Writing in the New York Times about “Avatar” (“Luminous 3-D Jungle is a Biologist’s Dream”) , Carol Kaesuk Yoon rhapsodizes over the beauty and variety of life depicted in the film. “With each glance, we are reminded of organisms we already know, while marveling over the new…It has recreated what is at the heart of biology: the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing (my emphasis) the natural world.” To Yoon, and to this observer as well, the firing up of that “sense of wonder,” a phrase most notably introduced into modern discussions of biology and education by environmentalist Rachel Carson in her book of the same title, is central to the film’s impact.

But almost simultaneously with this comes a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation that boggles the mind: on average, the amount of time spent plugged into an electronic device for the population from eight to 18 years of age is seven-and-a-half hours per day. This is equivalent to a 53-hour work week. All of these kids’ waking time outside of school is spent connected to something (often more than one device).

As author and journalist Richard Louv has warned in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2008 updated and expanded), children are especially in need of contact—first-hand, in-their-skin-contact—with nature. A rich, ornery, lungingly actual relationship with living Creation is necessary, utterly necessary, to inform the deepest sympathy with life on the planet, human life included. Such a relationship, fully and carefully developed over time, teaches responsibility and connectedness. It teaches birth, death, glory,transformation. It teaches decay, failure, and triumph. It teaches ocean truth and luna moth truth, parasite truth and pomegranate truth, volcano truth and tsunami truth—the marvelous continuum of the human and natural, and it teaches finally the unplumbable mystery of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence,” as Annie Dillard puts it.

This rich and tragic sense of nature’s presence, power, and complexity does not require wilderness. With focused attention and effective preparation, something of it can be experienced in a suburban back yard, or along the banks of any edge-of-the-subdivision creek or golf course pond.

But in our schools there is very little training in how to see nature, in forming the habit of spending time outdoors without being driven by some sporting agenda. Outside of the one week in the year when a small handful of us learn about urban gardening, my students’ shoes never show the signs of woodsy mud. The knees of their jeans are never yellow with clay they have knelt in, rapt in observation of an insect or fossil. Their sweaters never bear the seeds of burdocks or thistles, those obvious signs of having brushed up against something other than a plastic mall kiosk. Instead of sharpening their students’ eyes for the natural world and opening their hearts to an environmental ethic, so many schools have leaped on the media bandwagon that brags to the public of their technological prowess, of how “wired” they are, of how technologically savvy their students are becoming.

What if such claims are dead wrong? What if such uncritical adoption of more and more technology is a form of contributing to the delinquency of our students in as clear a way as selling cigarettes to kiddies behind the gym or providing cases of beer to underage drivers who eventually wrap themselves and their friends around telephone poles? Where is the research that shows us all is well?

When I entertain such thoughts, the news from the Kaiser Family Foundation is as unsettling to me as any I have heard. It is the more unsettling because it is not the result of sinister overseas forces intent on ruining us, but is rather the result of the successful marketing of, and the constant invention and reinvention of, artificial “needs” that capitalism thrives on. The ubiquitousness of electronic devices in youth culture is so great that it has apparently obscured rational adult thinking. Quoted in another recent New York Times article by Tamar Lewin (“If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online”) Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston, says there’s no use arguing whether so much electronics consumption is good or bad, because these devices have become “like the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.”

Exactly. Yes. And since we clearly know that water, air, and food are sometimes tainted and dangerous, shouldn’t we then form some sort of Environmental Protection Agency to monitor the ill effects of all these devices in the hands and ears and bedrooms and classrooms of our children? And how do we explain to ourselves why so many parents seem to have conceded to their children’s willy-nilly desire for all the gizmos and gadgets? Are they aware of the effects of addiction—any addiction, whether to tobacco, or heroin, or pornography, or texting? I had a student two years ago who, as part of a class project, stopped using her cell phone. After the first day, she reported, she was “half-crazy”; after the second, she was driven to distraction; after the third, she was utterly “sick with myself for being so needy for a phone!”

