These papers explore environmental justice through the intersecting lenses of religion, community action, and alternative ecological imaginaries. Across diverse contexts—from urban food systems in Gary, Indiana to data infrastructure conflicts in Northern Virginia, Indigenous environmental philosophy in Minas Gerais, and faith-based activism in West Virginia—the panels highlight how communities resist extractive systems while cultivating more just and sustainable futures. Together, they examine shifts from charity to sovereignty in food justice movements, grassroots resistance to energy- and resource-intensive technologies, Indigenous epistemologies that reimagine human–environment relations, and the practical challenges of aligning religious ethics with socio-ecological action. By foregrounding lived practices and moral frameworks, these papers illuminate how faith traditions and community knowledge can generate transformative responses to environmental crises.
Pope Francis’s 2015 Laudato Si’ inspired commentators to wonder about the relationship between the Catholic Church and socio-ecological justice. Such queries reflected a broader growing interest in the hypothesized “greening of religions.” Intellectuals working within and beyond the Catholic Church began reflecting on the potential for socio-ecologically conscious Catholicism. Yet despite such increased concern, few studies have empirically assessed Catholicism’s socio-ecological entanglements. I aim to address this gap by examining Nazareth Farm, a Catholic intentional community located in north-central West Virginia and long committed to justice as envisioned through Catholic Social Teaching. However, since unconventional natural gas extraction began to boom, the intentional community has struggled to materially advance socio-ecological justice. This paper examines how Nazareth Farm sought, in practice, to negotiate natural gas’s growing hegemony. In so doing, it also reflects on the obstacles hampering those who imagine just futures encounter while trying to make their visions take place.
One finding of recent scholarship on urban religious communities and food insecurity is a shift from security and charitable models toward community-led food systems development. This paper examines how urban Christian churches transition from operating traditional food pantries and supporting corporate for-profit solutions to building self-determined food systems. Using a case study of FAITH CDC in Gary, Indiana—a non-profit affiliated with a historic Black Baptist church in “Steel City”—this research analyzes the move from a food security framework to one of “food sovereignty.” Drawing on preliminary fieldwork and existing literature on religion, race, and food justice, this paper explores how FAITH CDC integrates what they call “good F-words”—Faith, Farming, Finance, and the Field of science—to counteract an extractive food system. It argues that their holistic model—typified by their redefinition of “soul food”—represents a transformative strategy that prioritizes community agency over “solutions” that sustain the status quo.
This paper analyzes environmental justice campaigns in Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia as sites of counter-apocalyptic imagination. Over 300 data centers host an estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic in the suburbs of Washington, DC near Ashburn, Virginia. Interfaith organizations and faith communities have resisted the further development of such centers by simultaneously critiquing the future imaginations manifest in the material, technological, and economic processes of techno-utopians and proposing alternative futures rooted in visions of wisdom. I argue that these sites of local resistance are crucibles for counter-apocalyptic praxis. By engaging in the practice of communal imagination, these communities make space for difficult conversations that enable hard and courageous choices to enable a shared, intergenerational future.
One of the greatest ecological catastrophes in the history of modern mining came to light in Minas Gerais, in Brazil's southeastern region: the collapse of the iron ore tailings dam known as Fundão. From within this catastrophe, an indigenous philosophy of the future emerges—engaged in producing spiritual repertoires to postpone the end of the world (Krenak 2019).
In this paper, drawing on the ecological, ontological, and agential force of the cosmological kinship between the Krenak people and the Doce River, I intend to explore an epistemological confluence between Ailton Krenak’s indigenous philosophy, material post/inhuman ecologies, and methodological strategies derived from the Religion and Ecology’s field of study to investigate how the ancestral future(s) already present in the watery roots of the Krenak's experience can inspire and teach us to produce relevant knowledge on and collective interventions in response to current planetary crises.