A three-year-old girl is poisoned when her family moves into an apartment previously occupied by mercury-sprinkling Santeria practitioners. A well-known writer contracts giardia from the Ganges River, which is littered with corpses of Hindus seeking salvation. In Sri Lanka, religious pilgrims destroy a wildlife sanctuary as they seek a holy footprint left by the Buddha, or maybe Shiva, or Adam. And across central Africa, poachers brutally slaughter thousands of elephants for ivory, which is carved into religious icons used by Buddhists and Catholics in the Philippines, China, Thailand, and Vatican City. These are just a few of the ways that religious practice harms the environment all over the globe. Here, I offer a quick tour of the problem, focusing on the effects of religious practices on the world’s air, land, water, and wildlife resources, as a way of setting the stage for the more detailed accounts in the book’s remaining chapters.
What more important natural resource could there be than the air we breathe every minute of every day? And yet, air pollution remains rampant throughout the world. The World Health Organization has estimated that air pollution causes seven million deaths per year from problems such as heart disease, respiratory ailments, and cancer. Major sources of air pollution include mobile sources like cars and trucks and stationary sources like factories and power plants. Relatively minor sources range from cigarettes and hairspray to volcanoes and cow farts.
When it comes to our air, the biggest hazard posed by religion is that religious people really like burning stuff. Whether they are burning incense or firecrackers or logs or paper or pieces of cardboard put together to resemble a small house, religious believers around the globe can’t seem to get enough of using fire to celebrate their traditions.
Consider Lag B’Omer. This is a relatively minor Jewish holiday that young people celebrate all over Israel by lighting enormous bonfires to commemorate the death of a famous rabbi and the end of a plague that was killing a different rabbi’s students. Even though I was raised Jewish, I had never heard of the holiday until my colleague Jack Beermann told me about it. Jack, who was nice enough to hire me when he chaired the Appointments Committee at my law school fourteen years ago, despite the fact that I misspelled his name in my cover letter, visits Israel often. “When I was there on Lag B’Omer, the whole country smelled like a bonfire that night and the next day,” he said to me one day when I was explaining my book project to him. “Also, my clothes smelled like a bonfire, of course, so it must require lots of extra laundering.”
According to news reports, there are so many bonfires lit on Lag B’Omer that satellite images reveal a smoky haze hovering over Israel during the holiday. Scientific research has shown that visits to emergency rooms for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) occurrences go way up because of the smoke, which is hardly surprising since the concentration of particulate matter on the evening of the holiday can spike to as much as ten times the normal level. Government officials in Israel are well aware of the problem. A study authorized by the Knesset showed that the bonfires contribute to the problem of global warming, and that body has recommended (though not required) that people refrain from lighting them. The message has not been well received in most quarters. When an influential local mayor launched a campaign to convince residents to find alternative methods of celebrating the holiday, the people became outraged. As one journalist wrote: “In an instant, the popular mayor became the local killjoy, the Grinch who was trying to steal Lag B’Omer. The local press and town Internet forum erupted with residents blasting [the mayor] for his attempt to extinguish the flames. ‘Next thing you know he’ll be ordering us not to light Hanukkah candles,’ one angry resident wrote.” In fact, Hanukkah candles do contain hazardous substances like toluene, benzene, and formaldehyde, so it wouldn’t be entirely shocking if somebody did try to ban them.
Beyond bonfires, the burning of incense is a fairly long-standing and ubiquitous religious practice found in all sorts of traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Although incense can be sweet-smelling and pleasant, it is also really dangerous. For whatever reason (the smell, the context, the different treatment by the media, the extreme irrationality of all human beings), people who would go miles out of their way to avoid breathing in the smoke from a single cigarette often have no problem hanging out for hours at a temple or church where the air is filled with billowing plumes of hazardous incense smoke.
When I was visiting Hong Kong, I spent an hour or so at the School of Public Health at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, talking to a research scientist named Kin-Fai Ho, whose work focuses on the effects of toxic air pollutants on human health. Professor Ho was part of a team of scientists who were granted rare access inside of two temples in Hong Kong so they could study the effects of incense burning on the air quality. The team found that during peak times, when incense was being burnt in high quantities, the air was far more polluted than during nonpeak times. At one of the temples, for instance, the peak carbon-monoxide level was three times the nonpeak level, and the average benzene concentration was almost eight times more than the government’s recommendation for public places. When I asked Dr. Ho how incense smoke compares with cigarette smoke, he said the two were comparable with respect to particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and polycyclic hydrocarbons.
Temples and the people visiting them have several alternatives that can help reduce the risk from incense smoke. In their paper, Ho and his coauthors write that “visitors may decrease the number of incense sticks burned and period of stay at temples.” In my travels, I did visit temples that tried to suggest limits on how many incense sticks people should burn. Some temples have tried to deal with this problem by extinguishing incense sticks after they have been burning for a while. Particularly in Hong Kong, I sometimes saw large buckets of water standing near places where large amounts of incense were being burnt, and every once in a while, a temple worker would grab a bunch of sticks and douse them in the water. There is one suggested possible solution, however, that Dr. Ho was not very optimistic about. So-called environmentally friendly incense, which is marketed in some places as a way of reducing the environmental and health impacts of incense burning, turns out, according to a new study that Ho was working on, to have slightly fewer particulate matter emissions but little effect on the amount of toxic pollutants emitted. On my way out of the interview, looking in that journalistic way for the bottom line, I asked Dr. Ho whether he thought incense-smoke inhalation was a problem. He looked at me and responded calmly, “Yeah, it’s a big problem.”