Incidentally, the seven-and-a-half hours per day of electronic media consumption does not include the 90 minutes of texting and 30 minutes of talking on the phone kids reported on the Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Picture the typical day of such kids: outside of school and sleeping, there is for some of them not a minute during which they are not umbilicaled to an electronic device or two. Unaware of the weather outside, increasingly obese and diabetic, they must come to live in a Silent Spring of electronic origin, bereft of any awareness of anything but what has lurking beneath it not the voice of the wind or the great moanings of the sea, but some manufactured hum of circuitry. They are slipping further and further away from the incarnation, through their senses, of the material world, and they are oblivious.

I think of this as potentially one of the most significant withdrawals of human beings from the natural world in the history of our species. Unchecked for a generation or two, what sorts of people will these wired citizens be? Will they ever experience significant personal confrontations with, and difficult ruminations about, physical nature—the kinds of encounters both sublime and terrifying that have for millennia challenged humans with opportunities to grow toward wisdom and a sense of right behavior on this planet? If the electronic center of their increasingly virtual reality cannot hold (and recent cyber attacks hint at the vulnerability of such an overly centralized system), what fundamental, eons-old traditions of spiritual, physical, and intellectual survival will they have lost? Will their only nature be a succession of “Avatar” films, creating for them an avatar world, a virtual and substitute Creation in which, crippled by nature deficiency, 3-D goggled, and in a dark more ominous than that of the theater, they can vicariously leap and bound and be seized by a counterfeit wonder in a counterfeit environment lost to them in reality?

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s withering Christian attack on a way of life that paralyzed even those who knew it was wrong, Marie St. Clare, the hypochondriac and self-centered mistress of Tom, whines, “Well, at any rate, I’m thankful I’m born where slavery exists; and I believe it’s right—indeed, I feel it must be; and, at any rate, I’m sure I couldn’t get along without it.” Aside from her unconscious fumbling with logic and rationalization, her last thought is the one that chills me. If—just if—we wanted to protect our children from falling out of the world of Creation, can we imagine recalling all the devices already in their hands? Can we imagine them, and ourselves, getting along without iPods, PlayStations, MP3 players, TVs, more and more computers in the schools, portable DVD players, X-Boxes? Can we imagine the paroxysms to our economy if the sales of these were as limited or heavily taxed as the sales of alcohol and tobacco?

“Unimaginable,” many, if not most, would say. Equally unimaginable, and nearly unforgivable, is what may already be happening to our wired and exiled children.

Richard Hague is in his 40th year of teaching at Purcell Marian High School, an urban Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest book is “Public Hearings” (Word Press, 2009), a collection of poems social, political, and satirical.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This ragtag parade in northwest Thailand, in the area known as the Golden Triangle, is a celebration of sorts, but it also has a very serious purpose, and one that has had dangerous consequences.

(speaking to Thai man): How was he killed?

PIPOB UDOMITTIPONG: He was stabbed to death.

SEVERSON: You think that he was killed because of his environmental work?

UDOMITTIPONG: Of course, definitely.

SEVERSON: Why?

UDOMITTIPONG: Because there was no other reason. He’s such a nice man. If you meet in person, he’s a very amicable man. He has no enemies whatsoever.

Pipob Udomittipong

SEVERSON: What was so unusual about the killing was that the victim held a position of great respect in Thai society. The victim was a Buddhist monk, an environmental activist.

Susan Darlington is writing a book about Thailand’s environmental Buddhism.

PROFESSOR SUSAN DARLINGTON (Hampshire College): There were 18 human rights and environmental activists who were assassinated in Thailand in a three-year period, none of whose murders were solved. So somebody was feeling threatened and had the power to push back and try to send perhaps warnings or to stop these people altogether.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa is a noted Buddhist scholar who has written over a hundred books. He claims he knows who was pushing back against the monks who were trying to protect the forests: international corporations with financial ties to some corrupt generals in the Thai military.

SULAK SIVARAKSA (International Network of Engaged Buddhists): Unfortunately the big loggers, in cooperation with generals, they don’t care. They cut the trees, and the monks protested, and they even arrested monks. Not before in history that monks had been arrested.

SEVERSON: Darlington is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She says it wasn’t until the late 1980s, after whole forests had vanished, that monks became activists.

(speaking to Professor Darlington): We’re talking about whole forests, clear cutting?

Senior monk Anek

DARLINGTON: Clear cutting to either get the logs—the teak forests were going at a rapid rate, other hardwoods—or cutting down forest to make room for intensive agriculture.

