The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is a straight shot up Havana Street, off I-70 just east of downtown Denver, past an Office Depot and the national headquarters of a company called Scott’s Liquid Gold. No signs point to the refuge, which was created on the site of a chemical munitions facility back in the mid-1990s and is now home to a herd of bison, dozens of burrowing owls, and countless furry prairie dogs. The entrance is hardly inviting, although the officer working the booth there kindly directed me two miles north to the collection of administration buildings, where I found the National Eagle Repository, a macabre little division of the US Fish and Wildlife Service that collects dead bald eagles and golden eagles and sends them (and their parts) to members of federally recognized Native American tribes that use them in religious rituals.
Applying to the repository is the primary way to legally get hold of any part of either eagle species in the United States. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940 punishes unauthorized possession of eagle parts with a hefty fine and possible prison time. Although the repository serves an important need, it is highly controversial. After all, it’s a rare Native American who thrills at the idea of applying to the United States government for permission to own what he or she believes is a sacred object central to a religious practice.
I had come to the repository to speak with its director, Bernadette Atencio. When I met her, she was dressed in a khaki FWS uniform, holding a mug that said CHICAGO, and looking serious. She did not seem very happy to see me, which I guess was not much of a shock—from her perspective, what good could possibly come from talking to a nerdy East Coast academic? As it turned out, however, Atencio was quite forthcoming. First we talked numbers. The repository, which has been in the area since 1995—previously it was in Oregon, and before that, in Pocatello, Idaho—receives about two thousand eagles a year, two-thirds of them bald eagles. Atencio quickly compared that number with the much larger number of pending applications—over six thousand still waiting to be filled, most of them for whole birds, rather than feathers or other parts. The eagles come from all over, generally from state fish and wildlife officials who either find the birds or are contacted by private individuals who have found them. Demand has increased significantly in recent years as the word has gotten out that the repository is the place to go for legal eagles. Large feather orders, in particular, have increased over the past few years, but these are difficult to fill as well. “Plucking takes time,” Atencio pointed out. “You can’t always get the perfect feathers.”
Atencio talked a lot about the condition of the birds that arrive at the repository. Most have been lying out in the wild before someone finds them and sends them in. By the time the birds show up in Denver, they’re often infested with bugs or in pieces. “A wing hanging here,” Atencio said, “a leg hanging there.” When the repository cannot use the whole bird, the staff members “piece them out,” meaning that they put together the claws from one bird with the wings of another and a torso from yet another, to make a whole bird. Atencio stressed the care and detail that the repository staff exercises when processing the birds. Several times, she described her mission as basically “customer service.” Running a dead-eagle processing agency is not a job for everyone, but for Atencio, who describes her work as a passion, it seems a perfect fit.
I asked if we could take a look around, and Atencio led me on a tour of the facility. From a corridor, I peered through a glass window into the cavernous, science-lab-looking room where they process the eagles. An enormous pallet stacked with nearly 170 identical Federal Express boxes was waiting to be taken away. Each box, according to Atencio, contained a set of loose feathers. As a fact sheet explains, the repository fills orders for both “Quality Loose Feathers” and “Miscellaneous Eagle Feathers.” The latter consists of “various size feathers (such as primaries, secondaries, tail, and plumes).” There is no guarantee these feathers will be any good. As the sheet puts it: “Quality may vary.”
In addition to the eagles, the building that houses the eagle repository also contains the National Wildlife Repository, where the federal government stores illegally killed, traded, and shipped animals and their parts. The repository holds this material until it is no longer needed as evidence in ongoing trials and until it can be sent to a school, a museum, or another institution. We took a look at the warehouse where all the animals and their parts are kept. Seemingly endless rows of gigantic blue shelves stretched back the entire length of a space big enough to park a midsized jet. The aisles were arranged by creature, or type of creature. One nearby was labeled the “Elephant, Rhinoceros, Yak, Ostrich, Zebra” aisle. As I was talking to Atencio about something or other, I turned my head toward a different aisle. My gaze was returned by a line of tiger heads, each staring out of plastic bags right at me through their dead eyes. Several leopard heads were next to the tigers. Since I had my camera with me, I asked if I could take some pictures. Atencio said no; for security reasons, photography is not allowed in the warehouse. But to my surprise, she said we could go into the eagle processing room, and I could take pictures there. Perhaps, she added, some eagles might have arrived that needed processing. I could watch that. And take pictures.
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” Atencio said.
Sweet!
Perhaps at this point you might be wondering: Why would anybody in his right mind want to visit the National Eagle Repository? It’s a good question. The answer is complicated, and it gets to why I wanted to write this book. So let me explain.
