Category Archives: Ecology, religion, justice

Placelessness

Second in a series of commentaries on the essays in the book Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, edited by Peggy F. Bartlett (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

In her essay in Urban Place, titled “Reconnecting with Place: Faculty and the Piedmont Project at Emory University,” Peggy Bartlett begins by noting that academia is dominated by an ethic that “values a cosmopolitan placelessness.” Professors and academics are supposed to be ready to move to another university at a moment’s notice:

Such a commitment to placelessness responds to the mobility of academic positions and the nomadic life that many experience. It also reflects the deep familiarity that some faculty have with cities and places far from where they teach, an expertise that may be part of why they were hired in the first place.

Bartlett developed a curriculum development project at Emory University to help faculty reconnect with place, and to create course, or modules within existing courses, that were place-based. The response, she says was extraordinarily positive. Faculty liked being connected with the place they lived in. And of course, the hope is that they will train their students to become more aware of place — and thus more open to enviornmental stewardship.

I can’t help but note that Unitarian Universalist ministers are trained in placelessness. When I began training for the ministry, I was told to be ready to relocate anywhere in North America. It has proved true: I have had to relocate a number of times because of my career; a friend and fellow minister who wishes to remain in one place, on the other hand, has been struggling to put together a career. And I feel the placelessness of Unitarian Universalist ministers may well inhibit a rooted, place-based religion which can help foster further environmental stewardship.

Soemthing to think about as we strive towards an ecological theology….

Speaking of placelessness, Carol and I are off to Washington, D.C. until Monday. I probably won’t be able to post again until then — see you in three days!

Sublime nature in cities

First in a series of commentaries on the essays in the book Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, edited by Peggy F. Bartlett (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

In his essay “On the Sublime in Nature in Cities,” Robert Rotenberg begins by asserting that city dwellers in the United States lack “a meaningful language to talk about [their] connection to landscape.” It’s almost as if many urban dwellers don’t even think of themselves as living in a landscape at all.

Rotenberg is an urban anthropologist who has been studying urban gardeners. He has been studying urban gardening in Chicago, and at the same time has research partners in Vienna, Austria. He found that American urban gardeners do not understand their gardens to be a part of the urban landscape:

Urban gardening in Chicago exists on a continuum between the amateur and the agriculturalist. Amateurs include home gardeners who plant small beds for aesthetic enjoyment… Their design rules and landscape tastes derive from popular media such as Martha Stewart’s magazines and Home and Garden TV, on the one hand, and the more serious magazines, such as Organic Living, Organic Gardening, and Horticulture Monthly.… The urban agriculture end of the continuum is characterized by for-profit and nonprofit community gardening…. The nonprofit version aims to build community and… is characterized by such ideologies as sustainability through intensive soil-building practices [etc.]. The for-profit organizations supply locally-grown, high-quality produce for restaurants and food pantries. [Emphasis added.]

By contrast, the Viennese urban gardeners make direct connections between their gardens and the greater urban landscape:

In Vienna, my partners connected their home gardens to public gardens, and through public gardens to several different discourses, including the relationship between activity and health, and between the individual and the community.

Rotenberg believes that here in America, the meaning of “nature” has become limited to wilderness. If an American wants to get out into nature, he or she will get in a car and drive away from urban areas. Because of this, says Rotenberg, when we talk about nature in cities, we are likely to talk about “concerns of sanitation, civil order, and governmentality.”

Case in point: here in New Bedford, there’s a local group called “Friends of Buttonwood Park,” a citizen’s group that wants to support beautiful Buttonwood Park, which was designed by Frederick Olmstead. But the Friends have faced stiff resistance from the city government when they have tried to plant more trees in Buttonwood Park. Even though the new trees would be consistent with Olmstead’s vision for the park, the city government does not want any new trees because that just means more leaves to clean up in the fall. Thus, the discourse immediately turns towards sanitation, civil order, and governmentality.

Rotenberg goes further. Here in America, he claims that we have gotten to the point where we understand the sublime only in the context of wilderness. The sublime is an experience of nature which can overwhelm us, terrify us. But we tend to ignore sublime nature that exists in cities. Rotenberg gives two examples of sublime nature in cities: wild animals and extreme weather. Here in New Bedford, we have seals in the harbor, which stay at a distance in the water and seem kind of cute and cuddly rather than sublime. But we also have peregrine falcons; in fact, a peregrine made the front page of the New Bedford Standard-Times a week ago Thursday. Pergrines have no qualms about sitting outside office windows and ripping apart a bloody pigeon to eat it; watching any large raptor eat can be terrifying enough to be sublime. As for extreme weather, any community on the New England coast experiences weather extremes. I happened to go into a supermarket the night before the blizzard hit on February 12. You could almost smell the fear as people stood in long lines at the checkout counters; I’d argue they were anticipating a sublime natural experience.