SEVERSON: The forests went away, and the animals, too, and then in 1988 catastrophic floods caused people to reevaluate what they had been told was progress.

DARLINGTON: Up to three hundred people were killed from the floods, and most experts pointed to this and said the flooding would not have occurred if there hadn’t been such severe deforestation.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. He says Buddhism’s views of the environment are both moral and spiritual.

SIVARAKSA: Buddhism believes that we are all interrelated, not only among human beings but to all sentient beings, including animals, nature, the river, the trees, the clouds, the sun, the moon, we all related. We are brothers and sisters. So if you harm any of these you harm yourself.

DARLINGTON: Buddhists’ primary motivation, primary goal is to end suffering, and destruction of the environment causes suffering on many levels. Therefore as monks it is part of our role to make people aware of this and to undertake actions to prevent this and to protect the forests that still exists.

SEVERSON: To protect to the forests, one monk did something radical, just as they are doing here now. He started tying orange robes around trees, in effect ordaining the trees.

DARLINGTON: He was called crazy, and a national newspapers called for him to disrobe from the sangha [community or order], that this was not appropriate behavior for a monk, he’s misusing the religion. But meanwhile other monks began to do tree ordinations as well. “You can’t ordain a tree. What does that mean?” So people started debating, what does it mean to ordain a tree?

SEVERSON: To the monks, it meant making the forests sacred, off limits to exploitation. The idea has caught on with some villagers, like these. The forests rangers with the guns are not official rangers. They’re volunteers who patrol the mountainside looking for timber poachers. Senior monk Anek took us to an area near his village that was clear-cut in the dark of the night. August 21st there was a forest here. August 22nd it was gone. Three acres of prized hardwood disappeared overnight. Anek says he doesn’t think monks’ robes wrapped around trees would have prevented this.

INTERPRETER (translating senior Buddhist monk Anek): He says it might not deter them because they are investors from outside, they have no respect for the culture, they have no respect for the tradition. He’s saying that he feels sad because it took them many years to preserve this.

SEVERSON: Anek says he still gets threats for ordaining trees but not as many as before and not as severe. He doesn’t think this area was clear cut for the trees, but instead for the land, which foreign companies are using for huge farming operations, like the tangerine plantations that stretch for miles along rolling hills that were once covered with pristine forests. Unfortunately for the locals, the companies are hiring cheap labor from nearby Burma. So they’re losing the land and their ability to live off it. In the middle of the plantations there is a Buddhist monastery that acts as a buffer against development. The senior monk here is also an environmental activist. His name is Abbot Kittisap.

(speaking to Buddhist abbot): But you’re not fearful?

Because of his activism, and because he is testifying in the trial of the murdered monk who was his friend, Abbot Kittsop has 24-hour-a-day police protection, the gentlemen you see here. The abbot says he is still fearful for his safety, but his conscience keeps him going. Even though it’s been four years since the controversial killing, no one has been convicted of the crime, and recently the chief investigator confirmed many people’s suspicions when he accused the police of tampering with the evidence. Many here don’t think justice will ever be served, but Susan Darlington says that doesn’t mean the monks have not made progress. The Thai government, for instance, has cracked down on illegal logging.

DARLINGTON: I think the role of Buddhism in protecting the environment has come a long way. These monks really do, they put a moral standard into the environmental movement that makes people really stop and think. It brings a spiritual element to it.

SEVERSON: Others like Sulak say spirituality also requires action.

SIVARAKSA: Spirituality is not merely personal contemplation, not only meditation, that you feel peaceful and then you feel “I’m alright, Jack.” I think that’s is dangerous. It’s escapism.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa, who received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, says many Westerners and many Buddhists alike do not understand the meaning of engaged Buddhism.

SIVARAKSA: In fact, meditation only helps you to be peaceful. But you must also confront social suffering as well as your own personal suffering, and people suffer now because of the environment.

