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1997 (his earlier works won a Pulitzer in 1974).

For many years I used the first poem, called "Endless Streams and Mountains," in my Morning Prayer meditation. Here is that poem, with some other paintings by Obata.

May peace and holiness follow your day.

Endless Streams and Mountains

Ch'i Shan Wu Chin

By Gary Snyder

Clearing the mind and sliding in

to that created space,

a web of waters streaming over rocks,

air misty but not raining,

seeing this land from a boat on a lake
or a broad slow river,
coasting by.

The path comes down along a lowland stream
slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods,reappears in a pine grove,

no farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters,

gateways, rest stops, roofed but unwalled work space,
—a warm damp climate;

a trail of climbing stairsteps forks upstream.

Big ranges lurk behind these rugged little outcrops—

these spits of low ground rocky uplifts
layered pinnacles aslant,

flurries of brushy cliffs receding,
far back and high above, vague peaks.
A man hunched over, sitting on a log
another stands above him, lifts a staff,
a third, with a roll of mats or a lute, looks on;
a bit offshore two people in a boat.

The trail goes far inland,
somewhere back around a bay,
lost in distant foothill slopes
& back again
at a village on the beach, and someone's fishing.

Rider and walker cross a bridgeabove a frothy braided torrent
that descends from a flurry of roofs like flowers
temples tucked between cliffs,
a side trail goes there;

a jumble of cliffs above,
ridge tops edged with bushes,
valley fog below a hazy canyon.

A man with a shoulder load leans into the grade.

Another horse and a hiker,

the trail goes up along cascading streambed

no bridge in sight—comes back through chinquapin or
liquidambars; another group of travelers.
Trail's end at the edge of an inlet
below a heavy set of dark rock hills.
Two moored boats with basket roofing,
a boatman in the bow looks
lost in thought.

Hills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp,
a gentle valley reaching far inland.

The watching boat has floated off the page.

Where is your altar in the world?

We have 20 people gathering on Wednesday evenings to talk about Barbara Brown Taylor's book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

We talked about a lot of things yesterday evening, and we took the time for silence, too.

I asked a couple of questions, and I pose them to you: Where is your altar in the world? Is there a place -- a specific geographic location -- that is sacred for you? A place where you feel the presence of the Holy like no other place? Where is that for you? Do you have more than one?

We heard many stories, and we heard about many wonderful places -- seashores, islands, and back porches; mountains, rivers, lakes and gardens. There are many holy places in this world, many altars for holy people. Where is yours? I'd love to hear about it.

I have many. The one that is much on my mind lately (probably because of the Ken Burns series on national parks) is a ridge near the May Lake high camp at Yosemite. It takes a couple of hours to reach on foot from the Tioga Road, and you best bring a sleeping bag and tent.

The time to go is at dusk, the time of the alpenglow, when the sun is setting and an orange sheen envelopes the mountains to the east across Tuolumne Meadows, Cathedral Peaks, Mount Dana, Mount Ritter and beyond. The Sierra glisten gold for a few minutes, and you can touch the face of God. I've lost track of how many times I've made the climb to that ridge; I took the photo above on a climb four years ago.

I have another altar in the world, and I can reach it every day: the rocker on our front porch in Charlottesville. God is in the meadow right here, in the trees, with the birds, on the porch, in my hands. God is in this place. It enjoy reading Morning Prayer on the porch in the early morning.

Where is the altar in the world for you?

Ken Burns National Parks PBS series and the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley

I've been watching the Ken Burns PBS television series on the national parks, and I am transported through time and space to Yosemite where I've been going since I was very young.

I am old enough to remember the fire fall. As an adult, I've camped on the Valley floor and hiked in the high country, caught trout in Tuolumne Meadows, and stood in the spray of water falls. I've slept under Yosemite skies so clear I could practically touch the Milky Way.

Yet this television series is not an exercise in sentimentality. I am very grateful that Ken Burns highlighted the travesty of a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, built in the early 20th century. John Muir called Hetch Hetchy "Little Yosemite," a glacially carved canyon that San Francisco entombed behind a dam for its water supply. It is hard to believe now that a dam could be built in a national park, but it was.