Rotenberg points out that by denying the sublime in nature that already exists in our cities, we are “debilitated from experiencing [nature] in its fullness,” and, worse yet, we “deflect attention from the nature that already exists in the city.” He ends his essay by saying:

To invigorate urban life with a more direct experience of nature means to embrace the sensibility of the sublime. The embrace of the sublime has already begun to occur in the reclaiming of spiritual and nonrational experience that is often associated with postmodern social movements. It may be merely a matter of time before our sense of the desirability of nature in the city has more to do with trembling fear than quiet beauty.

So what’s the role of liberal religion in reclaiming the sublimity of nature in our cities? One big stumbling block for my own faith community is our over-insistence on the primacy of reason — which by definition means denying the sublime. Unitarian Universalists are still stuck in the extreme rationality that dominated modernism in the past century. Yet if we look back at some of our spiritual forebears, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, we would find that they made room for both rationality and the sublime. We will have to move beyond Thoreau and Emerson, however: they had the unfortunate tendency of only seeing the sublime in wilderness and ignoring the sublime in the city. Yet their embrace of nonrationality and their acceptance of the sublime in daily life could serve us well, as we try to grow into a postmodern religious movement.

Beyond evolution

The latest issue of the print magazine UUWorld carries an article on Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow. Link You might want to read the article first, before reading my commentary on it.

Dowd and Barlow are Unitarian Universalists and itinerant preachers who preach the gospel of (drumroll please) evolution. Taking their inspiration from Brian Swimme’s “Great Story” of evolution from the beginnings of the cosmos through the evolution of life on our planet and culminating in human beings, Dowd and Barlow travel from place to place telling this “Great Story,” and telling people that religion can be founded on the story of evolution.

Not necessarily a bad start at theology, but the UUWorld article, and other things I’ve read about Dowd and Barlow, seem to indicate a number of serious problems with their thoughts. I’ll briefly point out some of the problems that come up in the UUWorld magazine, recognizing that I haven’t heard Dowd and Barlow directly, and recognizing that I’m filtering what I know about them through my own early attempts at ecological ethics.

1. Problems with meta-narratives

I’m always distrustful of grand, sweeping religious stories that claim to explain everything. Using the language of post-modernism, these grand, sweeping stories can be called “meta-narratives.” One thing meta-narratives seem to do is to blur important differences in order to further the agenda of the meta-narrative. Unfortunately, I think Dowd and Barlow are guilty of this. Here’s a quote from the UUWorld article:

Like Unitarian Universalists, the Great Story movement embraces both theists and atheists. Dowd has coined the term “creatheist,” to describe both religious orientations within the movement. He pronounces the word creatheist to refer to himself, a theist who “knows that the whole of reality is creative and that humans are an expression of this divine process.” And he calls Barlow a “creatheist — an atheist who knows the same thing.”

Back in 1974, in an article titled “Theism and Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones pointed out that most liberal theists were a lot closer to humanists (or call them atheists if you will), than they were to most conservative theists. Jones said that the liberal theists could be called “humanocentric theists,” that is, while they believed in God they also felt human beings had the freedom and autonomy to make serious moral choices; life was not all about “God’s will” being done. However, while Jones pointed out that humanocentric theists and (humanocentric) religious humanists shared many characteristics, he also identified serious differences between them, including:

At the bottom of the humanist world view hovers the opinion that ultimate reality may not be intrinsically benevolent or supportive of human welfare. Recognizing that God’s benevolence is not self-evident and that every alleged instance of divine agape can also be interpreted as divine malice for humanity (cf. Camus’s inverted interpretation of Golgotha in The Rebel), humanism permits but does not dictate a human response of rebellion as soteriologically authentic.

It sure sounds to me as if Dowd and Barlow think that ultimate reality is on the benevolent end of the spectrum, which means their meta-narrative glosses over at least one crucial theological difference. Dowd and Barlow could learn from Jones, who does a far better job of reconciling humanists and theists while respecting their real differences. Dowd and Barlow could also benefit Jones’s ability to link theology to social justice and ethics.

