June Movement Café:
Summer Resources for Creation Justice
June 19th 2024
10am PT / 11am MT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET
Sponsored by the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement, the informal, virtual space of the Café facilitates conversation, connection, and community focused on creation care and justice issues.
Summer Resources for Creation Justice
As we slip into summer, we offered the June 19 Creation Justice Movement Cafe as a space to explore resources for inspiration and reflection. In particular, we were excited to feature Leah Rampy, speaker, retreat leader and author of Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos, winner in the Spirituality category in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
We also shared Creation Justice resources that have been collected or created by leaders in the Creation Justice Movement that we hope will inspire you and your church communities. They can be used alone, but will be most fruitful in conversation with others. Maybe you’ll organize a book club with friends or family, or a study session with church or conference colleagues this summer, or maybe they will help you prepare for doing those things in September and October.
Speaker
Leah Rampy
Leah Moran Rampy, Ph.D. is a writer, speaker, and retreat leader who weaves ecology, spirituality, personal stories, and practices to help others deepen their relationship to the natural world. She is the author of Earth & Soul: Reconnecting amid Climate Chaos and a frequent speaker on spiritual ecology and leadership in these uncertain times.
Leah co-authored and co-facilitated with Beth Norcross the six-part video series on The Spiritual Wisdom of Trees: Insights from Our Elders in collaboration with the award-winning film maker Jane Pittman and sponsored by The Center for Spirituality in Nature. Leah and Beth are co-
authoring a book, Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees, to be published by Broadleaf Books in early 2025.
She has led over a dozen pilgrimages to sacred places in the US and internationally for the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation where she previously served as the Executive Director and continues as an adjunct staff member. She is the founder and leader of Church of the Wild Two Rivers, affiliated with the Wild Church Network, that meets regularly to deepen spirituality through time in the natural world. Leah also offers retreats through Friends of Silence, a nonprofit honoring the work and intent of the late, well-beloved author, Nan Merrill.
Through Shepherd University’s Lifelong Learning Program, Leah teaches classes on ecology through the lens of current writers. Her essays on living more fully connected to Earth in these uncertain times have appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers (Barbara Kingsolver edition), The Cardinal Anthology Vol 1, and Soul Food; Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership. She is a member of West Virginia Writers.
Leah holds a doctorate in Curriculum from Indiana University. She has extensive leadership experience as an executive in Fortune 100 organizations and in nonprofits and has offered executive coaching and consulting to individuals and organizations through the business she founded in 2001, Illumined Way, LLC.
She lives with her husband in a cohousing community in Shepherdstown, WV, where members collaborated to build and now to run their village with a focus on community, environmental responsibility, and Earth care. She co-founded Save Our Soil, a volunteer organization to promote soil health, local food, native plants, and regenerative agriculture in the Eastern Panhandle and beyond. The Rampys have two adult children who live in Virginia, and two dogs who live at home.
The June Movement Café focused on summer resources to reconnect and rejuvenate as those involved in the Creation Justice Movement continue their work and mission. The guest speaker was author and speaker Leah Rampy, author of Earth and Soul: Reconnecting amid Climate Chaos. Ms. Rampy is an established speaker on spiritual ecology and leadership in these uncertain times.
The Café was facilitated by the Reverend Richenda Fairhurst, with input from Cathy Velasquez Eberhart, who reminded Café participants that spending time to reflect, to study, and to reaffirm our spiritual practices is essential in this creation justice arena and that connecting with wildlife and the land helps build our resilience and passion for this work.
Ms. Rampy reminded the Café guests that the world experienced the warmest year ever recorded last year. She noted that our children will never know the earth as we know it. Two-thirds of the wildlife have vanished since 1970. One million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction in years, not decades but years. Her book, Earth and Soul is part of a soul journey dedicated to helping folks get back to the essence of who we as humans really are.
She noted that this concept shows up in many ways. One way is the epidemic of loneliness. She said this loneliness that eats at our heart and soul is for connections to both the human and natural world. Ms. Rampy noted that Einstein saw this mindset as an optical illusion of consciousness, the very idea that we could separate ourselves from this web of life. Our western culture holds onto this myth of separation, when in fact we live in a world of amazing and elaborate connections.
To illustrate these connections, she talked about the relationships that trees hold with other trees. As an example, redwoods are actually vulnerable to wild storms because they are quite tall and have a shallow root system, but they can withstand the storms because trees intertwine their roots for mutual support. Rampy discussed the work of Suzanne Simard, author of Finding Mother Tree who worked for the forestry department in Canada with an emphasis on trying to increase the numbers of more valuable trees. When there was an orchard of paper birch and fir trees, the paper birch trees were clear cut to make rooms for the firs. But the firs did not prosper because it turned out that the birch and fir trees had a symbiotic relationship and were trading nutrients underground for a mutual benefit.
People can also play a role in these supportive relationships. In Braiding Sweet Grass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who started the Center for Native Peoples gave an example. The Center was asked to help figure out which was the most beneficial way to harvest sweet grass. They looked at various ways to harvest, with two harvesting methods and one control group. The failing plots were those that were left unharvested, the control group, as they choked and did not survive. The harvesting done by people helped the grass thrive. Native peoples and sweet grass evolved together and lived in harmony with attention to mutual well being.
She ended her talk with walking the group through some spiritual exercises that focused on participants reconnecting to the living and loving world around us.
Richenda Fairhurst provided various resources for the groups to use during the summer and beyond, including her Study Guide to Creation Justice Legislation at General Conference, which is packed with information, worship prayers and ideas, and much more. There are also more resources available that are cited in the June edition of the UMCJM newsletter and on the UMCJM website. Leah Rampy’s book, Earth and Soul, is also recommended. Ms Rampy notes that there are discussion questions in the back of the book, and she is happy to Zoom for a 30-min Q & A with any book groups reading Earth and Soul.