Mollegen Forum explores planet's water crisis, hears calls for ‘theology of water'

"To withhold or contaminate water; to be unconscious or deliberately unaware of brothers and sisters who lack water and all else that upholds their wellbeing and dignity, is to stand against the very One under whom this nation of ours has placed itself," Griswold said during his remarks to the April 27 Mollegen Forum on water.

"The Water of Life: the Earth's Water Crisis" was a day-long forum featuring Griswold, environmental author Fred Pearce ("When the Rivers Run Dry"); environmental attorney Martha Franks; the Rev. Canon Peter G. Kreitler, Episcopal priest and host of the "EarthTalk Today" television series; and the Very Rev. Martha J. Horne, dean and president of Virginia Seminary.

Addressing attendees from around the country, all four speakers wove a dialogue of human interconnectedness with God's creation and people's responsibility as stewards of the world's resources.

"Water glorifies the Lord by being what God intended water to be, a sacrament -- an outward and visible sign of God's desire revealed in Christ to impart and sustain life," Griswold said in his introductory remarks. "Water not as a possession, a commodity, a source of economic advantage for some at the expense of others, but a gift, an outpouring of divine love that reflects Christ's yearning for the wellbeing and full flourishing of the whole creation of which we, with our fragile humanity, are an intimate part."

The complete text of Griswold's remarks is available here.
 
Franks discussed her legal experience as a specialist in water law and its approach to the idea of property rights.

"The heart of environmentalism is the argument that natural resources cannot be separated into private parcels," Franks said. "In a purely secular context, the development of water law has forced people to face their interdependence, and to create a system in which all water users, including non-human water users, participate. From this secular direction, therefore, water shows our interconnectedness with creation in a literal, physical way that serves as a metaphor for the spiritual changes that we must make in response to our new relation to the earth."
 
Franks said that a theology of water "holds a greater hope."

"The change in vision that we need is like the theological shift between the old law and the new law, where instead of trying to define correct behavior, Christ, the source of living water, tells us that we must re-form our hearts to be in right relation to our neighbors," she told the participants. "In the same way, we must abandon the effort to parse out exactly what our correct share of the world's resources should be. Rather, we should be asking, in a living way, what our role in the world's eco-system should be." 

The complete text of Franks' remarks is available here.
 
A noonday Eucharist was held in the Seminary Chapel during which Kreitler preached a message of Christian awareness and responsibility as stewards of God's creation.

"Today, out of the whirlwind of climate change and global warming, the question is not ‘where', but ‘why'," he told the congregation. "Woman and man, I have placed you in the garden to be guardians, to keep and serve. And you are watching as creation collapses. I have given you two hands, one for the book of scripture and the other for the book of nature, as your guidebooks along the pathway of life; I've lifted up prophets to hold mirrors to your face; I've lifted up a modern-day prophet -- the voice of water --Jacques Cousteau, who said at the Earth Summit in 1992, ‘unless we do something radical today, we will be unable to do anything at all tomorrow.' Tomorrow is today. The earth is in our hands."

A video of Kreitler's sermon will soon be made available here.
 
Pearce discussed his best-selling book during an afternoon session. "People often talk about a world water crisis," Pearce said, "but this is not like other global resource crises."

Instead, he said, because water is used very locally, the crisis is a series of local crises as individual rivers run dry in the world's more arid and densely populated areas.
 
Attributing part of the world's water crisis to climate change, Pearce said that the principle causes of the crisis are due to "huge demands on the world's rivers, taking [up to] four times more water from them than we did a generation ago." Among those demands are those for irrigated farming which utilizes "two-thirds of all the water abstracted from our rivers and underground reserves" to produce "high-yield" super crops of rice and wheat.

"If the world gets into growing biofuels to reduce our reliance on oil and cut greenhouse gas emissions -- say, by a quarter of its fuel -- that would effectively double our water demand for crops," he said.
 
Pearce then outlined options to help address the water crisis, such as becoming "better at catching the rain where it falls," finding ways to reduce enormous losses from water evaporation at reservoirs, an increased use of recycled urban waste water, and -- most importantly, he said -- developing "cheap and modern systems of drip irrigation" that could cut water demand by up to 70-80 percent.

"It's not rocket science," urged Pierce. "We have somehow to ensure universal access, while encouraging both communal efforts at conservation, and price incentives to penalize misuse and encourage more efficient use."

The complete text of Pearce's remarks is available here.

The Mollegen Forum is named after the Rev. Albert T. Mollegen, former New Testament and ethics professor (1936-1974) at VTS. A powerful and charismatic teacher, Mollegen was deeply committed to an ongoing conversation between the Church and the world, encouraging the intersection of theology with the social, political, and economic issues of the day.

VTS is the largest of the 11 accredited seminaries of the Episcopal Church and was founded in 1823. The school prepares men and women, representing more than 40 different dioceses and nine different countries, for service in the Church both as ordained and lay ministers, and offers a number of professional degree programs and diplomas. 

The VTS forum follows another discussion of the religious and scientific issues surrounding water use that was held March 8-9 at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. ENS coverage of that gathering is available here.