2. Problems with ethics

If we look at Dowd and Barlow from the point of view of environmental ethics, another interesting problematic emerges. Patrick Curry, in his new book Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass., Polity Press, 2006), makes the case for the existence of at least three strains of ecological ethics:

  1. a “light green” ethics which is human-centered
  2. a “mid-green” ethics where “value is not restricted to humans but does not extend all the way to ecosystems”
  3. a “dark green or deep (ecocentric)” ethics which extends ethics to holistic entities, i.e., entire eco-systems.

By Curry’s standards, Dowd and Barlow’s “Great Story” seems to privelege human beings enough so that it would be considered “mid-green” or even “light green.” From my own dark-green point of view, Curry helps me understand why I have some discomfort with Dowd and Barlow: their theology seems unlikely to satisfy me. More to the point, I find that there is an existing ecological theology within Unitarian Universalism, open to the insights of science (as any ecological theology must be), that is in fact “dark green.”

In his discussion of ecocentric spirituality, Curry notes:

The understanding of the sacred that can make a positive and effective contribution to ecocentric ethics, then, is a valuing of Earth which is:

  • pluralist (while allowing commonalities, with other people in other places also valuing nature in other ways, to emerge):
  • local (while allowing connections with those others elsewhere);…

(I need hardly to point out that Dowd and Barlow’s “Great Story” is problematic when judged against these two criteria.) Curry identifies several current “deep green” schools of ethics which would tie in nicely with an ecocentric spirituality, including ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism is already widespread within Unitarian Universalism, already linked with spirituality and religion, and already deeply linked to our other historic justice concerns. I don’t see that Dowd and Barlow make a strong enough case for adopting their “Great Story” theology over ecofeminism; nor do I find that their theology has as much to offer in the realm of ethics as does ecofeminism.

3. Problems with their religious education proposals

One of Dowd and Barlow’s claims is that they are coming along and linking science to religious education. According to the article in UUWorld:

If children can learn at church that they descend from the stars and that their ancestors once swam in the sea, Barlow says, perhaps they’ll see there’s no fundametnal contradiction between having a religious understanding of the world — one that stands in awe of creation and finds meaning and value in existence — and embracing the profound offerings of science.

An admirable goal. It happens to be a goal that Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist religious educators have been following for at least the past six decades.

A quick review of historic Unitarian Universalist curriculum would have showed Dowd and Barlow that the New Beacon Series of religious education curriculum, overseen by Sophia Fahs, included many titles that incorporated science into religious education programs as early as the 1940’s (Fahs herself was incorporating science into religious education in her own non-denominational Sunday school as early as the 1920’s). In the 1960’s, there was the Beacon Science Series. You could argue that the most influential curriculum in our denomination’s history, About Your Sexuality, was deeply grounded in science. And still in print today is Peg Gooding’s Stepping Stone Year, with a great unit on science and cosmology. So really, Dowd and Barlow offer nothing new to Unitarian Universalists.

There’s a deeper problem here, though. In my own personal experience, I had lots of science in my Unitarian Universalist religious education. I have fond, albeit vague, memories of the Beacon Science Series. When I got into my teens, I heard plenty of sermons on the compatibility of science and religion. However, speaking from my own experience as a religious educator for over a decade, and as someone who was raised a Unitarian Universalist, I would have to say that grounding religious education in science is not sufficient. Science is based on lab work, reproducible results, close observation, etc. — if you want to set up labs in your Sunday school space, go right ahead. But science does not answer many of the questions and concerns children have, like: “Who was Jesus, anyway?”, “I felt sad when my pet died,” or “Why is there hatred in the world?” As the great Quaker theologian Rufus Jones once wrote,

“The poet may know of flowers which ‘can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,’ but science discovers no such flowers in its field. Its flowers are amazingly complex, but they call for no handkerchief. Rufus Jones, Spiritual Reformers, p. xvii

Good religious education calls for a handkerchief.

Nor do I feel that Brian Swimme’s “Great Story” of creation provides very much substance for religious education. Someone once suggested I use it in a religious education program, and so I looked it over carefully, but it just didn’t stand up to existing Unitarian Unviersalist religious education materials.

