MountainStrong Hurricane Recovery Fund

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, MountainTrue is dedicated to addressing the urgent needs of our community.

MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The End (of the Session) is Near, CCA Goes to Raleigh & More

MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The End (of the Session) is Near, CCA Goes to Raleigh & More

MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The End (of the Session) is Near, CCA Goes to Raleigh & More

CCA members with just some of the legislators they’ve met with this week in Raleigh. From left to right: Holly Cunningham (CCA), Alan Rosenthal (CCA), Rev. Scott Hardin-Nieri (CCA), Rep. Susan C. Fisher, Sen. Terry Van Duyn, Rep. Brian Turner, Rev. Bill Garrard, Rep. John Ager, and Rev. Kevin Bates (CCA). 

2018 Farm Act, Veto Overrides and Constitutional Amendments

The 2018 North Carolina General Assembly has started its slow march toward adjournment. Here’s a quick update about what to expect before legislators go home.

Last week, lawmakers approved a flurry of bills in anticipation of an expected adjournment later this month. Lawmakers plan to restrict their work during the remainder of June to local bills and constitutional amendments – which do not require the Governor’s signature – as well as veto overrides. Keep in mind that veto overrides require a three-fifths vote in both chambers, or 72 votes in the House and 30 votes in the Senate. A three-fifths vote is also required to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

On the veto override front, the two biggest environmental bills of the session – the 2018 Farm Act and the legislature’s annual regulatory “reform” bill –  are now on the Governor’s desk. A veto of the Farm Act is widely expected. There are 74 Republicans in the House and 35 in the Senate, so a strict vote along party lines would override the vetoes. However, collecting the needed votes for an override is a very different game in each chamber. Expect the Senate majority to easily and quickly override any veto of these bills. In the House, however, the vote is likely to be much closer, with many environmental groups (including MountainTrue) and other opponents of the bill working hard to find the votes to sustain a veto.

Lawmakers are also expected to consider putting several constitutional amendments on the fall ballot – largely, it appears, in hopes of motivating certain groups of voters to get to the polls. Some of the proposals include a constitutional amendment protecting the “right to hunt and fish,” a voter identification requirement and a limit on personal income taxes.

Creation Care Alliance of WNC Goes to Raleigh

The Creation Care Alliance of WNC traveled to Raleigh this week to meet with legislators. Among the issues they discussed were clean and renewable energy, landslide hazard mapping and trout and hemlock tree protection.

Thanks for supporting MountainTrue’s advocacy efforts. Keep an eye out for our legislative alerts and opportunities to help us speak out for the environment in Raleigh.

A Message From the Creation Care Alliance: What Lent Can Teach Us About Uncertainty and Action

A Message From the Creation Care Alliance: What Lent Can Teach Us About Uncertainty and Action

A Message From the Creation Care Alliance: What Lent Can Teach Us About Uncertainty and Action

Scott Hardin-Nieri is the Director of the Creation Care Alliance of WNC, a network of congregations and people of faith who have united around a moral and spiritual call to preserve creation. Whether or not you observe the Christian season of Lent, Scott offers his thoughts on what Lent can teach us in these changing times.

 

As spring emerges around us, some Christians are observing the season of Lent, a 40-day period of sacrifice and preparation prior to Easter Sunday. While Easter is a celebration of new life, forgiveness, and wholeness, Lent takes on a more introspective and somber tone, reflecting the defining moments in the wilderness in the early stories of Jesus. The beginning of this period is marked by Ash Wednesday, when ashes are placed on the foreheads of the gathered to indicate grief, humility and repentance. Ash Wednesday blessings often use the words: “Remember, you are from dust and to dust you return.” Men, women, children, babies, students, executives, coal miners, bartenders, everybody who chooses to receive ashes on their foreheads at this time are reminded of the fragility, gifts and natural cycles of life.

 

It is humbling to be reminded of the human relationship to dust, as we remember that humans are part of creation and not above or beyond it. In the Hebrew Scriptures of Genesis, the Hebrew word for the first human, Adam, is closely related to Adamah (אדמה), meaning ground or soil. And as Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness, he comes close to the Adamah around and within him. There, the stories say, he fasted, suffered, and was tested by the forces of pride, brokenness, greed and material wealth. Thus, wilderness is often seen in the Christian world as a place of trial, hardship and temptation.

 

However wilderness is also a place of becoming, where Jesus lived fully – where he watched the stars, felt the wind and sun, listened to the animals, to the Spirit and to himself. And it is where he practiced living into the name “Beloved,” which was given to him after he emerged from the Jordan River at his baptism. It was this deep connection to land that enabled Jesus to find power in his identity as a peacemaker, a seeker of justice and a friend to the outcast. In other words, Jesus’s time in the wilderness drove him to action.

