In Denver last summer, the Episcopal Church held "the first major convention in the history of the U.S. to power itself with renewable electrical energy," according to Steve McAusland, who, with his colleague Sally Bingham, was behind this achievement. A month later in Los Angeles, the national Democratic Convention followed suit -- also in response to McAusland and Bingham's initiative.

"They followed the church," McAusland says. "Now, isn't that an example of what can happen? The church can lead, and in the absence of what I would call sustained leadership in Washington, maybe it's time for the church to continue to exert its potential for leadership on the climate change issue."

Through Episcopal Power and Light, a ministry they co-founded, McAusland and Bingham are providing that leadership in a very practical way, urging churches to purchase their electrical power from companies that generate it from renewable sources. In the Diocese of California, where Bingham is Canon for Environmental Ministry at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, 50 percent of Episcopal churches are now buying green energy, and a growing number of churches elsewhere, both Episcopal and other denominations, are joining them. McAusland and Bingham, who met through the Episcopal Environmental Network, both have long histories of ecological activism.

Taking on Hydro-Quebec

For McAusland, it began with a canoe trip he took after graduating from college, on which he met a community of Cree Indians in Quebec who were fighting to save their river. "It was the early seventies, at the very beginning of the James Bay project, the largest hydro-electric project in North America," he says. "I ended up spending several years living with them while their river was being taken away from them. I saw the business plan of Hydro-Quebec, and saw that they were going to be beginning Phase II of the hydro-project in the early 1990s. So after I closed the chapter of my life living with the Cree, I became a video producer, knowing that it was really for the purpose of helping the Cree to defend their rivers. And when Phase II came around, I was ready, and we won. I had helped out in a significant way and we shut down a $15 billion project."

Bingham was an activist who returned to college and then seminary in her 40s to explore the connections between her faith and her commitment to the health of the planet. As a trustee for the Environmental Defense Fund, she had wondered about the seeming absence of the church's voice among those speaking out on behalf of creation.

"People would say, 'Well, it's the Christian church that's at blame -- you are the ones that have dominion over everything and you think you can exploit the earth,'" Bingham recalls. "That didn't sound right to me. It didn't sound like the God I know or the faith I believe in."

Yet as a seminary student, she found her ecological convictions suspect.

"I had a vocations committee, and partway through seminary we decided that, in fact, this was a call to Holy Orders," she said. "And so I proceeded along that track, and mostly I was told to stay quiet about the environment. If it were prison ministry or AIDS or one of the more obvious ministries that have to do with people, it would have been easier, but I was accused of being an environmentalist looking for a platform. You won't find people going through the ordination process with an environmental focus."

Bingham persevered, and after her ordination in 1997 became environmental minister for the Diocese of California.

Deregulation: a window of opportunity

By the time they met, both she and McAusland had independently concluded that climate change was the most serious issue facing the planet, and both were ready for a project involving concrete action. Opportunity presented itself in the form of energy deregulation, which was happening simultaneously in California, where Bingham lives, and in McCausland's home state of Massachusetts. They began laying the groundwork in California.

"When the business actually deregulated in March of 1998, we had already talked to the six California bishops, we had talked at two or three deanery meetings, and we had given people a heads-up on the choice they were going to have," Bingham says. "You don't have a choice of who's going to take the wires to your house or who's going to distribute the already-generated electricity, but you do have a choice of where that electricity comes from. So the environmental community has taken advantage of this, and has asked that people who care about the air and global warming find a company that produces their electricity from wind, sun, biomass, geothermal and, in some cases, small hydro-electric plants."

In addition to talking to church leaders, Bingham and McAusland approached energy companies with a proposal for partnership with the church. They ended up contracting with Green Mountain Energy, agreeing to encourage their churches and parishioners to buy from them in exchange for a small rebate to parishes for each member that signed up.

A growing campaign

The campaign has now spread beyond Episcopal churches in California, and given birth to California Interfaith Power and Light. Similar efforts are underway in other states where deregulation has occurred and clean energy marketers have moved in, or where green energy is available through traditional suppliers. The General Convention choice of green power was possible because of a green energy program begun by the Public Service Company of Colorado, which has invested in wind farms in Colorado and Wyoming. Similarly, consumers in Iowa are being offered the choice of wind-generated electricity.

While deregulation in and of itself is not necessarily desirable, environmentalists see in it a teachable moment.

"Deregulation is not an environmental cause," McCausland explains. "Deregulation as a phenomenon has been brought about by the biggest energy-consuming companies in the country who want to pay less for their energy. If cheap electricity is the motivating factor then we are going to see more coal being burned than before -- and that has been the case."

"There's a particular window of time here," says Erika Morgan, who serves as technical advisor to Maine Interfaith Power and Light, an organization working toward a partnership between faith communities and a green energy provider (not yet identified) in Maine. "Choosing electricity is new to most people, so it enables us to take a message about environmental protection to a new audience at a time when they're listening. It's the key that opens the door; we need to walk through that door with a solid message about consumerism and conservation and energy efficiency."

Looking beyond price

Since green energy is generally slightly more expensive, part of the message is that price is not the only thing that matters.

"We learned early on that we cannot describe this to folks as a financial discussion," Morgan says. "It's more of a mission discussion -- it's the right thing to do."

In New Jersey, where an interfaith group called Partners for Environmental Quality has contracted with Green Mountain, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark made the switch to green energy for its diocesan buildings last fall.

"It's something like $400 annually more than they were paying, but they felt that this was an appropriate outreach commitment to make, to take some leadership in the state," says Skip Vilas, an Episcopal priest and longtime advocate for environmental concerns. Vilas notes that the bishop of Newark has sent a letter to all Episcopal congregations, asking them to consider joining the effort. In New Jersey, as in California, congregations receive a small rebate for each member that signs up through them.