And the dam is still there.

What is even more hard to believe is the

opposition to removing the dam from San Francisco's supposedly green-leaning political leaders, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor, and former mayor Willie Brown. They've opposed even studying whether San Francisco could obtain water from downstream on the Tuolumne River. They are apparently afraid to know the answer.

Our generation has the opportunity to set right this crime against the earth. John Muir saw the dam as an affront against God. "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." Muir once wrote.

There is an organization that has worked tirelessly for years to remove the dam and restore Hetch Hetchy. It is worthy of your support. You can find more information on Restore Hetch Hetchy by clicking HERE. We've been involved with this organization for many years, and it has new and inspired leadership with Mike Marshall.

Awhile back I wrote an opinion piece for the San Francisco Examiner, aimed at the religious community, on this topic. Here it is again:

Why the religious community should care about Hetch Hetchy

By: The Rev. James Richardson Special to The Examiner | 5/8/09 4:14 PM

With the dire threat of climate change and with one-third of the planet’s population lacking safe drinking water, it’s a reasonable question to ask: Why care about a relatively small mountain valley in California?

For those of us in the religious community, it’s especially fair to ask that question given our seemingly stretched resources and the priority extended to alleviating the suffering of the poor. Would we not be better served to spend our resources elsewhere and on some other cause than the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley?

Let me suggest looking at this differently, and I am speaking primarily to my brothers and sisters in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious communities. It’s a central tenet of faith common to all of our religions that God provides. And God does not provide meagerly, but provides abundantly. God gives us all that we need to heal the sick, bind the wounds of the injured and to care for this planet, our island home.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy would be a spectacular declaration that we believe in God’s abundance, that we take seriously our calling to be faithful stewards of all God gives us. If we have just enough faith to restore one wounded valley, we can move other mountains — we can reverse global warming, we can clean the watersheds and bring safe water and food to every corner of the Earth. God provides everything we need to fully heal our planet. Do we really believe that?

As pressing as large-scale issues like global warming are, we ignore at our peril the smaller-scale issues of environmental restoration. It would be doubly tragic to fail in our efforts at the large issues while also failing to restore the jewels of our planet, like Hetch Hetchy. I believe God calls us to do both.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy also is about how human beings touch the sacred. We are not the first generation to experience God in the wilderness. The ancient Celts called the mountains and river valleys “thin places,” and Yosemite is certainly one of those amazing thin places.

John Muir’s Celtic spiritual roots were on full display when he fought San Francisco’s proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley. For the great naturalist, damming the valley was not only an attack on nature, but an attack on God.

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” Muir wrote in 1912. “As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

The Rev. James Richardson is an Episcopal priest and the former Chaplain of the California state Senate.

Photos show Hetch Hetchy Valley before the dam, and now.

The Feast of the Transfiguration: What happened on that mountain?

Forgive me if you've heard this story before (I like to tell it): A few years ago my friend, David Link, and I set forth to climb Mount Hoffman, an 11,000 foot peak in Yosemite National Park. I tell you about this because I think it has something to do with the Feast of the Transfiguration, which we celebrate today.

The Feast of the Transfiguration is not a big deal in the churches of western Europe and the United States, but it is a very big deal in Eastern Orthodox churches. In the eastern churches, today is a major feast day, right up there just behind Easter and Christmas. 

So let me tell you about our adventure up Mount Hoffman.

Now, as peaks go, Mount Hoffman is certainly not the highest in Yosemite, but has the advantage being in the exact geographic center of Yosemite, giving it spectacular views into every corner of the park. And it also has its challenges, so we gave ourselves three days to climb Mount Hoffman.

When I say Mount Hoffman has its challenges, not all of those challenges are physical. One of the challenges is finding the trail to the top. The higher you go, the less obvious the route up.  And that is another way of saying that we somehow missed the mountain. Oh, we got to the top of a peak. We looked down on Half Dome to the South, and over to Cathedral Peaks and Tuolumne Meadows to the East, and to jagged peaks far in the distance to the north, and to the hazy Central Valley to the west.