Another problem is fireworks. As someone who has always hated fireworks and would rather stay inside with my head under a pillow than endure a loud, smoky Fourth of July celebration with ten thousand people staring at the sky and going “ooooh” and “ahhh” over and over for half an hour, I find it hard to understand the appeal. But still, people love watching fireworks! Every celebration these days, from the biggest national holiday to the most insignificant home-run hit by a last-place baseball team down 14–0 in the bottom of the eighth inning, seems to be marked by a blast of colorful explosions. Religious celebrations are no exception. Chinese New Year celebrations, which for some take on a religious meaning (many believe the fireworks ward off evil spirits); the Muslim holiday of Eid, which marks the end of the Ramadan fasting period; the Hindu festival of lights known as Diwali; and many other religious holidays and festivals around the world are celebrated with the abundant lighting of firecrackers and fireworks.
Unfortunately, for those of us who need to breathe air in order to live, the smoke produced by fireworks can be quite dangerous. According to one academic paper that showed the effects of fireworks on air pollution during Diwali in India, “fireworks contain harmful chemicals such as potassium nitrate, carbon and sulphur apart from an array of chemicals such as strontium, barium, sodium, titanium, zirconium, magnesium alloys, copper and aluminum powder to create the colourful effects. On burning they release gases such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.” The study concluded that fireworks contributed to excessive ozone pollution spikes during the holiday, and that “high ozone levels combined with pollution due to fireworks might be critical for elderly people and children with heart and respiratory ailments.” Another Indian expert similarly concluded, “Gaseous air pollutants along with other toxic gases emitted due to burning of firecrackers aggravates the chance of attack among asthma patients. The patients with heart disease, chronic bronchitis and low immune system are also at high risk.”
The realization that fireworks significantly raise air pollution levels has led officials in Beijing to call for a reduction in the use of pyrotechnics during the Chinese New Year period, and it’s one reason, among others, that Abu Dhabi police have warned Eid celebrants not to use illegal fireworks in the United Arab Emirates. Even in the United States, some critics have called for the federal government to regulate fireworks, rather than exempting them from the ambit of the Clean Air Act. The EPA has refused, claiming that “Congress did not intend to require EPA to consider air-quality violations associated with such cultural traditions in regulatory determinations.”
Although most people probably conjure up images of a dark and smoggy sky when they think about air pollution, in fact indoor air pollution may be nearly as dangerous as outdoor pollution, particularly in developing countries where people routinely burn coal and biomass fuel for cooking and heating their homes. Indoor air pollution also provides the context for one of the most bizarre examples of a religious practice that has created environmental problems in the United States.
Mercury is an element that people generally do not want to mess with. Touching it, eating it, or, most dangerously, breathing in the vapors that it releases can be extremely dangerous, potentially causing respiratory problems and damage to the nervous system. Given the perils of inhaling mercury vapors, it might be surprising to learn that some religious believers actually sprinkle the silver liquid metal inside their homes to ward off evil spirits. The practice puts not only current residents at risk but also future ones, as mercury can remain in fabrics and carpets for up to a decade, releasing dangerous vapors the entire time.
Back in 1989, a middle school chemistry teacher in Brooklyn named Arnold Wendroff was teaching his students about the periodic table. When he asked his students if they knew what mercury was used for, he fully expected someone to mention thermometers. Instead, one of his students answered that his mother, a Santeria practitioner originally from Puerto Rico, liked to sprinkle it around their apartment to fend off witches. Witches? Concerned and curious, Wendroff soon became a one-man watchdog of the ritualistic use of mercury. He learned that many practitioners of Caribbean religions like Santeria, Palo, and Voodoo believe that mercury can bring good luck and keep evil spirits at bay. In large US cities with substantial populations of these believers, practitioners purchase capsules containing a small amount of liquid mercury from so-called botanicas, which are essentially stores that sell religious paraphernalia. The practitioners then do things like sprinkle the mercury on floors, furniture, or car interiors, or mop the floor with it, or burn it in candles, or mix it with perfume, or even swallow it. Because mercury vapors are so dangerous to inhale and because the mercury remains in the environment for so long, Wendroff concluded that the ritualistic use of mercury posed a significant health hazard that the government needed to address.
Through Wendroff’s efforts, the EPA became aware of the problem in the early 1990s and started considering whether to do anything about it. The agency has several statutes that it could have used to regulate the ritual use of mercury inside homes, most importantly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, which allows the agency to take a wide variety of regulatory actions against substances that pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or public health. To look into the issue, the EPA established a task force that conducted research and interviewed interested parties. Ultimately, though, the agency decided against using the TSCA, opting instead to work together with states and municipalities to spread the word about the dangers of mercury through education and community outreach.
In the wake of the task force’s decision, Wendroff continued to call for further efforts to address the indoor religious mercury problem, talking to the media, writing papers in scientific journals, and interacting with various governmental units. In 2005, he asked the Office of the Inspector General at EPA to “determine whether EPA had adequately investigated whether [indoor religious mercury] contamination poses an environmental health threat and, if so, had EPA substantively acted to address its dangers.” Unsurprisingly, the OIG concluded that EPA had acted properly and recommended no further action. On the other hand, the office did release a report on its investigation “to further emphasize that the ritual use of mercury poses a health risk.” This final conclusion does seem to be accurate. A 2011 article in the New York Times, for instance, reported on the case of a three-year-old who suffered mercury poisoning when her family moved into a Rhode Island apartment that had been the site of ritual mercury use by a former tenant many years earlier.
Clean air is great, of course, but all the fresh air in the world won’t make much of a difference if we have to stand on destroyed or despoiled lands when we breathe it. Our lands—our deserts and our forests, our parks and our jungles, from the fruited plains to the amber waves of grain, the mountains to the prairies, and everything else that makes up the grand landscapes of the world—are one of humankind’s most treasured resources. As with the air we breathe, though, we have not always been kind to those resources. From wetland destruction to mountaintop mining to deforestation and so many other types of harm, humans continue to threaten the natural environment and put our land-based resources in great danger. Some, for example, have estimated that we have destroyed half of the world’s wetlands in the past century, and others claim that we could lose the rest of our rain forests in the next century. If we don’t take action to stop and reverse this damage soon, we will end up creating a bleak world indeed.
