Lutheran Bishop inspires interfaith groups to join EPA Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge

(Chicago, Illinois) - 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. EPA Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge is in high gear with more than 100 projects involving hundreds of communities 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 numerous interfaith Earth Day recycling projects hopes people of all faiths will 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 of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). “The Great Lakes watershed is really kind of a mother to all of us" in the Midwest.

Interfaith environment projects like the challenge will help ensure a better future for all humans, Skrenes said, adding “sometimes it's trusting each other that really counts 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.”

The EHI is a coalition of American Indian tribes and a "partnership of churches, 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.

Saying “it’s not your grandfather’s environment movement anymore,” Skrenes said that environmental work is now more mainstream and no longer “an obscure thing for a certain group of people” unlike 40 years ago when he was in high school “and I dare say some of my relatives said it was kind of a hippie movement.”

“The church is called to bring people together to be part of the healing,” Skrenes said. “This interfaith earth healing effort is really a great gift that has been given to all of us."

Interfaith organizations 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.

The interfaith EHI is one of numerous environment and Native American projects founded by the non-profit Cedar Tree Institute in Marquette, Michigan including the Earth Keepers, who removed more than 370 tons of e-Waste, pharmaceuticals and household poisons during three Earth Day clean sweeps.

The northern Michigan 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 interfaith relationships. For more info call 906-401-0109