Insights

A Historic Gathering Pacific Small Island Developing States, or PSIDS, are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Every tenth of a degree of warming means another community forced to relocate, another family cemetery buried under rising seas, another garden inundated by saltwater. For Pacific communities, the 1.5°C warming goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement is not an abstraction—it is existential.  This urgency formed the backdrop for September’s “Pre-COP31”

On September 19, a group of concerned citizens from New York state and beyond gathered at Arctic Lake in Oquaga Creek State Park in upstate New York to begin a two-week walk in protection of water. A core group of walkers, joined by scores of supporters who walked for one or more days at a time, walked, sang and prayed for 108 miles along the route of the proposed Constitution

Before coming to Union Theological Seminary, I worked at Sterling College in Vermont, where environmental protection, outdoor skills, expeditions and farming were part of how I learned to understand the world. When I came to Union, I brought that background into conversation with my growing interest in eco-chaplaincy. What might it mean and look like to care for the Earth as a chaplain? Would it mean caring for environmental activists