In the United States, where nearly one-third of the land is owned by the federal government, Americans have created a complicated federal system of regulations both to protect the lands and to authorize humans to use those lands in particular ways. An array of federal agencies implements these laws. Of course, state and local governments also have a good deal of responsibility for managing these lands. Like the federal government, states have their own methods for organizing public lands within their jurisdiction. And perhaps even more important, at least for most people’s day-to-day lives, local governments use various land-use laws, particularly zoning regulations. Zoning laws regulate everything, from what people may do with their property (live, sell things, farm, sell porn) to how many people may live in an apartment to how big a plot of land must surround each single-family dwelling.
Once a city or town promulgates a zoning regulation, generally the only way to get around that regulation is through a variance from the zoning authority. If the facts are in your favor, you might try arguing that the regulation violates the state law that authorizes the local zoning regulation in the first place. Of course, you can always try to change the zoning law itself through the political process. Federal law, however, will rarely be of any help. Although a handful of federal constitutional challenges to zoning regulations have succeeded in the past, for the most part, nobody is going to succeed in bringing a challenge under federal statutory or constitutional law to a local zoning law.
Except, that is, when it comes to religion. Although the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment’s so-called Religion Clauses (the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) do not give religious believers any special exemption from general laws that burden their religious practice, in 2000 Congress passed a law called the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act (RLUIPA). The 2000 law does give religious believers special rights in two very specific contexts—inmates challenging prison regulations, and landowners challenging land-use regulations. Because of this law, no governmental unit may impose a land-use regulation that places a “substantial burden” on the “religious exercise” of any individual or institution unless the government can show that the regulation is the “least restrictive means” of furthering some compelling government interest. In the parlance of constitutional law, which RLUIPA is intended to mimic, this means that the government must pass “strict scrutiny,” perhaps the most stringent test created by the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of legislation. Similarly, without passing this strict standard, the government may not apply a land-use regulation in a way that treats a religious institution less favorably than a similarly situated nonreligious institution or in a way that “unreasonably limits” a religious institution.
Although some zoning regulations are intended to do dopey things like limit the amount of vegetables you can grow in your garden or specify how big your window shutters can be or prohibit you from painting your house pink, some regulations are indeed intended to serve important purposes, such as protecting the environment. Increasingly, localities are using land-use laws as a way of supplementing inadequate state and federal regulations to protect their natural resources. Open-space requirements, watershed protections, and landscaping requirements that protect against soil erosion are all examples of how local zoning has become an important weapon in the war against environmental degradation.
So, what should happen if some church or other religious institution were to insist that a locality’s zoning regulation intended to protect the environment substantially burdened the exercise of its religion? Well, it depends on a number of things, including the specific facts of the case as well as which court is hearing the dispute. Because different courts have interpreted key terms in the statute, such as “substantial burden” and “religious exercise,” differently, a lot depends on where the controversy takes place. But in at least some cases, courts have held in favor of religious institutions claiming a right under RLUIPA to be exempted from some zoning law intended to protect the environment.
The most prominent of these cases comes from the lovely town of Boulder, Colorado, where the city plows the bike lanes before the streets and the restaurant menus tell you the source of every single ingredient in your farm-to-table dish. Boulder has a comprehensive zoning system that is intended, among other things, to reduce urban sprawl and maintain open space. In areas designated as agriculture zones, facilities of a certain size must apply to a county for a special-use permit; in deciding whether to grant the permit, the county considers a number of factors, including whether the new use would result in “an over-intensive use of land or excessive depletion of natural resources.” In 2004, the Rocky Mountain Christian Church applied for a special-use permit to expand its already large footprint by over a hundred thousand square feet. The county denied the permit, finding that the expansion would result in an over-intensive use of the land by, among other things, causing traffic congestion and increasing the size of the church’s parking area. When the church filed suit, claiming that the decision violated RLUIPA, both the trial court and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
In an article critical of these decisions, University of Houston law professor Kellen Zale has argued that they “foreshadow how RLUIPA could lead to a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ for environmental protection across the nation.” She maintains that RLUIPA can have wide-ranging effects:
RLUIPA allows churches to do what no other land users are permitted to do: develop their property in ways that land use laws forbid. When the land use law at issue is an environmental zoning law, the threat is particularly severe. The negative environmental impacts of any one particular land use can threaten an entire ecosystem. The efficacy of environmental zoning regulations often depends on the area as a whole being protected from the effects of development; just one overly-intensive development, such as a shopping center or a school or a church, in an otherwise undeveloped or agricultural area, starts the inevitable buildup that follows. No matter that other land users are prohibited from building in wetlands by a zoning restriction, if a church can successfully argue that the zoning restriction violates RLUIPA, the damage to the environment is done.
The controversies over RLUIPA concern the surface of the land, but religion can also affect what happens underground. The relationship between religious views on burying the dead and the environment is complicated, and it is hard to know whether religion has resulted in net ecological harm on this front. Some religious traditions prohibit cremation, for example, which might be more eco-friendly than burying a chemically embalmed body in an elaborate casket on a not-insignificant area of land, but cremation comes with its own environmental hazards, primarily in the form of air pollution. Moreover, some religions insist on simple burials without embalming or extravagant caskets (or sometimes, such as in Islam, with no casket at all), and indeed the current movement in favor of green burials has received much support from religious groups.
This debate aside, most of us can probably agree that burying thousands of bags of discarded religious books and clothing in some random spot underground is not so great for the environment. This is what happened a few years ago in the central New Jersey town of Lakewood, home to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish populations in the United States.