At Boston University, I’ve taught church-state law for well over a decade. Back in 2007, during my first sabbatical, I spent six months traveling around the country to the cities and towns where landmark Supreme Court law-and-religion cases started. I wanted to see the places and meet the people involved in these controversies that I had previously known only from law books. It was a terrific experience that resulted in my first book, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. Researching and writing that book was so much fun that when it was over, I found myself wanting to make more trips to legally significant places so I could write about them. Soon after Holy Hullabaloos was published, I happened to come across some cases where Native Americans claimed that they had a First Amendment right to take and possess bald eagles and their feathers. As someone who also teaches environmental law, I found these cases particularly fascinating because they pit two incredibly important interests—religious freedom and environmental protection—against each other. When I learned about the repository, which had to be one of the strangest places I’d ever heard of, I couldn’t resist. As soon as I found some free time, I booked my flight to Denver.
When I returned home from the repository, I wrote a short piece about the place for a legal journal and decided I would write a book about bald eagles. Should Native American tribes be allowed to take a small number of eagles for their religious practices every year? I didn’t know the answer, but I figured that by writing a book on the subject, I could work through for myself just how the government and the legal system should go about balancing the religious freedom and environmental protection interests at stake. I planned to call the book Illegal Eagles. The cover would have a picture of a discombobulated bald eagle, shaggy feathered and delirious. Energized, I cleared a space on my bookshelves for the inevitable Pulitzer Prize that soon would be coming my way.
As I thought more about the topic, however, I started to wonder whether the eagle controversy was an example of something bigger. Were there other circumstances involving religious practices that somehow harm the environment? I did some research and quickly learned that, all around the globe, people of faith engage in religious practices that are environmentally unfriendly. Each of these situations raises some variation of the religious-freedom-versus-environmental-protection conflict that I found so fascinating in the bald eagle context. In Colombia, demand for the palm fronds used in Palm Sunday celebrations almost rendered extinct a rare and beautiful parrot. In Israel, bonfires to mark the holiday of Lag B’Omer fill the country’s air with dangerous smoke. In South Africa and Zimbabwe, members of the Shembe religion—a mixture of Christian and Zulu traditions—drape themselves in leopard pelts during spiritual dances; the demand for pelts is having a serious effect on wild leopard populations. In the United States, members of the Santeria faith sacrifice animals and splash mercury in their inner-city apartments as part of their rituals. Hindus in India throw half-burnt corpses into the Ganges River, while in Bangladesh, Hindus celebrate a Festival of Light by sacrificing tens of thousands of turtles every year. And that is just the beginning.
That’s how I came to write this book. I decided that, as I did with my first book, I would travel around the country—scratch that, the world—to investigate in depth a few select instances of religious practices that harm the environment. My goal was to understand how this conflict has manifested itself in different situations, how various societies have tried to deal with these conflicts, and what lessons we can learn from these experiences. Nobody had ever before focused comprehensively on the relationship between religious practice and the environment, and I thought that with environmental protection and religious freedom being such important and timely subjects, this would be a great time to research and write about their interaction.
So that’s what I did. For about two years, I took whatever opportunities I could to travel to some hot spots around the world and learn what I could. I went to India and Mexico, Singapore and Guatemala, Alaska and Oklahoma, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I spoke to a Taoist priest, a Mexican palm frond collector, an Inupiat whaler, and a Taiwanese animal rights activist. I interviewed government officials in several countries to see what they planned to do about the religious practices that were causing harm to the environment, and I talked to religious leaders to see what they felt about the government’s getting involved. I hiked through palm forests high in the Sierra Madres in southern Mexico, spent a day chanting Buddhist scripture at a hilltop temple outside Taipei, and stood on a beach in Mumbai while Hindu worshippers carried twenty-five-foot idols of an elephant god into the sea. I ate way more whale blubber than I had ever expected to consume.
The relationship between religion and the environment has always been an extremely complicated one. On the one hand, many believe that organized religion, particularly Christianity, has historically been unfriendly toward the environment. In his classic 1966 lecture before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” historian Lynn White Jr. surely spoke for many when he laid the blame for much of the world’s environmental problems at the feet of Christianity and its teaching that humans have dominion over nature: “Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions, not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Echoes of this attitude toward nature abound today: in the Religious Right’s skepticism of science; in an Alabama official’s recent claim that EPA’s coal regulations interfered with a “gift from God”; in the anti-environmentalist charges of Resisting the Green Dragon, a DVD series put out by a group of conservative Christians who deny the importance of climate change and decry the environmental movement as “without doubt one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”
On the other hand, religion has done a lot of good for the environment, particularly lately. For one thing, many Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism and Taoism, as well as other traditions that treat natural objects as sacred (Shintoism and Native American religions, for example) are largely environment-friendly. Second, contrary to claims that Christianity teaches humans to act in dominion over the environment, many Christian believers believe that the Bible requires human beings to act as stewards of nature. For example, former pastor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has publically cited his biblical beliefs as support for his environmental view: “We should see to it that our care for the environment enhances not only its aesthetic value but preserves the resources themselves for future generations.” Finally, over the past three decades, several organized religious groups have begun enthusiastically promoting environmental values. Acting under the umbrella of a secular organization known as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, for example, a dozen faiths from around the world have worked for many years on projects, including spreading environmental education in rural areas, promoting environmentally friendly pilgrimages, and planting trees all over Africa. In the United States, some of the loudest voices clamoring for action on climate change have come from the Christian evangelical community, many members of which have signed formal commitments to fight global warming. Indeed, the narrative of recent years when it comes to organized religion and the environment is one of groups recognizing the importance of protecting the planet and doing something about it. Pope Francis’s June 2015 encyclical on the environment should put to rest any doubt about this current trend.