Summary

Through their work, Dowd and Barlow are getting many people in Unitarian Universalism excited about doing some new theology. For that, they should be commended. I hope they will take into account existing theologies (and existing religious education materials) that mesh quite well with science, and indeed cover a far broader range of science than they do; they will be able to make their ideas go further that way. I hope, too, they move beyond their limited theological idea of incorporating the insights of science into religion, because that’s pretty old hat to Unitarian Universalists, and into a wider notion of an ecological theology.

They’ve made an acceptable start — now it’s time for Dowd and Barlow to do the hard work to crank it up to the next level.

Candlelight vigil at Puzzles Bar in New Bedford

In the wake of last night’s anti-gay hate crime in New Bedford, the Marriage Equality Coalition of the SouthCoast organized a candlelight vigil at Puzzles bar, the site of the hate crime at 426 N. Front St. I drove over with Ann Fox, minister at the Fairhaven Unitarian Universalist church, and Lisa Eliot, the director of religious education at the Fairhaven church.

“What street number is the bar again?” asked Ann, who was driving. Just then Lisa pointed out the flashing blue lights: the police had blocked off N. Front St. for the vigil. We found a parking place within sight of one of the police cars, and walked a block to the bar.

Several people already had lit candles. I brought over 100 candles left over from our church’s Christmas Eve candlelight service, and I began passing them out to anyone who wanted one. One or two gay couples felt safe enough to quietly hold hands. I saw the core members of NBPI, several ministers, and several Unitarian Universalists. The crowd kept growing, until I estimate over 200 people were present.

Right at 7:00, Andy Pollack from the Marriage Equality Coalition welcomed everyone, explaining that the Coalition organized the vigil because at the moment, they are essentially the only gay/lesbian political organization on the South Coast. David Lima, interim executive minister of the Inter-Church Council, gave the invocation. Then Andy introduced the bartender of Puzzles who was there at the time of the attack.

The bartender told essentially the same story you can read in the New Bedford Standard-Times Web coverage of the incident. He said what he witnessed was far worse than any horror movie, any gory slasher movie, that he had ever seen.

According to the bartender, the attacker came into the bar and showed an I.D. that said he was 23, though it now appears that was a false I.D. The attack started after the attacker had been in the bar long enough to have a couple of drink. The attacker struck his first victim from behind with a machete, and almost immediately the attacker was jumped on by the bartender and the other patrons in the bar. The attacker kept lashing out with the machete and a small hatchet that he carried; he was overcome by the others, disarmed, but then reached down and pulled out a 9 mm handgun, shot upwards at the bartender and another man who were on top of him. Everyone backed away, the attacker stood up, and then shot the face of the first man he had hit, and shot into the head of another man whom he had knocked down. The third shooting victim was a mentally challenged man in his early twenties who emerged from the restrooms at just that moment accompanied by his mother; the attacker shot him in the abdomen.

The bartender managed to get everyone out of the building, and went back in. As he went back in, the attacker grabbed him, put the handgun to the bartender’s head, and pulled the trigger; but the gun was out of ammunition. “That gun ran out of ammunition so I could be here tonight,” said the bartender, who cried intermittently as he told this story to us, “so I could be here tonight to tell you this story. He could not silence my voice! [cried of “yes” and “amen” from the crowd] We must not be silenced!” He urged us all to stand up and speak out against all hate crimes directed at gay and lesbian people.

Barney Frank was unable to be present, but he did send a statement which was read by one of New Bedford’s city councillors. Tony Cabral, state representative, spoke compelling about the need to be tolerant of all persons no matter what their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Bev Baccelli of the Marriage Equality Coalition spoke next, pointing out that while it is no longer OK to use words like “kike” or “nigger,” it is still considered socially acceptable to say “fag” or “dyke,” and this must change. Bev Baccelli also said that her office was getting calls all afternoon from news outlets across the country, and they all asked what kind of city New Bedford is; to which she replied, “New Bedford is just like any other city in this country. A gay man or a lesbian woman is harassed each an every day in some city somewhere in this country. New Bedford is just like your city.”

Mayor Scott Lang arrived a little late, so he wound up speaking last. He said the police and the city will not stop until the attacker is brought to justice. But, he added, we will have to do more than take care of the legal end of things. The city must come together and put an end to hatred of all kinds. Lang was very serious, and very compelling. Ann Fox gave a very short closing prayer, and led the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome.”

I saw maybe seven or eight reporters scribbling in notebooks, and there were at least three video cameras; I know the Associated Press picked up this story, so watch national news media for coverage of this vigil. Also, I heard a rumor that the primary suspect, an 18 year old New Bedford man, has been apprehended, but this could not be confirmed — follow news media for more on that aspect of the story, too.