The dispute surrounds the treatment of so-called shaimos, which refers to the Orthodox Jewish law that requires believers to bury certain religious books, writings, objects, and clothing separately from regular trash when these things are worn out and will no longer be used. The set of materials treated as shaimos is quite large, and although there is disagreement about exactly what counts as shaimos, many faithful believe it includes any written materials containing God’s name or a verse from the Torah, as well as any object that has been used for a mitzvah (good deed). Such objects include, for instance, the palm frond (lulav) and lemon-like fruit (etrog), which are featured in the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Before the advent of mass printing, burying shaimos was not such a big deal, but these days, when printouts of Torah quotations and whatnot can be copied and distributed far and wide, the amount of shaimos that needs to be buried has gotten somewhat out of control.
To dispose of their shaimos, Orthodox Jews will typically pay a temple or a rabbi to take the material away and bury it properly, under the tenets of Jewish law. They can also visit www.shaimos.org to purchase green shaimos boxes, which they can then mail, with their shaimos, to the preprinted address on the box. The website promises that the shaimos will be “properly handled and buried under [Orthodox Union] supervision.” (The website also features a funny picture of a horse carrying so much shaimos in its carriage that the horse is lifted high into the air—the caption says “Don’t Wait Til You Have This Much Shaimos.”)
Hopefully, whoever actually ends up burying the stuff has figured out how to do so consistent with all relevant solid waste disposal laws within the jurisdiction. Federal law regulates the disposal of certain types of hazardous wastes under a statute known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA, but it leaves the disposal of nonhazardous wastes primarily to the states. The feds only require the states to ensure that nonhazardous waste is buried in sanitary, lined landfills, rather than just any old place.
Unfortunately for the citizens of Lakewood and Jackson, New Jersey, however, a rabbi there named Chaim Abadi decided to bury his congregation’s shaimos not in a lined landfill but rather just willy-nilly in the woods around the towns. A few residents learned of this practice and, in 2010, contacted the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which ordered the rabbi to unearth the thousands and thousands of bags that he’d buried because, among other things, the bags had been buried near a well and some protected wetlands.
The problem with Chaim Abadi’s bags has not yet been solved. Environmentalists are now worried that the ink used in the written materials could end up seeping into the water. They also worry that nobody really knows exactly what is in all of the bags. The rabbi, for his part, has objected to the state’s clampdown on religious practice. Eventually, the New Jersey DEP went to court and got an order requiring the rabbi to dig up the bags. As of this writing, the bags—ten tractor-trailers full, plus thousands more, loose on the ground—remain unburied. The town of Jackson has fined the rabbi (who, along with his synagogue, has had to pay huge amounts already to unbury the shaimos), and the state has offered to bury the material and “arrange for its disposition in a respectful manner,” in a somewhat nearby landfill, but so far, no agreement has been reached.
When we move outside the United States to consider which religious practices might be most threatening to the world’s lands, one practice clearly emerges—religious pilgrimages. Most religions hold certain places as sacred, perhaps because the place represents the origin of the tradition or continues to be a repository of the divine presence. Every year, believers make the journey to these sacred spaces as part of their religious practice. Whether the faithful are Catholics heading for the Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica in Mexico City or Hindus off to the Ganges River at Varanasi or Muslims on their way to Mecca or Buddhists visiting the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya or Sikhs traveling to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the religious pilgrimage represents one of the most important ways that devout believers connect to their traditions and demonstrate their faith. It is impossible to know exactly how big this phenomenon is, but some observers have estimated that over a hundred million people make some sort of religious pilgrimage every year. The number may be as high as two hundred million.
A couple hundred million people on the move to a few select spots around the world can wreak havoc on the environment, causing deforestation, the destruction of plant and animal life, and pollution of all sorts. For example, one study showed that in 2010, during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca for the hajj, which every able Muslim is supposed to make at least once in his or her lifetime, pilgrims left behind a hundred million plastic water bottles. Scientists in Kashmir worry that an annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave in the Himalayas where the mark of Shiva can allegedly be seen is threatening the fragile glacial landscape there, potentially leading to the destruction of a major water source for both India and Pakistan. According to a National Geographic report on the problem, “The snowcapped mountains along the trail are now black with the pollution generated from hundreds of thousands of people. To reach the cave, pilgrims walk through piles of garbage, water bottles, gas cylinders, human feces, and occasional horse carcasses.” And the annual pilgrimage to the top of Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, in Sri Lanka to visit the footprint-shaped mark that Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Muslims all believe is sacred, is bringing, according to one account, “garbage, sewage, putrid smells and most of all, irreversible environmental harm to the surrounding wildlife sanctuary.”
In 2009, recognizing that “pilgrims often cause some form of environmental damage” and “[constitute] a threat both to the beauty of the ambiance, as well as to the flora and fauna that form part of each heritage landscape,” representatives from nine religious traditions agreed to create something called the Green Pilgrimage Network to promote environmental values in connection with religious pilgrimage. The network was officially launched in 2011 at a meeting in Assisi, Italy, with a handful of pilgrimage sites signing on; the number of sites has increased substantially over the years. Each site agrees to develop a strategic vision and action plan, consistent with the relevant faith’s theology, to ensure that green values will play a part in the pilgrimage activity at the site. Working with other NGOs like the Alliance of Religion and Conservation, the network urges member sites, among other things, to recycle, save water, ban plastic bags, create green transportation options, and encourage visitors to clean up the pilgrimage route as they travel. It holds conferences, engages in education efforts, and even publishes guides for practitioners, such as the very popular “Green Guide to Hajj.” Nevertheless, despite these hopeful efforts, religious pilgrimages continue to cause significant environmental damage to the earth’s lands across the globe.