SEVERSON: The generals and the developers still have the upper hand, but the battle for the land, and the hearts and mind of the people is not over. Ordinary people are now beating a drum for the monks.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson north of Chang Mai, Thailand.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a segment today on going into the wilderness to experience the presence of God. John Lionberger is a former atheist who had a profound religious experience on a wilderness trip. Now an ordained United Church of Christ minister, Lionberger leads others looking for their own experience of the holy. Lionberger is the author of “Renewal in the Wilderness.” He lives in Evanston, Illinois. Earlier this fall, I asked him what happens to the people he takes to the wilderness.

Rev. JOHN LIONBERGER (Author, “Renewal in the Wilderness”): What they encounter in the wilderness is getting away from all of the things in society that we call “trappings” that are meant to be good things, but that keep them away from a more authentic and deeper relationship with God.

ABERNETHY: Lionberger’s trips begin with his coaching.

LIONBERGER: I think what happens for them is they get to the transcendent through the physical—the act of canoeing, the act of setting up camp. I like to say it strips them of the barnacles that they accrue throughout their lives and society, and they begin to realize how little they need to be profoundly happy. They are able to simplify, and in that simplification they get a sense of something holy about what surrounds them, a sense of well being and a sense of being cared for and a sense of profound peace, and it’s kind of a hackneyed phrase—“Be in the moment”—but there is something so powerful about it, because that is the moment, in the very present is when God comes to us. It is much easier, I think, for God to get through our defenses when we’re in a wilderness.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger to recall the conversion experience he had when he was alone on skis on a frozen lake in winter.

LIONBERGER: It was getting dark, and the trees were etched against the skyline in kind of blackness while the skyline was turning purple. I just looked up at the sky and put my arms out like this, with the poles dangling from my wrists, and arched my back, and at that moment I felt like I was in the midst of a warm stream of water that felt so pure and so refreshing and so cleansing and so friendly and so loving, and then it kept coming into my mind, slowly at first, and very dimly at first, but it said, “It’s God.”

Sometimes there are those wonderful explosive moments of experiencing God, but most of the time it’s very, very subtle. It’s just the small things that people ignore that being out in an environment like that brings them to an awareness of. It reminds us of who we are, who we are not, and who God is.

ABERNETHY: Back home, Lionberger tries to recapture some of the wilderness experience in a park near his house, and he says all people can do that.

LIONBERGER: I suggest to them that they have an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, and they do it very consciously. It is part of being here now. It’s part of what the wilderness teaches you.

ABERNETHY: I asked Lionberger whether some people come on his trips and have no sense of anything holy.

LIONBERGER: In the eight years I’ve been doing this, and maybe the 400 people that I’ve taken to the wilderness, I only know of one man who was not really touched by his experience in some way, who said at the end, “I had a good time, but I got no spiritual insight, no spiritual awakenings, nothing like that.” And that is not a bad batting average, one out of 400. I’ll take that.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s hard work on a warm day, but Bob Lewis never shirks.

BOB LEWIS (Garden Volunteer): I garden at home. On off days, I’m out here.

POTTER: “Here” is a vegetable patch in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in suburban Washington, tended by volunteers from the parish.

VOLUNTEER: We got a bumper crop and more coming in!

POTTER: Last year, this garden was just an idea—something the rector dreamed up.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY (Rector, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland): I think “come eat, go serve” is becoming our slogan.

POTTER: For Reverend Stephanie Nagley, the garden as a way of living out what she sees as God’s call to give away what you’ve been given, especially in tough times. St. Luke’s is one of several churches across the country that planted vegetable gardens for the first time this spring, partly in response to the recession. Most of their food goes to local food banks, but what comes out of this garden goes right next door. All of the produce grown at the church is donated to St. Luke’s House, a mental health facility the parish helped to found almost 30 years ago.

VOLUNTEER (to class members): You want to help us get all this stuff rinsed?

POTTER: Cooking class is offered daily as part of a life skills program. The goal of the class is to help these adults with mental illness learn to live more independently.

(to class member): What are you learning?

CLASS MEMBER: How to cook different veggies.

POTTER:  The fact that those veggies come from the church next door isn’t lost on anyone at St. Luke’s House.

BETH WELCH (Client, St. Luke’s House): I think it’s really absolutely nice. We get a lot more veggies to eat.

MARK ROBBINS (Client, St. Luke’s House): I really appreciate it. I really should thank them sometime, I guess.

