ABSTRACT
On 19 December 2008, University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher entered a controversial auction of public lands orchestrated by the Bureau of Land Management in Salt Lake City. The auction offered parcels of land across Utah to various industries, including companies interested in fossil fuel exploration and development. Despite having no actual money to purchase lands, DeChristopher registered as “bidder 70” and won several parcels. His bidding drove the cost of other parcels up as much as ten times from their original price. When other participants discovered that DeChristopher was not a representative of an energy company the auction was stopped and all previous bids were nullified. DeChristopher was quickly arrested and in 2011 he was sentenced to two years in federal prison for his act of civil disobedience. Despite his arrest, DeChristopher’s protest was ultimately successful. The auction was not reconvened and the public lands were not sold. For DeChristopher, this act of civil disobedience was grounded in deep ethical convictions regarding future generations and a spiritual commitment to promoting environmental justice (DeChristopher 2012). Speaking at a rally before his sentencing, he noted, “principled action is the salvation of the soul. I may have to go to prison, but every day since that auction, I walk a little taller, and I feel a little more free” (DeChristopher 2015). Two years later, on 8 August 2013, Catholic nuns from the Sisters of
Loretto community in central Kentucky disrupted another public meeting related to fossil fuels. Energy companies had proposed building the Bluegrass Pipeline to transport natural gas from Ohio and Pennsylvania through central Kentucky to ports on the Gulf of Mexico. Feeling that the pipeline represented an unjust threat to local Kentucky citizens, these nuns decided to nonviolently block the proceedings. In the midst of the meeting, the nuns rose and sang the hymn “Amazing Grace,” forcing the meeting to stop. Further protests from numerous community members continued and in 2014 the energy companies abandoned the pipeline project. Sister Ann Scholz, an associate director at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, later described the motivating values of the Sisters of Loretto and others as follows: “No Christian can live the gospel fully unless they attend the needs of
their brothers and sisters, including Mother Earth” (Diener 2016). For Scholz and the Sisters of Loretto, preventing the Bluegrass Pipeline was clearly a dimension of “living the gospel.” The acts of DeChristopher and the Sisters of Loretto represent just two
among dozens of similar efforts comprising the broad and multi-faceted resistance movement against fossil fuel extraction. Through the first decades of the twenty-first century, activists from around the world have conducted protests and other acts of civil disobedience aimed at halting fossil fuel extraction and use at various levels. This has included shutting down sites of extraction such as surface coal mines, oil sands fields, and hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) wells; hampering fossil fuel shipments by challenging pipeline construction and blocking shipments of oil, coal, and gas; and impacting the financial supporters of fossil fuel extraction by divesting funds from financial institutions and disrupting shareholder meetings. Citing issues such as environmental injustices faced by impacted communities, climate change, and biodiversity loss, anti-extraction activists generally call for a transition away from fossil fuels toward more sustainable and renewable forms of energy production. As is evident from the cases of DeChristopher and the Sisters of Loretto, the issue of fossil fuel dependency is also a deeply moral and religious issue for some activists. The anti-extraction movement thus forms an important case study for examining religious environmentalism in action. Understanding just how religions have influenced the movement and
how they might help foster more ecologically just and sustainable futures remains a complex goal. As the previous chapter has shown, “religion” is a challenging term to define, and varying definitions of religion imply different methods for examining religions on the ground. Do religions provide a foundational worldview and interpretive lens through which individual activists evaluate the appropriateness of energy policies? Do religious institutions such as churches and non-profit groups hold a significant moral influence over policymakers, thus inspiring them to act in ways that individual stakeholders cannot? Do religious individuals turn to environmental activism because they feel their tradition urges them to do so, or do they develop their religious perspectives on environmental issues through engagement with threatened and struggling communities? Pursuing answers to these questions requires an appreciation for the multiple dimensions of human religiosity, and different theories and methods can yield different types of data. Critical scholarship must remain conscious of these different approaches and their limitations, recognizing that many approaches are needed to provide a robust account of the interconnections between religions and environmental activism. With this in mind, this case study examines a few specific examples of religious engagement in the North American anti-extraction movement, describing how studying the issue at the individual and institutional levels yields different information about the possible roles religions might play in environmental activism.
