04/09/2025
Reflections for Consideration
by the St. Andrew Green Team
As persons of faith, when it comes to our health, our community, and the environment, we are driven by our values as well as by our Christian beliefs, rooted in scripture. While we gather at church to worship, we also gather to express, dedicate, and put to action what God requires us to do as stewards of creation. As an Earth Care congregation, this includes advocating for environmental policies, laws, and actions, and further to that end, standing against harmful policies and laws.
We remember the power of Martin Luther King’s call to “the fierce urgency of NOW;” of Greta Thunberg’s reminder that “once we start to act, hope is everywhere;” of Bill McKibben’s urging to stop acting as individuals and join with others to protect creation.
Our religion and our faith-based community can and should be primary drivers for how we recognize God’s role as creator, our own role as responsible stewards of the Earth, and our care for the disenfranchised and low-income members of our community.
To those ends, the St. Andrew Green Team wishes to do more than remind us of how to buy green products and recycle wisely in our daily lives. We invite your stated outspoken resistance in all the ways available to you through the organizations and your political representatives who are speaking to the administration’s stated intentions to repeal our country’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from cars and factories, protections for wetlands and our national parks, and the regulations to control the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreements, reopening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and pausing new offshore-wind development and the Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding are just some of the policies which will undo many years of progress.
Some of the following proposals are reflected in The Environmental Protection Agency’s website (epa.gov) and others from press releases and comments from EPA Administrator Lee Zelden regarding the EPA’s plans to:
- Freeze the funding of environmental groups and pursue criminal prosecution.
- Eliminate limits on soot from smokestacks linked to respiratory problems in humans.
- Overturn restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin.
- Block state labels that warn consumers of pesticide risks.
- Ease safety screenings for potentially toxic chemicals.
- Roll back regulations to protect workers from chemical disasters.
- Close all the EPA environmental justice offices, which protect poor and minority communities from pollution.
- Close the EPA’s research office, which tracks fossil fuel pollution and researches its health impacts.
There are other actions that the EPA has already taken to harm public health with more envisioned for the weeks and months ahead. You have many options for a personal response to these actions: the most important is our vote, but our advocacy is also essential as we consider whether to attend community protests, contact our elected officials, speak out in the media, and join the groups that are resisting the efforts to destroy the regulations and good efforts that have put public support and protection for the environment and for all of us in place.
We look forward to working together with you as a Green Team and an Earth Care Congregation doing our part in the world.
Sources:
EPA Press Office, EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History, 3-12-2025.
Winston’s Environmental Law Update, EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, Announces Five Pillars to Guide the EPA’s Work, 2-25-2025.
Earth Justice, New EPA Chief Launches 31 Point Attack on Our Health and Environment, 3-13-2025.
Emily Atkin quoted in Peter Brouwer Newsletter, March 18, 2025.
Mark Gongloff and Elaine He, Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days: A Timeline, Bloomberg Opinion 3-25-2025.