Home Depot in New Bedford

Best commentary yet on Home Depot’s plans for the Fairhaven Mills site in New Bedford is a letter to the Standard-Times by architect Ricardo Romão Santos. After pointing out that Home Depot has made architectural concessions in other communities, he concludes by saying:

Those of us who see a greater potential in the Fairhaven Mills site have been wondering how to engage Home Depot officials in a dialogue that would at least result in saving the historic Fairhaven Mills structures. But they simply won’t do it. It would be fair to say that Home Depot is not in the least concerned with our community. If New Bedford’s relationship with Home Depot is starting on this wrong footing, I wonder how it will end.

Obviously, Home Depot sees New Bedford as a poor, disempowered community who will roll over and play dead, while they do what they want….

Toxic

According to a Washington Post article, Toxic Waters Provide ‘a Snapshot of Evolution,’ from Monday, January 23, New Bedford harbor is now swarming with Killifish. This is remarkable because New Bedford Harbor, designated as a Superfund site, is so polluted by PCBs that almost nothing can live there:

The waters of New Bedford Harbor, Mass., sparkle on sunny days. But beneath the bay’s gleaming surface lies one of the most toxic environments in the nation.

“You’d think nothing, absolutely nothing, would be able to live in New Bedford Harbor,” says Jim Kendall, a fisherman and president of New Bedford Seafood Consulting. “But you’d be dead wrong. Something does live there, and in huge numbers.”

Killifish, three-inch-long saltwater fish common along the Atlantic coast, thrive in these polluted waters…. “Sometimes they’re so thick in the harbor, you could just about walk across on them,” Kendall says….

No one is quite sure how the killifish have managed to adapt to the toxic environment. There are representatives of other species — the article mentions quahogs — living in the harbor, but the killifish are there in great numbers. Why so many killifish?

“That’s the big question,” said toxicologist Mark E. Hahn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. “It’s what can happen when animals are exposed over generations to high levels of contaminants.” The result goes one way or the other, he said. “The population dies out or it adapts through genetic changes to extreme pollution levels.”

In one way, this is a hopeful story: even with all the toxic sludge we’re pumping into the environment, some organisms seem to be able to adapt. In another way, this is a very worrisome story: the killifish are filled with PCBs, they are being eaten by other animals, and so the PCBs have a new entry point into the wider food chain. I’ve seen lots of Mergansers on the harbor this winter; Mergansers eat fish; the Mergansers are likely getting pumped full of PCBs.

Green Revelation

Carol, being a free-lance writer specializing in ecological pollution prevention issues, is always bringing home the latest environmental publications. Her latest find is Plenty, a glossy magazine with the motto “It’s easy being green.” I opened it to find an article by Liz Galst titled, “Saving Grace: How Evangelical Christians Are Energizing the Environmental Movement.” Galst opens the article like this:

Like the Bible-thumper that he is, the Reverend Rich Cizik [pronounced “size-ick”], tall, lanky, slightly stoop-shouldered, stood in the September heat of midtown Manhattan bellowing into a microphone. His subject was the Book of Revelation, and he was hoping to reach the ears not only of his audience but also of the unconverted who happened to wander by.

“In Revelation,” he thundered against the wind, against an incredible din, “in Revelation we’re told that God — hear this,” he paused, tilting his heavy head forward. “God will destroy those who destroy the environment.”

Preach it, Brother Cizik. The article continues:

“What an amazing statement about the world that God created and cares about!” Cizik continued. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Though he was sweating in a pin-striped suit, Cizik is not your average street preacher. In fact, he has friends on Capitol Hill, friends in the White House…. Cizik is the public-policy voice of the National Association of Evangelicals [the evangelical version of the National Council of Churches]….

And in case you’re wondering whether he’s one of those progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis, author of the New York Times 2005 bestseller God Is Politics, forget about it. Cizik opposes abortion, opposes marriage for same-sex couples, opposes stem-cell research. Cizik is the deepest Republican red.

