Cheri Whitehead knows about environmental justice.
She grew up as one of the many kids in West Oakland with asthma, in a neighborhood where diesel trucks spewed pollution as they paraded down her street to access the port. “You don’t realize how much dirt and grunge from the trucks just comes in,” she said.
But when neighborhood adults rallied for the trucks to change their route, even slightly, she was awed by the cleaner air and how she could breathe better.
Now Whitehead talks about composting at the Berkeley church, where she’s a member. She helps plant the garden. Her Christian faith charges her with taking care of the natural world around her.
But don’t call her an environmentalist. “I consider myself a steward, and I stay in that lane,” Whitehead said.
Whitehead represents a growing number of congregants in Black churches who are embracing environmental justice and taking climate action. Among other things, the churchgoers are transforming their houses of worship into “resilience hubs,” which are powered by solar panels and will be able to maintain power if there are blackouts thanks to backup batteries. They are places that can shelter the larger community on a day that’s excessively hot, cold or smoky.
It’s the kind of solution that can be a win-win-win. It starts in the community and addresses immediate needs, builds neighborhood resilience in the face of extreme weather, and cuts down on the planet-warming pollution.
Whitehead was recently drawn to an event at Beth Eden Baptist Church in West Oakland, where dozens gathered in the bright sanctuary to learn about environmental justice and faith.
A clean air advocate, Margaret Gordon, spoke about the importance of clergy preaching about these issues from the pulpit, telling their community that they have a right to healthy environments and diseases that unequally burden communities of color. “You have a right for your child to not have asthma. You have a right not to have lung cancer,” she said.
The event was convened by Green the Church, an organization merging the Black faith community and environmental justice. It was founded by Rev. Ambrose Carroll 14 years ago when he saw how hard it was to get Black religious leaders into the larger conversation about faith and the environment.
“When people are talking about saving the polar bears, that’s good. But we want to know that you care about our Cousin Pookie, not just the polar bear,” he said. “So there’s always been that estrangement. We felt that the Black church had to have its own table with its own language to talk about these issues.”
“We don’t always consider ourselves environmentalists, but we consider ourselves revivalist. We believe anything old or decrepit can be made brand new again,” Carroll said, including neighborhoods like East and West Oakland, which have been home to polluting industries for decades.
Instead of talking about “environmentalism,” Carroll and colleagues use words with greater meaning in the Black community and in scripture: revival, renewal, restoration, reparations and stewardship.
Green the Church is active in California, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The group has worked with roughly 3000 churches in some form or other through the years, from introducing recycling or composting to environmental justice organizing.
An impressive array of solar panels blanket Allen Temple Baptist Church’s gym roof in East Oakland. Two years ago, the board of trustees green-lit a project to cover the flat roof with 240 panels. They installed large, humming backup batteries a few yards away. The project was fully funded through a grant from Tesla.
On a typical day, the panels power the church’s classrooms, industrial kitchen, offices, and gym. Excess energy is stored in batteries, which kick in to power the building when the sun goes down. Church trustees estimate they save $20,000 in utility bills annually.
And when there is extreme weather or a power outage, Allen Temple opens their doors for anyone in the community to come in and relax, to charge their cell phones, and to plug in medical equipment.
Allen Temple’s solar panels, while invisible from below, have had an effect beyond their building.
The project “made us a model for other churches who were hesitating to pull the trigger or even enter this field,” said Rev. Jacqueline Thompson, senior pastor of Allen Temple.
“But when they saw us navigate into the work, we were able to partner with a lot of folks,” Thompson said. “There are a number of ministries who just needed someone to take the first step that they could trust.”
Solar atop prominent nonresidential buildings like churches and schools can “seed” the idea for nearby residents to follow suit, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For every church-based solar installation, the paper found, roughly four more installations would pop up on homes each year as a result.
“People have this idea about solar,” said Eric O’Shaughnessy, a research affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead author on the paper. “It’s like one day I wake up and just realize today is the day I’m going to adopt rooftop solar.”
“The research suggests that it’s not. It’s primarily an external motivation that prompts people to adopt. And a point that I often make is if you don’t have that external motivation, you probably are not going to adopt solar,” he said. Enter the church.
Houses of worship make up about 3% of commercial building energy use in the U.S. Beyond seeding solar, they can also demonstrate other energy upgrades like building weatherization and installing heat pumps.
The federal government earmarked billions of dollars in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act for disadvantaged communities. Carroll said this creates an opportunity for Green the Church.
His goal is to transform 2000 churches into resilience hubs nationally within the next few years — with solar panels, backup batteries, and even EV charging. That’s a step beyond Allen Temple’s current setup.
His organization received money from various sources, including the Department of Energy, private companies and local electricity providers, to upgrade Black churches. Expanded tax credits through the Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s major climate legislation passed in 2022, have also incentivized houses of worship to get solar.
Beyond solar panels and batteries, Carroll helped churches swap out inefficient, natural gas HVAC systems for heat pumps, which run on electricity. He facilitated projects to install electric vehicle chargers in underutilized parking spaces, both for community members and as a tool for churches to generate income.
“Black folk just don’t own a lot of buildings,” he said. “We don’t own the soul food restaurant or the funeral home. So when it comes to what we can actually produce and where we have our faith buildings.”
“When we talk about billions of dollars that have to come to East 14th [in Oakland], how are they going to spend that money in the community and with the community if it’s not in the places that the community owns?” Carroll said.
Carroll plans to attend a ribbon cutting for one of the first full resilience hubs in Hayward in November at the Glad Tidings International Church. He has 28 other churches he’s working with in the Bay Area alone that are hoping to follow suit.
That will be good for cutting emissions and utility bills. Ultimately, though, Carroll said Black churches can elevate restoring the planet as a social issue, much like they did for civil rights in the 1960s.
“The planet is our responsibility, and we will come out with the same vigor and vitality that we did in the ’60s on this issue.”
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