But then we looked at our topographic map, and we realized that whatever we climbed wasn’t Mount Hoffman. We somehow zigged when we should have jagged and we ended up on top of a different peak.

Mount Hoffman was over there, one peak over. See photo. That is Mount Hoffman. We were not on its top, we were one peak over taking its photograph.

I mention all this because climbing mountains is tricky business, and I am in full sympathy with the disciples who climb a high mountain and discover Jesus standing before them dazzling white. I can just feel how disorienting and strange this must have been to the disciples, and they did not have the benefit of a topographic map to help figure this out. When they got up there, they may have wondered if they should have zigged when they zagged.

So Peter blurts out the first thing that comes to mind: “Hey, I know – let’s make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

Peter is fumbling for words.

Peter is trying to make sense of what must have been an indescribable experience. When he sees the shimmering vision of Jesus, Peter goes to the only reference point on the map he knows, the words of the prophets.

For those who might be unsure what these dwellings are about, the dwellings are “tabernacles” – or tents – that devout Jews erect once a year for the Festival of Tabernacles. Peter is declaring his devotion and respect for Jesus and putting Jesus on the same par as Moses and Elijah, the two greatest Hebrew prophets. But even doing that misses the mark, as Peter is soon to find out. 

The language Peter uses – the dwelling places – aren’t big enough. The categories of religion are not quite up to the task. Instead of tents, a cloud appears, and God tells Peter, ever so simply, and maybe in just a whisper: “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.”

This experience is bigger than can be contained by any categories of human religion. We, with all of our education and healthy skepticism, do well to remember that experiences of the Holy often dwell outside of what we expect or can explain – that is the lesson of the Feast of the Transfiguration we celebrate today. I pray we will catch these experiences of the Holy in the unexpected corners and mountaintops of our life.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley

Recently I was asked to write an op-ed piece about my conviction that the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park should be restored (the artwork here is a rendering of what the valley would look like if San Francisco's dam was removed). It is a cause I have been long associated with, and I was happy to share a few words (I wrote this while waiting for recent flight at Dulles). This short piece ran in the San Francisco Examiner Sunday May 10, and I share it with you:

Why the religious community should care about Hetch Hetchy

By: The Rev. James Richardson Special to The Examiner | 5/8/09 4:14 PM

With the dire threat of climate change and with one-third of the planet’s population lacking safe drinking water, it’s a reasonable question to ask: Why care about a relatively small mountain valley in California? 

For those of us in the religious community, it’s especially fair to ask that question given our seemingly stretched resources and the priority extended to alleviating the suffering of the poor. Would we not be better served to spend our resources elsewhere and on some other cause than the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley? 

Let me suggest looking at this differently, and I am speaking primarily to my brothers and sisters in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious communities. It’s a central tenet of faith common to all of our religions that God provides. And God does not provide meagerly, but provides abundantly. God gives us all that we need to heal the sick, bind the wounds of the injured and to care for this planet, our island home. 

Restoring Hetch Hetchy would be a spectacular declaration that we believe in God’s abundance, that we take seriously our calling to be faithful stewards of all God gives us. If we have just enough faith to restore one wounded valley, we can move other mountains — we can reverse global warming, we can clean the watersheds and bring safe water and food to every corner of the Earth.  God provides everything we need to fully heal our planet. Do we really believe that? 

As pressing as large-scale issues like global warming are, we ignore at our peril the smaller-scale issues of environmental restoration. It would be doubly tragic to fail in our efforts at the large issues while also failing to restore the jewels of our planet, like Hetch Hetchy. I believe God calls us to do both. 

Restoring Hetch Hetchy also is about how human beings touch the sacred. We are not the first generation to experience God in the wilderness. The ancient Celts called the mountains and river valleys “thin places,” and Yosemite is certainly one of those amazing  thin places.

John Muir’s Celtic spiritual roots were on full display when he fought San Francisco’s proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley. For the great naturalist, damming the valley was not only an attack on nature, but an attack on God.  

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” Muir wrote in 1912. “As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

The Rev. James Richardson is an Episcopal priest and the former Chaplain of the California state Senate.

