Caring for creation: Utah churches aim to lessen their impact on the Earth

In England, it is against the law to disturb the roosting place of bats, even if they are living in the eaves of your church. Bats are endangered.

Of course, if your congregation is one of the more than 6,000 that have joined the nation's Wildlife Trust "Living Churchyards," you are proud when the bats choose your belfry. You are happy about all the mammals, insects, birds and wild grasses that flourish around your house of worship.

Nettles, too. You're glad for the nettles growing around the graves.

And lichen. English churchgoers seem proud of the lichen on walls and headstones. In British newspapers they talk reverently about how slowly lichen grows and how colorful it is. They would no more spray herbicide around their house of worship, these living churchyard folks, than they would dream of calling an exterminator for the bats.

In photos, the long-grass churchyards are lovely, like something out of Thomas Hardy. In practice, however, caring for God's green Earth is not without complications.

Snakes have been spotted in the tall weeds of the living churchyards — mostly grass snakes but occasionally an adder. Sometimes a human is found sleeping under the hedgerows. Tourists come searching for the graves of their ancestors, and a few have left angry notes about the upkeep, not realizing the grass is unmowed on purpose.

Then, too, the bat guano tends to accumulate, and the congregation may have a hard time finding someone to clean it up. So, yes, congregations have reached the point that they complain to the trust. Then the trust sends out a crew to relocate the bats.

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Here in Utah, believers have their own methods of honoring God's creation. They work hard to save the Earth, some of them, even when it is complicated. Increasingly, they are talking to each other about what God wants and about what is possible. They are willing to listen when people of other faiths — or of no faith at all — seek to influence their decisions.

Elaine Emmi, a Quaker and head of Utah's Interfaith Roundtable, says global warming is mobilizing a religious response across the nation. She says believers have always cared about creation and some have even hired environmental lobbyists — but now they are coming together around one very specific question: "What can we do to reduce our carbon footprint?"

This fall, Emmi says, the Interfaith Roundtable will announce a new venture, Utah Interfaith Power and Light. The plan is to encourage every Utahn to make a pledge to lower energy use.

Their first event will include giving away compact fluorescent light bulbs. "If everyone in the state used them, we might not need to build new power plants," she says.

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