 

Aren’t we in a wilderness moment?

 

We find ourselves in a time of great ecological and social challenge. Congregations that I visit are filled with people who are grieving these challenges and asking difficult questions. I just returned from the State of Appalachia conference in West Virginia, where towns that have been built around the coal industry have had their communities, families, water and land destroyed, and face the task of transitioning to a new source of energy that serves people as well as the earth. We are in an era of unmatched human creativity with new technologies like driverless cars, while also losing some of our planet’s oldest God-given creativity with the extinction of species like the white rhino. We see old power structures flipping, as women and children stand up to march for systemic change in numbers we have never seen before. We are immersed in fear and sadness in this transition, but also offered numerous opportunities to courageously resist despair. How are we caring for our children and grandchildren, and what kind of earth will we pass down to them?

 

“We are immersed in fear and sadness in this transition, but also offered numerous opportunities to courageously resist despair. How are we caring for our children and grandchildren, and what kind of earth will we pass down to them?”

Scott Hardin-Nieri, Director of the Creation Care Alliance

 

Like those who observe Ash Wednesday and Lent, we at the Creation Care Alliance are finding a deeper understanding of our relationship to soil, microbes, creatures and people. At a time when dominance over other people and the earth is commended, we believe that finding our place among all things and remembering that we come from and return to dust is a faithful way forward.

 

So whether you observe Lent or not, we invite you to listen to this wilderness moment and consider how it might transform you if you let it in. If we are able to take the lessons of this time and move forward, I believe this is a moment we will look back on and say, that’s when we figured out who we were.

Want to hear more from the Creation Care Alliance?

‘Let’s Turn Our Community Into A Demonstration Plot’: A Faith Spotlight on Piney Mountain United Methodist Church

‘Let’s Turn Our Community Into A Demonstration Plot’: A Faith Spotlight on Piney Mountain United Methodist Church

‘Let’s Turn Our Community Into A Demonstration Plot’: A Faith Spotlight on Piney Mountain United Methodist Church

Members of Piney Mountain United Methodist Church during their light bulb drive, August 2017. 

It was something you don’t see every day: in the Hominy Valley just east of Candler, NC, a man pulls a wagon of light bulbs while another drags a wheelbarrow full of green peppers, okra and tomatoes. Winding around the neighborhood, the small group knocks on the doors of 35 homes, and when their neighbors open, they do not ask for money or signatures. Instead they hand out 16 energy-efficient LED light bulbs to each home free of charge along with some fresh produce, and invite them to a community cookout and a series of free classes on creation care.

These generous visitors were congregants of Piney Mountain United Methodist Church for their LED light bulb drive last August. Piney Mountain, known for being a “working church” that serves in the Hominy Valley community, breaks the mold of what may be expected of rural congregations: the church has been incredibly active in the mission to protect our mountains.

“There are a lot of blessings of the rural community,” says Piney Mountain Pastor Kevin Bates. “My people love their land, they love their mountains, and they do a lot of farming. One of my parishioners raises cattle, and he loves every one of those cows and names them all.”

Pastor Bates was determined to connect his parish’s love of the land with an understanding of how climate change affects the earth and how they care for their neighbors. In 2016, Bates received a $1,000 Thriving Rural Communities grant for the neighborhood light bulb drive from the Duke Divinity School Endowment. Piney Mountain has now distributed over 1,300 energy efficient LED light bulbs to help lower their neighbors’ energy bills and reduce carbon emissions at the same time.

“I’d watched people come into the Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Mission (ABCCM) crisis center in Candler saying, “I need help with my heating bill. I need help with my heating bill,” Bates says. “And [ABCCM Site Coordinator] Ian Williams and I decided we need more than a Band-Aid fix for this issue. So the LED light bulbs were a beginning: we thought, let’s start moving people in the right direction so that instead of them asking for $100 come December, let’s save them $100 over the course of the year.”

LED light bulbs are 80% more efficient than regular incandescent light bulbs, and even more efficient than the spiral-shaped compact fluorescents (CFLs.) They’re also safer than CFLs since they do not contain mercury. On top of the energy savings, the LED light bulbs will eliminate about 1,000 pounds of carbon emissions per year the carbon equivalent of planting 15,000 trees in their community over the next ten years.

“We need more than a Band-Aid fix for this issue. So the LED light bulbs were a beginning: we thought, let’s start moving people in the right direction so that instead of them asking for $100 come December, let’s save them $100 over the course of the year.”

–Pastor Kevin Bates

Piney Mountain goes door-to-door in the neighborhood surrounding their church in the Hominy Valley, east of Candler, NC, to build community and create energy savings for their neighbors. 

Pastor Kevin Bates (left) and a Piney Mountain congregant (right) load boxes of LED light bulbs into a wagon at church.