Mmmm, water. Fresh, clean, crisp water. Water to drink, to swim in, to boat on, to catch fish in, to admire and write poems about. What would we do without clean water? And yet, even as recently as the early 1970s, the waterways of the United States were horribly polluted. Factories discharged toxic substances into the nation’s rivers. Municipalities dumped untreated sewage into the rivers. Fish were dying in record numbers. Most watersheds were unusable for swimming or other forms of recreation. Lake Erie was declared dead; the Hudson River contained bacterial levels over a hundred times greater than what is considered safe. Rivers in several major northeastern metropolises could occasionally be found on fire. When Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, containing “no visible life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms,” burst into flames in 1969, it became clear to many that the federal government had to step in and do something. Over Richard Nixon’s veto, Congress enacted the Clean Water Act in 1972, and slowly after that, the nation’s waters finally started improving. Today it’s even possible to swim in some of them without contracting a rash.
For a variety of reasons, including ease of enforcement and the strength of the nation’s farming lobby, the Clean Water Act distinguishes between point-source pollution, that is, pollution from a specific, easily identifiable source, like the end of a pipe, and non-point-source pollution, which generally refers to pollution from runoff, particularly from agriculture. The act thoroughly and strictly regulates point-source pollution, while leaving non-point-source pollution primarily to the states. As a result, the United States has made great strides in reducing the amount of point-source pollution getting into our waters, while agricultural runoff and other forms of non-point-source pollution continue to cause significant problems.
Realizing that something has to be done about these problems, states, localities, and to some degree the EPA have begun, in recent years, to focus more on ways to reduce non-point-source pollution. Some state and local governments, for example, have begun requiring farmers and other creators of non-point pollution (timber harvesters, construction managers, and the like) to take affirmative steps to reduce the amount of non-point-source pollution generated and to reduce the possibility that the pollution will make it into waterways. These measures include things like installing fences, moving activities back some distance from waterways, restoring eroded areas, and other so-called best management practices. Although these requirements have not always been strictly enforced, environmental officials have increasingly been investigating farms and other sites to ensure that the rules are being followed. In addition to imposing fines for violations, the government also often works with farmers and other polluters to educate them about the dangers of runoff pollution and to fund pollution-reduction projects when necessary.
But what if you’re a farmer who doesn’t really like working with the government? And what if you don’t believe in taking government money? And what if you don’t go in much for developing technological solutions to problems? Enter the plain-sect, old-order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Amish families own over half of the five thousand or so dairy farms in the county—the county that happens to be the worst contributor to the terrible pollution that has plagued the Chesapeake Bay for decades. According to an article in the New York Times, Lancaster County generates over sixty million pounds of cow manure every year. And a lot of that manure makes its way to the bay, “reducing oxygen rates, killing fish and creating a dead zone that has persisted since the 1970s.” As a result of this pollution, the bay’s blue crabs are apparently in such bad shape and so hungry that they have started eating each other. In 2009, a group of environmental investigators checked out two dozen or so Amish farms and found that most of them were not managing their manure properly and that, as a result, a large number of nearby wells were contaminated with E. coli, nitrates, or possibly both.
Environmental officials have been trying to work with these Amish farmers to implement pollution control measures—such as installing fences around the farms, building larger pits to store manure, and creating buffers between the farms and nearby rivers and streams—but the suggestions have not exactly been greeted with open arms and delighted cries of “Willkommen!” (I recognize that the Amish resistance to implementing these antipollution measures differs from the other examples in the book, which involve religious practices that affirmatively harm the environment, but it warrants inclusion here because the relationship between religious belief and environmental harm remains specific and direct.) The government officials and others who have tried to convince the Amish to change how they manage their manure have not had an easy time of it. The Amish are famously resistant to change, skeptical of the government, and wary of taking money from others. They were generally not happy to see the EPA, especially when the government first started showing up in 2009. It certainly did not help that the agency originally lacked sensitivity to the unique situation of the Amish. According to one non-Amish farmer in the region, the EPA “came in here with guns ablazing and really tried to hammer some people hard.”
When the government started taking a more cooperative approach, however, it started meeting with more success. Many Amish farmers have indeed accepted funds to modernize their operations and have implemented changes to reduce manure pollution from their livestock. Even so, such steps remain controversial within the Amish community. According to a 2011 article, one farmer who accepted money from the feds didn’t want his full name printed in the paper “because he was afraid his neighbors might see the story and criticize him for taking federal money.”
Cow poop is one thing, but it’s human poop that has in fact led to the most bitter battles between environmental officials and the Amish. The Swartzentruber Amish are a superconservative group that make your typical Old Order Amish look like Silicon Valley tech whizzes. Not only do the Swartzentrubers not use electricity or running water in their homes, but they also eschew bicycles and Velcro (Velcro!) for being too modern. Back in 2003, a group of Swartzentrubers in Pennsylvania ran into trouble when they refused to put reflective orange triangles on their buggies as required by state law. Apparently, the bright orange color was just too orangey for them. After a prolonged legal battle, the group convinced the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to let them use gray tape instead. This is not a group, in other words, that was going to cave at the first sight of a state sewage official.
When the Pennsylvania state sewage officials started showing up on Swartzentruber properties in 2008, they found numerous violations of the state sewage codes. The tanks were too small. They were made out of the wrong materials and lacked electronic monitoring equipment. Sewage was overflowing, untreated, and being emptied onto the ground. Neighbors were worried, understandably, that their well water might become contaminated. Nobody in twenty-first-century Pennsylvania wants to develop cholera. The sewage authorities told the Swartzentrubers to modernize or else. The Swartzentrubers refused to follow the law. According to one member of the group, “They’re enforcing stuff that’s against our religion.” A judge even sentenced a guy to jail for ninety days for failing to pay his fines. Nor are these conflicts limited only to Pennsylvania. Disputes involving sewage requirements have made it to courts in Michigan and Ohio. An Ohio municipal judge, for instance, found in favor of the state’s Board of Health, which had required an Amish man to install an off-lot septic system with electricity, on the grounds that “the state’s interest in preventing the discharge of untreated septic/sewage from being washed downstream in the surface waters and into the groundwater is compelling.”