ERIC GORDON (Staff, St. Luke’s House) I think the clients get a real kick out of it. One guy in particular is always double-checking: Are you guys really using that in your cooking classes? Are you sure? Yes, we definitely are using this in our cooking classes.

POTTER: The clients and staff of St. Luke’s House benefit from the garden’s bounty, but that’s not its only value. Parishioner Anne Elsbree organized the 30 volunteers who tilled the ground, planted the seeds, and now harvest the crops.

ANNE ELSBREE (Garden Organizer) I think it’s produced good teamwork at church. We’ve all been working on a project together and getting results, so it’s been very satisfying.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY: In some ways, I think a lot of this was just sort of an unconscious bubbling up of people’s faith, and now I think it’s sort of come to this next era, where it’s really now articulated, and we’re making it clear that this is what we’ve been about all along.

POTTER: Cara Gonzalez worships at St. Luke’s and has brought the local youth organization she works with to help out in the garden.

CARA GONZALEZ (Parishioner): There’s definitely something spiritual about working with the earth and feeling a relationship with all of God’s creation, and then taking that and making it into a human relationship with those who benefit in the cooking program and with the youth who benefit. I think it’s all about that connectedness, and that’s very spiritual.

POTTER: This year’s harvest was such a success that St. Luke’s plans to keep the garden going next year and make it bigger, so it can feed even more people, body and spirit.

CARA GONZALEZ (holding out fresh basil): Amazing. Here, take a sniff. Tell me that’s not spiritual right there. Amazing.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Bethesda, Maryland.

Gardening is never simply about gardens. It is work that reveals the meaning and character of humanity, and is an exercise and demonstration of who we take ourselves and creation to be. It is the most direct and practical site where we can learn the art and discipline of being creatures. Here we concretely and practically see how we relate to the natural world, to other creatures, and ultimately to the Creator. We discover whether we are prepared to honor these relations by nurture and care and celebration, or despise and abuse them. Gardens are a microcosm of the universe in which all the living and nonliving elements of life meet, elements ranging from geological formations and countless biochemical reactions to human inventiveness and age-old traditions about cuisine and beauty. When and how we garden gives expression to how we think we fit in the world. Through the many ways we produce and consume food, we bear witness to our ability or failure to gratefully and humbly receive creation as a gift from God.

*

To garden effectively is to bring human living into fairly close, appreciative, and sympathetic alignment with the life going on in the garden. It requires us to know a particular plot of land and understand its potential, and then work harmoniously with it. To garden is to unseat oneself as the center of primary importance, and to instead turn one’s life into various forms of service that will strengthen and maintain the many memberships that make up the garden. It is to give up the much-trumpeted goal of modern and postmodern life—individual autonomy—and instead live the life of care and responsible interdependence. This is what the biblical command to “till and keep” the garden means. When we garden well, devoting ourselves to the strengthening of the memberships of creation, personal ego and ambition gradually recede from the lines of sight so that the blessings and glory of God can shine through what we see. When we serve a garden well by learning to calibrate our schedules and desires to complement gardening realities, life has the chance to thrive and smell and taste really good.

*

Gardening, besides being a practical, life-nurturing task, is also always a spiritual activity. In it people attempt to make visible and tasty what is good, beautiful, and even holy. Every act of gardening presupposes and embodies a way of relating to creation, a way that invariably invokes moral and spiritual decisions. Though membership in a garden is a given, how we will take our place in the membership is not. Our aim must be to develop into good gardeners, gardeners who work harmoniously among the flows of life. This means that besides vegetables, flowers, and fruit, gardeners are themselves undergoing a spiritual cultivation into something beautiful and sympathetic and healthy. A caring, faithful, and worshipping humanity is one of the garden’s most important crops.

Norman Wirzba is Research Professor of Theology, Ecology, and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School. These excerpts are from his book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

RABBI LAWRENCE TROSTER (GreenFaith): To be bar-mitzvahed is to come of age in the Jewish tradition. For women, it’s bat mitzvah. Many years ago, the rabbis had to create, what you might say, a legal definition of what it meant to be an adult, and they picked twelve for a girl and thirteen for a boy, and in the last few hundred years this has become really a rite of passage in our communities, a way to publicly proclaim that this person is now an adult member of our community, and we do that symbolically by calling them to the Torah, to have them read a Torah portion. It means that we are now fully responsible for our actions, that we are part of the covenanted community, that we are expected to live up to the Jewish tradition. In other words, a child is not culpable for things they don’t do or do wrong, but an adult is.