Bingham and McAusland are quick to point out that the cost can often be offset by simple conservation efforts.

Bingham, who purchases 100 percent wind energy -- Green Mountain's most costly product -- for home use, says that her heightened awareness has brought her overall cost down.

"It's about 19 percent more than what you would ordinarily pay," she says. "However, I have become so conscious of the electricity that I use that I save about 25 percent of electricity now just by doing simple things like putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs and not leaving the lights on when I leave the house. I pay less for electricity now than I ever have before. Steve used to come out here with a compact fluorescent light bulb in his pocket, and he'd change them in my house, and I watched my bill go down, down, down."

"A lot of us take energy and electricity for granted," McAusland says. "But when we learn what it is that's happening on the other end of the electrical line -- what is being burned somewhere to provide us with electricity -- then we begin thinking a little more carefully about how we use the stuff."

In California, where the current energy crisis has caused Green Mountain to stop taking on new customers, conservation has become the focal point of Bingham's work.

"Conservation is the short- and long-term solution to this problem," she says. "It doesn't scare me to think electricity prices may go even higher, because it will force people to conserve. I think this crisis is a wake-up call. Wasteful and short-term planning has really hurt our culture." She is also helping to mobilize the religious community to lobby for the creation of clean energy sources.

"We are hoping to influence the California Public Utilities Commission, so that for every kilowatt-hour of fossil-fuel-burning electricity that they generate -- every new power plant they build that is dirty -- a kilowatt-hour of clean energy is created, and a kilowatt-hour of conservation. We're going to try to have a very strong religious constituency go to Sacramento and talk to legislators about this."

Freezing in the dark?

Conservation does not require extreme sacrifice, McAusland explains.

"Back in the Jimmy Carter years, energy efficiency and conservation were pilloried as freezing in the dark," he says. "We don't have to do that. Our energy technologies have matured enough that we can now maintain or improve our levels of comfort and save energy and save money at the same time. But you walk into your basic hardware store, and you don't find a lot of energy-efficient lighting systems, so we do have a ways to go. We need to be creating the demand for energy-efficient products and services.

"Energy efficiency is something we can be doing everywhere, regardless of whether or not there is a green energy to be purchased. You cut back on your energy bill by 30 percent, you save 30 percent of your greenhouse gas emissions. If you were to invest half of that savings in renewably generated electricity, you can begin to cut your emissions more, so perhaps we could begin to approach the 70 percent reduction level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is calling for. That's exactly what's happening in the Diocese of California."

A church mandate

McAusland is a visionary regarding the potential impact of the church.

"Because we are going to be partners in this effort, more than just consumers, and because we are going to be bringing such numbers to the table, we will be part of the decision-making process," he believes. "When we're talking about distributed generation -- getting away from the big, centralized, fossil-fuel-burning electricity-generating plant to putting solar panels on our roofs -- not only is it labor-intensive in manufacturing them but also in installing them. And bringing our homes and places of worship up to snuff, we're going to be creating lots of job opportunities -- and we will have a say in who gets the jobs. That's as exciting as anything else because when you look at the utility industry, for the most part you'll find white males. That will go when we get our numbers up there. So it's not just about traditional environmental values, but also about environmental and economic justice."

Bingham concurs. "People out in the South Pacific islands are going to lose everything they have as the ice caps melt and the seas begin to rise. We here in the U.S. create most of the problems. It isn't the populated areas of Ethiopia, it's the affluent nations with all the waste." Moreover, she notes, "electrical power plants are almost always located in poor neighborhoods. And the people that live near those power plants have the highest rates of asthma, lung disease and all kinds of respiratory problems. If the church isn't going to stand up and say, this is unjust, who is?"

Increasingly, the church seems willing to take up the commission. The National Council of Churches, through its Eco-Justice Working Group, is supporting interfaith global climate change campaigns in 16 states, which have held training events, facilitated political lobbying, and educated individuals and congregations about energy conservation and efficiency. An October conference in Maine drew 75 participants to consider the faith communities' response to global warming. The Maine campaign has also circulated a religious leaders' statement and developed a personal pledge for individuals and households committed to reducing their own emissions.

Building a global network

Last November, Bingham and McAusland were invited to Kathmandu, Nepal, for a gathering sponsored by the British-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC). Episcopal Power and Light was one of 26 faith organizations represented at the meeting, which included Japanese Shintos who have promised to purchase sustainably produced wood for rebuilding shrines, Huichol Indians who led a campaign which doubled the size of a protected area of the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico, Maronites who are protecting a threatened forest in Lebanon, and Indian Sikhs who are working to reduce fossil fuel consumption by using solar power and more efficient cooking equipment in their Delhi community kitchens.

"The Kathmandu trip was probably the highlight and the biggest thrill that both of us have had because we were mixing with folks who were doing the same kind of work all over the world," Bingham said. "This has set up a whole new network for us. We went to Australia on the way home and were introduced to the head of the Department for the Environment for Australia, who was so excited at the possibility of being able to work with the church."

McAusland is pleased that ARC has identified global warming as its central focus at this time. "All the other environmental insults that take place in our backyards and around the country are important, but when you mess with the climate you're messing with the big picture, and all of the relatively minor insults become greatly magnified when you throw the climate out of whack. We're talking about lots of long-term negative impacts that are going to greatly impact the quality of life not only for our children, but for folk around the world, beginning with the poor." McCausland does this work because he has children, he says, and because "someone's got to do it. Because I don't see our leadership in Washington doing it, I volunteer the Episcopal Church."

Detroiter Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.