As for the Pennsylvania Swartzentrubers, by 2013 they were planning to leave the state for New York, where they expected life to be easier. Moving to another state to avoid sewage regulations may seem incredibly radical to most of us, but it should serve as a poignant reminder of how important religion is to some people. As an attorney for one of the sewage agencies said, “I remember going to the [Amish] house . . . and the wife came out and said, ‘You’re going to keep me from going to heaven. Whose fault is it going to be that I’m going to hell?’”
Religious practices have caused water pollution in lots of places around the world—anything, for example, that harms the land, like the pilgrimages I talked about earlier, will also likely threaten water supplies—but the country where this problem takes center stage is India. Google “religion” and “water pollution,” and you’ll see what I mean. Considering the frequency, exuberance, and number of participants in religious celebrations in India, the events are bound to cause at least some degree of water pollution. Add to this the fact that so many people in India lack access to freshwater supplies, and the problem becomes extremely pressing.
Take, for example, Holi, a festival celebrated throughout India and other parts of the world with significant Hindu populations. During Holi, in addition to setting air-polluting bonfires, celebrants mark the beginning of spring by throwing abundant quantities of colored powders and liquids at each other. I have never personally witnessed a Holi celebration, but from the pictures I’ve looked at online it looks truly unbelievable—really wild and super fun. Everyone is running around the streets and parks and temples throwing handfuls of bright-colored powder everywhere and tossing water balloons filled with colored water at their friends and neighbors until everybody and everything is covered with a thick dusting of brilliant yellows and reds and greens and purples. The aftermath looks like a bomb went off in a Crayola crayon factory. Everyone is happy and smiling and dancing and seemingly having the time of their lives.
Except that, of course, a lot of this stuff is dangerous. This wasn’t the case back when the colors were made from natural sources like flowers and leaves and turmeric, but now that most of the colors are made from chemicals, like lead oxide and aluminum bromide, the practice has become a problem. For one thing, coming into direct contact with the chemical dyes can harm your skin and eyes and throat and lungs. More to the point, though, the chemicals also end up in rivers and lakes and other water bodies, which, in India, tend to be suffering already from a great deal of industrial, municipal, and agricultural pollution.
Scientists have recognized the problem. A recent paper, titled “Impact of ‘Holi’ on the Environment: A Scientific Study,” by two Rajasthan scientists, for example, describes the problem: “The discharge of the toxic colors in the soil and water has a deleterious effect on the water resources, soil fertility, microorganisms living in these habitats and the ecosystem integrity on the whole. These colors are not readily degradable under natural conditions and are typically not removed from waste water by conventional waste water treatments.” Likewise, a number of environmental activists and NGOs have started pushing for more eco-friendly Holi practices, including a return to natural dyes. As the scientific article concludes: “We believe that large-scale efforts to increase public awareness regarding the health hazards of harmful colors, widespread availability of safer alternatives at affordable prices, and governmental regulatory control on the production and selling of hazardous chemicals will go a long way in a safer and environment-conscious celebration of this vibrant festival.”
And then, of course, there is the Ganges River. This sixteen-hundred-mile-long river that flows from the Himalayas through India and Bangladesh into the Bay of Bengal is the most revered river among Hindus. Many Hindus believe that the river is the home of the goddess Ganga, a gift from the gods, or the earthly incarnation of the gods, and that bathing, drinking, or having their ashes scattered in this sacred river will wash away their sins and bring them closer to salvation. Unfortunately, the Ganges is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Among other things, the river is filled with garbage; dead bodies, both animal and human; hazardous chemicals like DDT and PCBs; and fecal coliforms, which are thought to be present in concentrations thousands of times higher than the safe level. Scientists believe the water from much of the river is not even clean enough for agricultural use, much less for drinking or swimming. The pollution causes all sorts of health problems, including skin rashes, infections, parasitic diseases, birth defects, and cancer, for the four hundred million or so people who live near the river. In his recent book Being Mortal, the well-known surgeon and writer Atul Gawande tells the moving story of scattering his father’s ashes in the Ganges. The ritual requires Gawande to drink some of the river water, and even though he takes antibiotics as a precaution against infection, he ends up contracting giardiasis.
Most of the pollution in the Ganges, of course, comes from industrial and raw sewage discharge, but a not-insignificant amount of it, particularly at certain locations and during certain times, comes from religious practices. The massive amount of ritual bathing contributes pollution to the river, especially during peak periods such as the occasional Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, the most recent of which in 2013 brought over a hundred million people to bathe in one portion of the Ganges. During the festival that year, the biological oxygen demand level of the river, which is an indication of the organic pollution present, rose to twice the recommended level on just the very first day at the site of the mass bathing. At the point of the river where it passes through the famous holy city of Varanasi, things get particularly grisly. Here, tens of thousands of Hindus are cremated every year so their remains can be scattered in the river. The cremation rituals take place on ghats, or steps that lead down from the town to the river. Often, the cremation ceremony does not completely burn the dead bodies (and other times, people who are too poor to pay for cremation simply have their corpses left in the river), so the section of the Ganges that passes through Varanasi is littered with floating corpses and partial corpses. Still, despite the fact that one estimate places the biological oxygen demand near this area as fifteen times the safe level for bathing, and despite the fact that bumping into a rotting dead body while doing the crawl stroke is a real possibility, people continue to bathe and swim in the water.
