EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Nine, Number Four May/June 2000 Southern Clergy Seek Moratorium on Clearcutting Excerpts from The Chattanooga Times, Editorial, March 4th, 2000, forwarded by Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation Information Service. Environmentally minded clergy see the integral connection between a healthy environment and the web of life. They find a religious and moral duty to defend and nurture the ecological threads that bind creation. That lends unique power to a letter by the church leadership of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia (CORA) to Vice President Al Gore. The signatories, including a significant contingent of Tennessee's United Methodist bishops, are seeking the vice president's help in safeguarding southern and Tennessee forests from the avalanche of industrial clear-cutting and chip mills. "We worry greatly that our forests — and thus the human communities and other species that have depended so long on so many aspects of the forests — may be facing a grave danger, not only in your own backyard, but throughout the South," CORA's clergy wrote the vice president, calling for a moratorium on chip mill operations in the South due to their impact on God's creation. CORA's clergy members, comprising 18 denominations and 10 state Councils of Churches in southern states, cited a current federal panel studying forest sustainability and fragmentation. They warned against a merely descriptive study and called for prescriptive solutions to the problems of clear-cutting and chip mills, for three reasons: good stewardship of God's creation; care for the common good, as grounded in the biblical view that "we are not merely discrete individuals, but communities of concern"; and lastly, justice. Home     Table of Contents