And yet, he continued on that hot September afternoon, “I have told people, ‘Look, you’ve got to care about this because when you die, God is not going to ask you about how he created the earth’ ” — a reference to the recent public debate on so-called intelligent design — “He’s going to ask you, ‘What did you do with the earth I created?’ “

And may I remind my readers that while these evangelicals are going green, most religious liberals are keeping their environmentalism separate from their religion? Well, wake up and smell the (fair-trade organically-grown) coffee! I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Unitarian Universalists, it’s time for us to go public with our own captivating ecological theology based on the Bible, Emerson, Thoreau, William Carlos Williams, and Sharon Welch. It’s time to quit sniping at each other, quit sitting around and grousing about the sorry state of Unitarian Universalism, and start doing public theology.

The “Rapture”? It’s all about New Urbanism

If you’re like me, at some point in your working life you’ve wound up working beside people who were sure the “rapture” was going to come, where God swept good human beings up into heaven, and left the rest of us (including heretics like you and me) to deal with the calamitous “end days.” I’ve had some great conversations about the “rapture” during coffee break. (My older sister, Jean, has some great stories of rapture-talk in her new book, Rose City: A Memoir of Work.)

And we know the “rapture” is true because it’s in the Bible, in the book of Revelation. Except it’s not. Nowhere in the Bible is there any mention of some “rapture” where human beings get swept up into heaven. Instead, God and the heavenly city of Jerusalem come down here to earth, as is told in chapter 21:

2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

This new Jerusalem sounds like the kind of urban paradise New Urbanism talks about, complete with urban agriculture and no cars and lack of crime and even clean power generation:

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4 they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Barbara Rossing, in her eco-theology essay “Alas for the Earth! Lament and Resistance in Revelation 12,” in The Earth Story in the New Testament, points out that most fundamentalists get the “rapture” backwards:

…the issue is to understand how Revelation’s ecological lament takes shape in our own global situation. Escapist scenarios of a “rapture” can only serve to deflect attention away from earth and away from [Revelations]’s critique of imperialism. There is no rapture of people up to heaven in Revelation. If anything, it is God who is “raptured” down to Earth to dwell with people in a wondrous urban paradise (Rev. 21.3; 22.3). The plot of Revelation ends on Earth, not heaven, with the throne of God… located in the center of the city (Rev 22.3) that has come down to earth. [p. 191]

So next time your fundamentalist co-worker asks you if you’re ready for the “rapture,” you can tell them that yes, you are indeed a supporter of New Urbanism.

A later post about a green evangelical Christian

Less than moral

Carol’s car wouldn’t start, which meant she had to stay up in Cambridge a couple of extra nights. She was supposed to go to a meeting of New Bedford Public Interest, but since she couldn’t, she sent me instead.

A little background for those of you who live outside New Bedford: the Fairhaven Mill building at the head of New Bedford harbor has been in limbo for many years. The first floor houses an antique market, there are a few other businesses, but mostly the building is empty. Given its location right on the Acushnet River with beautiful views of the harbor and the city, and given the fact that it sits right next to an interchange on Interstate 195, the site is ripe for creative development.

What I learned at the NBPI meeting is that Home Depot is trying to push a deal through the city quickly, a deal that will allow them to erect a big-box retail store on the mill site. Of course, their business plan does not allow for such contingencies as utilizing a historic brick mill building that happens to stand in a very visible spot, so they will bulldoze the building. According to Home Depot, decisions have to be made quickly, there is no time for long studies or discussions, the city council has to vote now. The New Bedford city council voted to bulldoze the building.

To be fair to the city council, Home Depot holds out the prospect of 400 jobs coming from this development, which means a lot in a city like New Bedford. But the city councilors forgot to ask if that meant 400 net new jobs for the city; or if, as was the case when Home Depot built a store on Cape Cod, there will in fact be a net job loss for the region.

You know the rest of the story: most of the people in the surrounding neighborhood are not well off, many are people of color, and the nieghborhood looks like it’s unlikely to cause any trouble to Home Depot. So yes, this is a classic ecojustice issue of putting less desirable development in poorer communities.

I hate to see an outside corporation bulldoze a historic building, destroying some of New Bedford’s sense of place, simply because their business plan is inflexible. As a minister, it’s my job to point out when a person or group of people is being less than moral and ethical. Home Depot could be ethical and moral corporate citizens and figure out a way to use the historic mill building, and grace a poorer neighborhood with a more attractive development. This could be a win-win situation — but so far Home Depot refuses to bend. Personally, I think they should be ashamed of themselves.

The NBPI Web site has links to New Bedford Standard-Times coverage of the situation. Read the stories, do some investigating on your own, and tell me what you think.