Even if the earth were surrounded by air as fresh as a baby’s first breath and covered with water as clear as a glass of icy Finnish vodka, it still wouldn’t be much of a place to live without animals. From our loyal pet dogs and hedgehogs, to eco-celebrities like pandas and condors, to downright weird and ugly critters like the naked mole rat or that fish with the light coming out of its head that lives on the bottom of the ocean, animals make the world about four hundred thousand times better than it would be without them (according to my own rough calculation). Even though I would expect that most people would more or less agree with this assessment of the awesomeness of animals, human beings still somehow have managed to wipe—or help wipe—entire species off the face of the planet at an alarming rate. Exactly how much havoc we are causing, extinction-wise, is difficult to pinpoint, particularly since some species would have gone extinct without any help from us. But scientists estimate that thousands of species die off every year and that the current rate of extinction is thousands of times greater than it would be without the “benefit” of human activity. Just in the past decade, for example, we’ve lost species like the delightful golden toad to pollution and the glorious West African black rhinoceros to poaching. Other incredible animals, like the black-footed ferret, the Sumatran tiger, and, of course, the polar bear, teeter perilously on the brink of extinction.
Religion is hardly the primary cause of species extinction, but as with the case of the bald and golden eagles, religious practice sometimes does threaten both individual animals and even entire species. There are two broad categories of religious practice that imperil wildlife. The first is animal sacrifice, where the killing of the animal is itself the central aspect of the ritual. The second involves killing an animal or animals to use them or their parts during the ritual. The latter—exemplified by the eagle situation—tends to be more dangerous from the perspective of species destruction, but the former, frankly, isn’t that great for the animals either.
Religious traditions all over the world have engaged in animal sacrifice since practically the dawn of time, and many traditions still partake in the practice today. In the United States, members of the Santeria tradition continue to sacrifice chickens and goats and turtles and other animals as a way of pleasing the religion’s spirits or deities, known as orishas. Back in 1990, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a Florida town violated the First Amendment by outlawing animal cruelty in a way that made it clear the town was targeting the Santeria. When I was writing my first book, I spent a day with a group of Santeria followers in Miami, including the head of the particular church that had brought the case to the Supreme Court. My visit was quite interesting, and not only because I got to hang out in an apartment with steaming bowls of goat meat and a tall machete by the front door. The followers of Santeria continue from time to time to be the object of illegal targeting by the government, but like the Amish, they are not a group that will cave easily. They know they have the law on their side, and even though they are not particularly popular among their neighbors, who tend to frown upon mass backyard sacrifices occurring next door to them, the Santeria faithful believe very strongly in what they are doing and are not going to stop anytime soon.
Sacrificing a few goats and chickens here and there may be no more harmful to the environment than hunting deer and eating a juicy steak, but some sacrificial practices around the world do pose a wee bit more danger than what Santeria is doing in Florida. Take, for example, the folk religion known as Candomblé, which is practiced in several South American countries, primarily in Brazil. Candomblé may have as many as several million followers, though the number is hard to determine, because the religion is often practiced in secret. In this tradition, which combines aspects of various African religions that entered South America through the slave trade and some native Indian beliefs, with a touch of Catholicism thrown in for good measure, practitioners sacrifice all sorts of animals to please the spirits. Although most of the animals are nonexotic ones like pigeons, guinea fowl, and goats, one sacrificial animal is the huge yellow-footed tortoise, which is considered vulnerable to extinction by international experts on species destruction. Apparently, practitioners of Candomblé sacrifice the tortoise specifically to please one particular spirit named Shango, because like the deity, the tortoise is considered especially powerful.
Endangered turtles are also having a hard time of it in Bangladesh. In the Hindu festival of Kali Puja, celebrants demonstrate their devotion to Kali, the goddess of power. The festival occurs during the autumn and is particularly popular in Bangladesh. One way that practitioners celebrate the holiday is by killing and eating turtles, because they believe that eating the turtle meat will give them strength, like the goddess. As a result, every October or November witnesses a mass slaughter of turtles, terrapins, and tortoises in this south Asian country. During the 2011 festival, for example, perhaps as many as one hundred thousand turtles were slaughtered. You can look online if you want to see some footage from this celebration, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The turtles are often unceremoniously hacked up and sold right on the street; the aftermath is a sea of blood and mountains of empty shells.
If this wasn’t bad enough, the sacrificer and the eater believe that the scarcer the turtle the better. Ten percent of the world’s turtles live in Bangladesh, and many of the twenty-two freshwater species of turtles and tortoises that can be found in the country are considered endangered. Bangladeshi law makes collecting these species illegal, but a large network of turtle collectors and vendors work together throughout the country to evade the law, and officials have largely looked the other way. During recent Kali Puja celebrations, observers have allegedly seen a number of endangered species being sold and eaten at the markets. These species include the northern river terrapin, one of the most endangered species of turtle on the planet, and the black softshell turtle, which until 2002 had been classified as extinct in the wild until it was rediscovered in a river in northeastern India. According to Dr. S. M. A. Rashid, an expert who has worked for many years to stop the illegal trade in endangered turtles in Bangladesh, the effect of the holiday on turtle populations in the wild was “devastating.” When I asked Dr. Rashid by e-mail about the current situation in Bangladesh, he told me that in the last couple of years since 2012, media attention has forced the government to step up its enforcement efforts. Open sales of turtles stopped for some time, and some village markets that sold turtles as part of the Hindu festival were raided as well. But Dr. Rashid also said that as a result of the increased enforcement efforts, much of the turtle trade has simply gone underground. These days, turtle traders have begun “home delivery” as an alternative to selling in public; an interested buyer need only place a mobile phone call to a trader, and the trader will deliver the possibly endangered turtle to the buyer’s home.
Two stories from Africa illustrate the second general type of problem posed by religion for wildlife—the use of animals as part of a religious observance or ritual. I’ll start with big cats. One of the fastest-growing religious groups in South Africa—now numbering at least five million adherents—is the Nazareth Baptist Church or the Shembe, a combination of Christian and Zulu traditions named after Isaiah Shembe, a charismatic leader who began the religion in the early twentieth century. When believers get together in large numbers to worship with prayer and rhythmic dancing, they don elaborate costumes of monkey-tail loincloths, headgear made with ostrich feathers, and leopard-skin pelts worn over their chests. The leopard pelts are meant to symbolize power, and thousands of leopards, a species that is listed as “near threatened” and getting worse, have been killed for these rituals. As with the turtles in Bangladesh, sale and possession of the leopard skins is technically illegal, but officials turn the other way and fail to enforce the laws.
