Hallelujah for fertilizer faith

DON’T LET THE RESIDENTIAL SIDE STREETS AND perfect lawns of Pacific Palisades fool you. There’s a road to Damascus running right through the place.

On the map in your glove box, it’s labeled Bienveneda Avenue. It was along this road, one morning in 1990, that the Rev. Peter G. Kreitler was ferrying his daughter to St. Matthew’s Parish School. Kreitler had been the priest at St. Matthew’s for 14 years. As they sputtered along in his Datsun B210, he bemoaned the defeat of two environmental measures on the state ballot.

“Well,” his daughter asked, “what are you going to do about it?”

She was 12 then and expected a real answer. So Kreitler came up with one. He gave up his congregation and devoted himself to a greener shade of Episcopalianism. This wasn’t quite a change of faith, like St. Paul’s along the road in the Bible, but it was a life-changing move all the same.

Now Kreitler, 61, directs an environmental education organization called Earth Service, works on the launch of an organic fertilizer company and cohosts “Earthtalk Today,” which airs three Saturdays a month on the city of Los Angeles public-access channel (35 on most dials). He also carries the title of minister for the environment for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

Our stewardship of the Earth, he told me, “is the most important theological issue of our time.”

That makes him one of many eco-religious leaders who stand out especially clearly in April, when Earth Day arrives on the heels of Easter and many a sermon turns to the state of the planet.

Look at the Evangelical Environmental Network, founded in 1993 on the belief that many “environmental problems are fundamentally spiritual problems.” Since 2002 the network has been making worldwide headlines with its “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. Meanwhile, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, also founded in 1993, has enlisted 29 national Jewish organizations as affiliates. Since 1995, a Jewish group known as the Redwood Rabbis has been protesting Pacific Lumber’s logging practices in Northern California.

But just the idea of heaven-and-earth alliances gives plenty of others the willies. Take, for instance, Michael Crichton, who is trained as a physician and famed as writer of “Jurassic Park,” “The Andromeda Strain” and other books and screenplays. Crichton told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September that environmentalism has become “one of the most powerful religions in the Western world.” And that, he continued, is bad.

Crichton argued that many environmental leaders exaggerate problems and manufacture issues, from overstating population growth to unfairly blaming bird deaths on DDT to denouncing secondhand smoke. “It seems facts aren’t necessary,” he said, “because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.”

Crichton isn’t the only one singing that refrain. Check Rush Limbaugh’s website transcripts and you’ll find that on Feb. 5, he dismissed the concept of global warming as a hoax “hatched by a bunch of big-government liberals.... The environment has become their religion. Who said this first, my friends? It was I.”

Limbaugh’s bragging aside, these guys have a point. Anybody with ears hears eco-leaders hollering about theoretical crises while clamming up about real problems solved. And anyone with eyes sees facts flung frivolously by debaters on all sides; like scripture, science serves conflicting arguments. But encyclopedias are published for moments like this.

My Britannica says global population has quintupled over the last 200 years, with growth slowing since the 1960s. It also says DDT kills birds and secondhand smoke is a health hazard. It does not profess to understand the cause of global climate change but says, “[I]t appears that a real global warming of 0.4° C has occurred in the 20th century and that it accelerated in the 1980s after a three-decade hesitation.”

Meanwhile, others seem more intrigued than worried, perhaps even relieved, by a spiritual-environmental convergence. In a wise essay in the July 2003 Harper’s magazine, an unalarmed Jack Hitt advanced environmentalism “not merely as a set of nice feelings about land and animals but as a rival to the power religion has held in people’s lives.”

In many ways the instigator of provocative modern thinking about faith and ecology is a 1967 essay by UCLA historian Lynn White Jr. Writing in Science magazine, White traced mankind’s fouled nest to Christian “arrogance toward nature.”

The problem, as White saw it, was the idea that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man,” a view that persisted in the church despite the efforts of such rebels as St. Francis, who saw us as one species among many.

“Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious,” White concluded, “the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.”

Are we seeing what White imagined?

It’s hard to imagine a thornier job than holding together a faith-based environment coalition. Plenty of secular eco-crusaders wince at the thought of hymn-singing at their forest protests, never mind squaring their protection-of-all-creatures stance with the debate over human reproductive freedom. And on the clergy side, you don’t meet too many preachers eager to quote Lynn White Jr. out loud, even though some see the world in a similar way. (Back in Pacific Palisades, Kreitler recently wrote in his weblog that “the human has no loftier place than the toucan or the bat.”)

But there may be more here. I’m guessing this conversation and its spiritual overtones mark a new chapter in our ongoing national introspection and may be a turning point.

Church, state and Birkenstocks, together at last: If that thought isn’t enough to get you excited, or nervous, or both, you’ve got no business living in a democracy.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.