Faith Communities building Green

More and more communities of faith—including Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Quaker groups— are embracing green design and green building. While beliefs, traditions, and practices vary in many respects, care for the earth is a value that transcends religious distinctions and emerges as a common motivation for incorporating environmentally friendly designs into construction projects. Belief in a higher being, respect for creation, and a mandate to care for one's neighbor are at the core of many faiths. Many religious traditions call upon members to be good stewards of the earth and its resources.

Building green is a way of committing an entire community to the moral imperative to care for the earth and help all people share in the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment. For a growing number of religious institutions, building green has become not just a cost-effective investment but, more importantly, a way to embody and demonstrate a religious and moral commitment to care for the earth and for life. The process of learning about and undertaking greening, in turn, commonly reinvigorates the religious community.

Felician Sisters convent and school in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh recently built green. Sister Mary Christopher Moore, one of the community's members noted that the more the community learned about green buildings, the more they began to realize that renovating their building to be LEED certified had a moral dimension: "building green was the morally right thing to do, because it not only considered the sustainability of our community but also the sustainability of our world."
The Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation (JRC) in Evanston, Illinois completed its synagogue in 2008 as a LEED Platinum building. In both cases, the decision to build green began as a grassroots effort, driven by interest from within the community and guided by leadership of the rabbis. According to Temple Rabbi Rosen, environmental concerns are inherent in the Jewish principles of bal tashchit, meaning "do not destroy or waste," and tikkun olam, which means "healing the earth." Rabbi Rosen observed that  "it goes back to the Torah, a value we've inherited in our own spiritual tradition . . . energy efficiency, not destroying natural resources. The world does not belong to us. . . . We're reminded repeatedly of that in the Torah".


Read more: http://climateprogress.org/2010/09/27/churches-going-green-greg-kats-greening-our-built-world/