Global warming, global restoration and journalists

Many years ago, in my journalism career, I wrote extensively on environmental issues, and in the 1980s I was among a group of journalists who established environmental investigative reporting as a distinct discipline within journalism (and in those days we spoke primarily of newspapers as the platform of journalism). My speciality was watersheds and pollution from toxic waste dumping. 

The stories that I and others wrote resulted in the federal "Superfund" to cleanup such sites. I bring this up today to point out a number of global trends that are disturbing and which the faith community has a stake in because the faith community, by definition, is part of the global community.

First, journalism: Newspapers are in a major economic meltdown and are closing or seriously downsizing. That ought to bother you mightily. Newspapers are still the major platform for serious journalism in the world; when you read a story on the internet, chances are a newspaper reporter wrote it and an newspaper editor edited it. The fallout of the economic collapse of car dealers, retailers and real estate marketers is that they have pulled their ads from newspapers, and the newspapers are collapsing. That is the result of an economic model too dependent on those sectors, and not the result of falling circulation or bad journalism (the rise of the internet is a convenient excuse for newspaper executives who made bad business decisions in the last 10 years). All of that is background for where I want to go with this.

Today marks the last day for Chris Bowman at The Sacramento Bee, where Lori worked as an editor for 20 years and I worked for 10 years as a reporter. Chris was among many journalists laid off earlier this month, caught up in the mass of layoffs throughout journalism. Chris is among my oldest friends, he was one of my two "best men" at my wedding (and my other best man, Tony Ramirez, was laid off by the New York Times last year). 

Chris is a leading environmental investigative journalist. He is a former Nieman Fellow from Harvard, which is the most prestigious fellowship in journalism. Chris is a founder of an organization that promotes environmental journalism, and he taught environmental journalism in Zimbabwe back when Western journalists had access to that country. With Chris removed from journalism (and we hope only temporarily), there is one fewer trained set of eyes and ears documenting the threats to our environment. That is an incalculable loss to all of us and to the environment.

Next, to related trends in the politics of the environment: Earlier this week, Lori and I participated in a meeting in Washington DC to hear from Mike Marshall, the new executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy, a decades-long effort to remove the dam from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Mike outlined a long-term political strategy to convince Congress to remove the dam built in the 1920s by San Francisco (this post includes an artist's conception of what the Hetchy Hetchy Valley would look like without the dam). I will say more about this issue in another post. 

Last night, we joined members of St. Paul's who live at Westminster-Canterbury in seeing a film about an appalling proposal to build a strip mine in the Bristol Bay watershed of Alaska, the richest salmon waters in the world (the top photo on this post is from that watershed). The proposed Pebble Mine would include building the world's tallest dam to hold toxic mining sludge, theoretically keeping the sludge poisons out of the rivers. If you are wondering at the reliability of such dams, check out the Iron Mountain sludge dam in California, now a federal EPA superfund site, and earlier this week labeled the "worst water in the world" in the San Francisco Chronicle (another newspaper soon to fold).

I mention all this by way of pointing out the confluence of a number global trends: it takes journalists to investigate and highlight threats to the environment, especially those in places remote from the rest of us, like in Alaska. Journalists are in shorter supply today, and that ought to alarm us.

Related to this is a conversation that needs to happen (and the work of journalists can help us make it happen) around the sometimes competing politics of the environment. The dire need to reverse global warming is now the necessary focal point of the major environmental lobbying organizations, like the Sierra Club. The danger of that focus is that the specific localized threats, like the proposed Pebble Mine, will slide through unexamined by the nation, and remain only feebly opposed by environmentalists who can't be in two places at once.

This is also an issue about world poverty. Worldwide, mining companies are stripping poor countries of their resources with little return to those countries, and that is an issue for the faith community if we take seriously that greed is a sin. There is a report issued today on how mining companies are depriving African countries of much needed tax revenue (click HERE.)

Moreover, restoration of the earth -- symbolized by removing the dam at Hetch Hetchy -- must remain on the environmental agenda because restoration is part of the healing of our planet. This past Monday in Washington DC we heard just how stretched environmental organizations are in working on both global warming and restoration issues. There is much work to be done, and much organizing and conversation that needs to happen around all of this.