Another early eco-Baptist was Eric Rust, Barnette’s colleague and a British transplant, who wrote Nature–Garden or Desert?. Jimmy Carter had environmental measures as GA governor and as POTUS. He created the Dept. of Energy, put solar panels on the WH (Reagan removed them on day 1) and tried to form an energy policy that would have begun our current move to green energy in 1978! Thousands of acres of wilderness were added to federal protection during Carter’s admin and his EPA was quite activist.

For decades at SBTS, Stassen taught a course that linked global hunger and global environmentalism.
I knew Jim Ball at SBTS.

Another early “Green Baptist” is my wife, Kate. Rev. Katharine E. Westmoreland-White has a B.A. in Forest Management from UT-Knoxville as well as her M.Div. from SBTS (1989) where we met. During seminary, she led the students in forcing the school to undertake more eco-friendly practices.

She is a major activist with the National Religious Partnership for the Environment http://www.nrpe.org and has worked on eco-legislation in KY with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Our church now has solar panels and most of our members pay a premium to Louisville Gas & Electric to get our electricity through green energy sources. (Kate is only one voice here. We also have an engineer, Dave Brown-Kinloch, who has taken an abandoned hydro-electric dam and refurbished it–and is a leader to wean KY from big coal.)

Kate has led our church to be involved with Kentucky Interfaith Power & Light–a green energy group and the “I Love Mountains” campaign against coal-mining by mountaintop removal. On the latter issue, she has both protested outside and testified before the state legislature. Her major partner in this work has been Rev. Donna Trabue, another member of our congregation, who works for Volunteers of America. (I find it interesting that Donna works for a homeless shelter and Kate works with the Catholic charity St. Vincent de Paul Society to provide low-cost housing for people who would otherwise become homeless. The concern for people and the environment are linked.)

In a dissertation, I’m going to obviously take a closer look at Campolo and especially Barnette. Jim Ball of the Environmental Evangelical Network, long-time member at the Alliance-affiliated Riverside in DC and Baptist minister with a SBTS degree – deserves to be examined too. I’m very interested in identifying the early Baptist environmentalists in addition to Barnette. You know, I’m sure there were a number of grassroots environmental activists who were faithful Baptists – I just don’t know their names yet.

My research this past semester focused on the Black Church and the Environmental Justice Movement. That paper was not focused on Baptists but on the African-American Christian leaders who were involved in protesting toxic waste dumping during the 80s and 90s. The National Council of Churches and the United Church of Christ were big players during this period but the EJM was primarily grassroots.

In American Baptist circles, Tony Campolo took a major lead in the 1980s.