In Ijeoma Oluo’s 2024 book Be a Revolution, one chapter relates an origin story of the environmental justice movement:

In the late 1970s, the state of North Carolina faced a major disposal challenge. After cleaning up toxic waste that had been intentionally dumped along North Carolina’s roads, the state government needed to rid itself of ten thousand truckloads of soil contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which had become known as a cause of birth defects and cancer when absorbed through skin or inhaled. The governor of North Carolina landed on the solution of creating a dump site for the PCB-laden soil in rural Warren County. Oluo relates:
“The community living around the dump site was predominantly poor and Black, factors that likely contributed to the appeal of the location. Black and brown communities have often been dumping grounds for the toxic trash white companies and governments want to get rid of. It had done before with little fuss–at least not from people who mattered. Why would anyone care this time?

But the inhabitants of Warren County were not going to be poisoned in silence. For six weeks in 1982 Warren County was the site of a massive Black-led protest. People of all ages took to the streets to fight this blatant pollution of their community. … In the end, the protestors were unable to stop the dumping of poison in their communities. It would take more than twenty years for the land in Warren County to be cleaned. But the protests in Warren County sparked the first nationwide conversation about the intersection of race and environmental harm. People of color across the country who had long decried the pollution and destruction of their communities by governments and business started to come together to discuss their shared experiences and identify patterns in them.”

The Warren County protests are now known as the beginning of environmental justice, “a movement that specifically battles racist environmental harm against communities of color.”

Hamline Church Earthkeepers follow in the footsteps of the Warren County protestors. Environmental justice is the lens through which we view our faith witness of caring for Creation. The Earthkeepers mission statement declares: “We affirm that all of God’s children are part of God’s perfect creation…We seek to stand with and defend the most vulnerable of God’s children who already bear a disproportionate share of the impact of the Earth’s changing climate. We lament that the sins of discrimination, racism, and oppression are often the root cause of unequal access to the gift of God’s creation.”

The environmental justice chapter of Be a Revolution ends with a practical list of ways to work for environmental justice:

1. Support free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for Indigenous peoples.
2. Demand the repair and maintenance of infrastructure in BIPOC communities.
3. Demand the cleanup of toxic sites near residential areas, the creation of safer disposal practices, an end to disposal sites placed in the backyard of communities of color, and more responsibility from manufacturers for the end life of their products.
4. Demand stricter air pollution guidelines for facilities that are near residential areas.
5. Honor treaties.
6. Support the creation of green jobs for communities of color.
7. Support legal funds for BIPOC communities fighting to protect their land and water.
8. Support land-back efforts.
9. Demand accountability from racist and anti-Indigenous environmental groups.
10. Support environmental justice groups.

These action steps bring to mind the work the congregation has engaged in, over the past two years, to learn about the Church’s role in causing harm to Native communities and to draft a land acknowledgment statement for the church. Church members who have engaged in this process have called out that acknowledgment must be accompanied by reparative action and relationship with our indigenous neighbors. We have come to call this broader faith journey “Sacred Reckonings,” after a course designed by Christian & Jewish faith leaders, including United Methodist Rev. Dana Neuhauser. The work of Sacred Reckonings at Hamline Church falls squarely within some of the environmental justice action steps from Be a Revolution. The current draft of our land acknowledgment statement calls out our commitment to “stand in solidarity with our indigenous neighbors, and return wealth to the original inhabitants of this land.” An upcoming blog post will describe the action steps that Hamline Church members have identified as ways to engage in Sacred Reckonings, and will discuss additional directions that this journey could take locally, using the environmental justice steps in Be a Revolution as a guide.

If you are open to engaging in the ongoing work of land acknowledgment/Sacred Reckonings at Hamline Church, a group will meet on September 11 to continue to refine the land acknowledgment statement and action steps for Hamline Church. All are welcome to join this discussion! Please contact miriam.e.friesen@gmail.com to RSVP and receive the Zoom link for the meeting.