Faith communities move toward Leopold land ethic one sip at a time

By Jonna Higgins-Freese
Prairiewoods:Franciscan Spirituality Center

One day in the fall of 2000, a dozen Lutheran pastors and members of their congregations visited Tabor Home Winery in Baldwin, Iowa, touring the vineyard and tasting wine.  They had come to learn how and why purchasing these local wines for communion could help them live out their commitments to social justice and caring for creation.

The project was inspired by the Leopold Center report "Grape Expectations: A Food System Perspective on Redeveloping the Iowa Grape Industry." The report outlined the re-emergence of the grape industry in Iowa and the importance of strengthening a local food system to support it.

As environmental outreach coordinator for Prairiewoods: FranciscanSpiritualityCenter, I'm always looking for ways to help churches connect their care for creation and concern for justice to practical, real-world actions. Prairiewoods already was encouraging people of faith to join Community Supported Agriculture farms, purchase locally-produced meat, and shop at farmers markets. Encouraging them to purchase local wine for communion seemed like a good way to connect the importance of local food systems more tightly to the theological message of creating justice for rural people and the land.

Leaders of one of the largest church denominations in Iowa agreed. As explained by Matt Schultz, a member of the environmental awareness team for the Iowa branch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA): "We are about more than recycling. We want to let everyone know that caring for creation is intrinsic to our faith. Communion symbolizes our relationships with God, other people and the land. We believe that everything we eat—and especially the wine we use for Eucharist— should be produced in a way that cares for creation and supports local communities."

Rich Pirog, marketing and food systems program leader for the LeopoldCenter, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project from the beginning. In addition to providing names and resources, he spoke at the field day about grape production and local food systems and helped secure LeopoldCenter funding to assist with the additional cost of providing locally-sourced food for lunch during the field day.

Since then, at least 20 churches have begun purchasing local wine for communion, and the Southeastern Iowa Synod of the ELCA has used local wine at its major conference event each spring.

The project has been covered in a variety of media outlets, including the SE Iowa Synod newsletter Crossroads; the denomination's national magazine The Lutheran  <http://www.thelutheran.org/0206/page46.html>; and the on-line environmental magazine Grist <http://www.gristmagazine .com/week/higgins-freese031102.asp>.

About half of the churches in Iowa use grape juice rather than wine for communion, but there currently is no grape juice processed from local grapes. Prairiewoods has received funding from the LeopoldCenter to pursue one of the recommendations in "Grape Expectations" to conduct feasibility studies for a specialty line of grape juices for markets such as churches, buying clubs and natural food stores.

Churches in Iowa will never purchase enough local wine to make them a significant market segment. But the program has a significant educational value in alerting people of faith to not only the availability of Iowa wines, but the social, symbolic and ethical significance of supporting local food systems. This is consistent with Aldo Leopold's message in "The Land Ethic," where he argues that the content of conservation education is insufficient because "it defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values."

If we want to change the content of conservation education, faith communities are a friendly place to start: they are one of the few remaining institutions in modern society where people talk openly about right and wrong, obligation, sacrifice, and values.

A field day two years ago attracted a number of Lutheran pastors and other people interested in Iowa's emerging grape industry.

Bill McKibben acknowledges this trend in the foreword to a book by Iowa Episcopal priest Ben Webb. "Synagogues, mosques and churches are nearly the only organized institutions that can posit some end, other than accumulation, for human life; therefore they may have a central role to play in dealing with [environmental] issues, in helping us remember that there are other, better routes to satisfaction.  Faith communities, at least potentially, represent one of the few counter-culture forces in this society." (Fugitive Faith, Orbis 2000).

Thanks to the Leopold Center, faith communities have the opportunity to begin to live out a land ethic -- one sip at a time.

Iowa grape industry has emerged following Center report

When the Leopold Center's "Grape Expectations" report was completed in April 2000, Iowa had an estimated 30 acres of grapes in production, and nine bonded wineries were operating. Since that time, there has been a significant increase in grape acreage and number of wineries established.

As of August 2002, there are an estimated 175 growers who have planted 400 acres to grapes in Iowa. There are 18 bonded Iowa wineries, of which five are estate wineries, with a number of other wineries in the planning and production stage, and membership in the Iowa Grape Growers Association has reached 200.

State support for the grape industry also has grown. In April 2001, Iowa State University Extension offered a viticulture homepage (http://viticulture.hort.iastate.edu/home.html) to provide technical information to Iowa grape growers. In May 2001, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack signed a law enabling the legislature to provide up to $75,000 for grape and wine promotion (no monies have been released as of this writing). In continuing work, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship recently received a grant to track progress of Iowa's emerging grape industry.

Leopold's land ethic

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land.

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.