A few years ago, a South African biologist and conservationist named Tristan Dickerson came up with an ingenious plan to save the leopards. He decided to try developing a fake leopard pelt that would look real enough for at least the rank and file Shembe practitioners to wear instead of the real ones. At first, things did not proceed smoothly. For one thing, the Shembe followers were not particularly worried about the leopards. Many did not know that leopards were in danger of becoming endangered, and some even told Dickerson that if the number of leopards got too low, the Shembe messiah would simply make more of them. The other problem was that Dickerson couldn’t get the pelts to look right. His attempt to print leopard spots onto impala coats, for instance, was not fooling anyone. Finally, though, Dickerson worked with expert fake-fur makers in China to develop a pelt that the church could get behind. In early 2014, the church endorsed the practice of wearing fake pelts, and as of early that year, nearly two thousand pelts had been given out to believers for free. One estimate put the number of fake-pelt wearers at 10 percent of the church, with another estimate predicting that 70 percent of the dancers would be wearing fake pelts within a couple of years.
Then there are the elephants. You will find no sadder story in this book than the one about the elephants. Most people know that poachers kill elephants in Africa for the animals’ ivory tusks, but do you know how many elephants are actually killed? A recent study—apparently the most rigorous one to date—concluded that the previous estimate of about twenty-five thousand per year was too low and that in fact poachers had killed one hundred thousand African elephants over a three-year period between 2010 and 2012. One hundred thousand elephants. Try to imagine, if you can, a pile of one hundred thousand dead, tusk-less elephants. In a week, when you’re done weeping, move on to the next sentence. Some experts believe that if the current rate of killing continues, elephants could be extinct within a decade.
Until journalist Bryan Christy published his now classic National Geographic article “Blood Ivory” in 2012, few knew how much of this illegal slaughter and ivory trade can be traced to religion. In that piece, Christy tells of his travels around the world to find out what all the ivory is used for. He learns that much of it is made into religious icons. In the Philippines, millions of Catholics come together in January with their idols of Santo Niño de Cebu to celebrate the country’s hugely important religious figure. Because “many believe that what you invest in devotion to your own icon determines what blessings you will receive in return . . . the material of choice is elephant ivory.” Christy visits ivory carvers in Thailand who produce ivory Buddhist icons for sale throughout the nation (“Ivory removes bad spirits,” a monk tells him); an ivory carving factory in Beijing that “smells and sounds like . . . a vast dentist office” where workers make sculptures of Buddhas and a variety of other Chinese folk gods; and Vatican City, where ivory idols can be found for sale in the stores on St. Peter’s Square. “No matter where I find ivory,” Christy writes, “religion is close at hand.”
In the aftermath of Christy’s story, Oliver Payne, who edited the piece for National Geographic, tried to use Christy’s findings to pressure the Vatican to take a stand against the killing of elephants for religious uses. Payne figured that if the pope (it was Benedict at the time) were to make a strong statement condemning the slaughter of elephants, it might have an important effect on the worldwide ivory trade. He sent a letter to Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s Press Office director, asking about the Vatican’s position on using ivory for religious objects. When Payne hadn’t heard back from Father Lombardi after two months, the editor sent a follow-up missive, suggesting that “the Vatican could make an important contribution to both humankind and the environment by taking a few important steps, in particular: (1) Declare the use of ivory for religious purposes as no longer acceptable; (2) Call for an immediate halt to all carving and exchange of ivory for religious and commercial purposes; (3) Accede to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.” And then he waited.
Finally, in January 2013, four months after Payne sent his first letter, he received a response from Father Lombardi. Although Lombardi stated that “we are absolutely convinced that the massacre of elephant is a very serious matter,” most of his letter involved pointing out how the ivory trade really isn’t the Vatican’s fault. Philippine Catholics who are “responsible for illegal trade in ivory?” Not the Vatican’s fault. The store that sells ivory devotional objects “a few dozen meters” from Lombardi’s office? It’s privately owned and not the Vatican’s fault. The Asian countries primarily responsible for the trade in ivory religious objects? Catholics there are a “tiny minority”—it can’t possibly be the Vatican’s fault. All of this was true, of course, but beside the point. Payne hoped the Vatican would take a stand against the slaughter of elephants, and the Vatican responded by pointing fingers and making a hollow promise to “raise awareness of the problem through programming on Vatican Radio.” Although Pope Francis, who took over for Benedict a few months after Lombardi issued his response, had already done many great things by the end of 2014, he had made no public statements about the slaughter of elephants.
Since around 2012, some progress has been made. The work of Christy, Payne, and many other dedicated conservationists in Africa and elsewhere around the world has done much to raise consciousness about the plight of the elephants. A number of countries, including the United States, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, have destroyed their stores of ivory seized from illegal traders. This is no small amount of ivory. The Philippines destroyed five tons; the United States six. Hong Kong has started destroying its ivory and has pledged to destroy nearly thirty tons over the course of a year. These are important gestures, and they help spread the word about the elephants, but at the same time it is not entirely clear how much good they are doing. The ivory being destroyed, after all, has already been removed from the market, and the poachers’ knowledge that this material can’t make its way back into the market may only serve to increase prices for new, illegally procured ivory. There is, in short, a lot of work left to do if we want to ensure that religion won’t end up eradicating elephants from the face of the earth.
As I hope I have demonstrated, the problem of religious practices that harm the environment is a real one. It occurs all over the world, including inside the United States, and it involves a wide range of religious traditions, both large and small. The large, looming question, then, is how society, and particularly the government, should seek to protect the environment without unduly burdening the freedom of religious believers to practice their faiths. The trips I describe in the rest of the book represent my attempts to find some answers to this critical question.