Pastor Bates’ passion for connecting faith with care for the environment is clear, and for him, the effort began with preaching. He did a six-part sermon series on creation care through the lens of Biblical passages from the Genesis creation story to the Book of John, Job, and Revelations, Bates points out that the Bible is full of references to our connection to the earth and the image of God as a gardener. “Other times, my sermons were more focused on the justice elements of what it means when we don’t care for the land,” he says. “There are plenty of places in the Minor Prophets where people are abusing the land and the prophets speak out against it because it’s hurting people, especially the poor. We know that’s the case now, and my congregation responds, ‘we’re farmers too – we get what’s happening.’”

Bates adds that the deep connection to the land felt by many parishioners allows them to feel and respond to climate change on an emotional level. “My people have noticed that they have changed when they plant in the ground, and they have even changed the way they fertilize because of changing snow patterns,” Bates says.

Piney Mountain offered free public classes last fall on home energy savings, composting and canning to keep fostering creation care, and used local knowledge to teach the classes. “I think canning was the best class that we had. I don’t know how many older grandmothers have said ‘I wish my grandchildren and kids knew how to can, but they just bring their tomatoes over here and make me do it,’” Bates laughs.

Many residents of the Hominy Valley make lifestyle choices that, while sometimes considered part of a recent wave of trendy “green” practices, are actually long-standing traditions in rural communities that just make sense economically. In the home energy savings class, Bates realized that most of the participants still used clotheslines and didn’t need to convert back to them to save energy like they might in more urban areas.

Bates serves on the Steering Committee for the Creation Care Alliance, and hopes Piney Mountain will offer more classes in the spring. Piney Mountain also plans to work more closely with the Energy Savers Network and to help make Buncombe County’s recently adopted resolution for 100% renewable energy by 2042 a reality.

Fittingly, Bates’ personal call to this work also connects to an agricultural vision. He speaks of the Koinonia Farm in Georgia that was founded in the early Civil Rights Movement by Clarence Jordan, who believed that black and white people need to live and work together in order for true reconciliation to occur.

“Now obviously there’s a lot of hard work that goes into living together with people,” Bates says. “But with Koinonia Farm, Clarence Jordan spoke about creating a demonstration plot for the kingdom of God, because it demonstrated to the world a different way, the way of the Beloved community. And it was also a protest against the way the world works now. So I turned that language to my congregation and said ‘let’s turn our community into a demonstration plot. Demonstrating to the world a different way: a way of reconciliation with people and land.’”

Are you clergy and interested in bringing creation care back to your faith community?

Would you like to connect to the Creation Care Alliance’s network of faith communities caring for our mountains in Western NC?

April 19: ‘Let There be Light’ — Earth Day Vigil with Creation Care Alliance

WNCACandleNoKXLThe Creation Care Alliance of WNC is hosting a “Let There Be Light” Earth Day Vigil celebrating God’s creation and calling on people of faith to care for it.  

The public is invited to join us on from 5:30-6:30 p.m. April 19 at  the Cathedral of All Souls in Biltmore Village, 9 Swan St., for an afternoon of song, reflection, and to hear messages of inspiration and action from local faith and community leaders.

A reception will follow. All are welcome.

The Creation Care Alliance of Western North Carolina is a program of MountainTrue and is focused on faith-inspired environmental advocacy.

CCAWNC is a network of people of faith and congregations who work to bring practical and hopeful solutions to their congregations and to broader secular communities by engaging hearts and minds through education, service and advocacy.

For more information, contact program director Scott Hardin-Nieri at scott@creationcarealliance.org.

March 25: Lift Up your Faith Voice for Clean Energy

raleighCreation Care Alliance of WNC invites you to join NCIPL and Interfaith Power & Light founder and President Rev. Sally Bingham on March 25 at the General Assembly in Raleigh for the Faith Voices for Clean Energy Advocacy Day. We’ll meet with members of the General Assembly to hear their vision for North Carolina and to express our support for new and existing clean energy policies.

CCAWNC will sponsor a van that can take 15 people to Raleigh at 6:00am in front of All Souls Episcopal Church, 9 Swan Street in Biltmore Village. We’ll return around 8:00pm.

Rev. Sally Bingham, NCIPL and Interfaith Power & Light founder and President

Rev. Sally Bingham,

Date: Wednesday, March 25, Faith Voices for Clean Energy Advocacy Day
Time: 6:00 am-8:00 pm.
Location: General Assembly, Raleigh; transportation provided by CCAWNC
Cost: FREE — but space is limited to 15 for the van ride.
Registration Deadline: 5 p.m. March 23

REGISTER HERE

For more information, please contact Jane Laping at janelaping@sbcglobal.net or call (828) 277-7342.