And yet, on the other other hand, as this book will show, even as religion begins to embrace environmental values, we find instances throughout the world where particular religious practices happen to harm the environment. Investigating those instances, and trying to figure out what to do about them, is the aim of this book. The more general questions about whether religion has been good or bad for the environment or whether, for example, religion has influenced major swaths of the Republican Party to take anti-environmental policy positions are fascinating and important but not the topic of this book. Here I will be solely concerned with exploring situations where the religious practice of some faith community harms the environment in some concrete way.
Perhaps you’ve read somewhere that I am a liberal atheist. Aha! you say, so the aim of this book must be to point out how religion is harmful and to explain why people should throw off their superstitious beliefs in the divine and embrace secular humanism! Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s true that I’m an atheist, but I’m not one of those “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, who thinks that religion is terrible and believes that science will save the world. I’m more of a “sad atheist.” I feel the same way about God that I feel about unicorns—I think that life would be much better if they existed, and I wish I could believe that they exist, but I don’t. Despite my lack of belief, I’ve always been fascinated by religion. I studied it as a graduate student and have written about it for two decades. I believe that religious freedom is one of the most important features of our constitutional democracy, and it drives me crazy when my fellow liberals occasionally trivialize either religious belief or religious freedom. Yet, at the same time, I really, really (really!) want a clean environment, one with fresh air and clean water and unspoiled lands and all kinds of wonderful creatures running and flying and swimming happily in their pristine habitats.
I would hope that most people share my commitment to both religious freedom and a healthy environment, and that’s why I think the subject of this book is critically important. Although religion in the twenty-first century is increasingly supporting the cause of environmental protection, what happens when religious practice doesn’t? What happens when a group of sincere religious believers insists on engaging in a practice that harms the environment in some way? How should we, as a society, mediate such a troubling conflict? Do we give religious freedom a trump card and let the environment suffer, to the detriment of others who will have to live with the harm? Do we instead insist that religious believers stop engaging in time-honored practices that are central to their sense of identity as individuals and as members of their communities? Or do we do something in between? And if so, what? These are the questions that animated me as I researched the book.
As I went from country to country, from conflict to conflict, I tried to understand the competing interests at stake from the perspective of those who care about them most. I tried to learn what kinds of approaches to mediating religion versus environment practices work best in what situations and thought a lot about what role law should play, if any, in these conflicts. I learned that different approaches have advantages and disadvantages depending on the circumstances. Sometimes a heavy-handed law may be the only solution, but other times the law should be used only sparingly or not at all. As with many environmental problems, sometimes it’s possible to alleviate the difficulty through the development of new technologies or by harnessing the forces of the market; other times, no such fix will work. Almost all the time, education going both ways is the best first step, and a sense of empathy on all sides makes things go more smoothly.
Following an introductory chapter that provides a broad overview of the various ways that religious practices continue to place the environment at risk, each subsequent chapter tells the tale of one of my trips, each to a different area of the world and involving a different religious tradition, and I share the lessons I learned from observing a specific religion-versus-environment conflict up close. As you’ll see, the lessons I took from my travels are largely aimed at the government or, in some cases, at nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), rather than at religious individuals and institutions themselves. This is because I approached my research not as a member of any particular religious tradition or indeed any religious tradition at all, but rather as a lawyer and, more importantly, as a voting citizen of our secular nation. There are certainly books to be written about how Christians should practice their religion without harming the environment or how Buddhists should change some of their practices to protect our natural resources, but in my view, those books should be written by Christians and by Buddhists, and not by me. Still, though, by the end of the book, I hope that I will have shared not only a collection of strange and entertaining stories, but also a set of insights that can help people on both sides of the religion-environment divide navigate these conflicts whenever and wherever they arise.
So, did I really get to see Bernadette Atencio and her staff pull apart some dead bald and golden eagles? Was it gross? Did it smell weird? Read on, and I promise that somewhere along the line, you’ll also find out the answers to these pressing questions.