Explanation

Communities in the Appalachian coalfields or the oilfields of Texas and Louisiana are sometimes described as “environmental sacrifice zones”; areas that bear the environmental and public health costs of our society’s dependence on the fossil fuel industry. But these areas also depend on that industry for jobs and tax income as well as communal and personal identity and cultural patrimony. Most necessary environmental activism – including on the part of The Episcopal Church – fails to acknowledge that the move away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy, while necessary and ultimately inevitable, will mean significant economic and cultural losses for these communities. These losses will affect communities all along the fossil fuel supply chain, from extraction through transportation and processing to energy production. This resolution complements the other environmental resolutions under consideration at General Convention by committing the Church’s advocacy and resources to help communities transition to new economies. It directs the Church’s advocacy agencies, the Office of Government Relations and the Episcopal Public Policy Network, to support initiatives that help communities meet the most urgent needs likely to arise as the fossil fuel industry becomes less viable: for jobs and income, and the training to perform those jobs; for childcare and early childhood education; for stable housing and community infrastructure in the absence of the fossil fuel industry; and for environmental restoration to repair the damage done by the fossil fuel supply chain. The resolution also calls on the Church at all levels to create programs to assist with this transition. Local parishes can be particularly important in sustaining the social capital communities’ need to weather imminent economic and cultural changes. Efforts to provide skills training and service industry employment to replace lost coal jobs have often failed because they have neglected to account for the importance of coal to individuals and communities’ identity and the deep resistance to any form of assistance seen as a “handout”. Local parishes can support community development and organizing efforts to strengthen community identity and solidarity, and to empower communities to meet their own needs and develop their own assets. It is with this in mind that the resolution directs the Office of Reconciliation, Justice, and Creation Care, as the apparent successor to the Domestic Poverty Office and the office with oversight of the church’s Asset-Based Community Development and the Advisory Council for the Stewardship of Creation, in its grant-making capacity, to focus some part of their resources to these needs.