I think it is a good fit that we use the bar mitzvah or the bat mitzvah as a way to inculcate environmental values. Protecting the earth is a mitzvah, and I mean this in the sense of a commandment. In other words, that we are commanded, we are required, to take care of creation. It’s not a choice.

ANNA HACKMAN (Bar Mitzvah Mother and Editor, GreenTalk.com): This is my third bar mitzvah—I have four sons—and I took a look at this bar mitzvah for more of a carbon footprint, like what was I doing that was impacting the Earth, that I could make a difference?

One of the most important parts is the tallis. It’s something that he wears during the service. It’s something he’s going to have his whole lifetime. It’s made out of organic cotton. It was hand-woven, and it symbolizes things about him, and his yarmulke was made by Guatemalan women that actually are paid fair-trade wages, and these wages help support their families. The other yarmulkes, I had them made out of hemp, and they’re all lined with organic cotton.

At the service there’s a program. It’s all made out of 100 percent recycled paper. The invitation’s a Web site with places for people to RSVP. It’s got pictures of Jacob. It’s got polls and quizzes, and the best thing is there’s no paper being used. There’s nobody mailing things back and forth to me. On the invitation, I put a note on the bottom to please try and carpool to cut down on the consumption of natural resources.

The theme is a movie theme, so what I did is I went and bought used DVDs as place markers for everybody to pick up when they come and look for their tables, so it’s something that they could take home and watch. They’re not going to throw it in the trash like a little paper, you know, place card.

We chose to put on the tables soy candles that are a renewable source, and they burn much cleaner. There’s not toxic chemicals coming from, like, wax candles.

The centerpieces are actual plants that are going to be planted in my garden. I made sure that they were ones that would live, so nothing’s wasted.

We’re serving three different meals. Everything was sourced either locally or was and/or organic. The leftover food is composted, or the balance of the food is donated to a food pantry.

The dress that you can see that I’m wearing, it’s a consignment dress. People wear dresses once for bar mitzvahs, and to me it’s senseless.

My goal to make this bar mitzvah greener is to let the world know that they can do it, being able to take my religion and say yeah, I’m part of that. It’s just another connection for me that makes me feel more vibrant as a Jew.

LUCKY SEVERSON:  Some think Tim DeChristopher committed a crime and should be punished. Others think breaking the law was the right thing to do. This University of Utah student, whose only previous brush with the law consisted of two speeding tickets, hardly seems like someone who would purposely break the law.  But here he is facing prison time for committing a felony deliberately.

Tim DeChristopher

TIM DECHRISTOPHER (Student, University of Utah): Jail is certainly a scary thing, but I’ve been scared for my future for a long time. I think that the scariest thing for my whole generation is that we stay on the path that we’re on now. Jail is not nearly as scary as dealing with the real consequences of climate change that we’re expected to see in my lifetime.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher is a devoted environmentalist—has been since he was a kid. He’s especially worried about what man is doing to hasten global warming. He was moved to tears after speaking with noted Stanford University environmentalist Terry Root at a conference a few months ago.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: She said there were things we could have done in the ’80s and things we could have done in the ’90s, but I’m sorry, I think it’s too late. It shook me to the core. I literally went outside the hotel where the conference was being held, and I just cried. And I went through a very — a period of really deep despair, where it was almost like I was mourning for my future; that I was mourning for the future of us all.

SEVERSON: He was convinced the Bush administration was auctioning off too much of the West to drilling companies. So when he heard the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, was conducting an auction in December of last year offering leases for over 350,000 acres of public land in Utah, some of it in pristine red rock country, he decided to attend, expecting to disrupt the auction and then get kicked out.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And instead I went inside. And as soon as I got inside the door an official said, “Hi.  Are you here for the auction?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And she said, “Are you here as a bidder?” And I said, “Well, yes I am.”

SEVERSON: Dressed like a student and carrying a backpack, DeChristopher started bidding simply to drive up the prices, but before long he was winning bids.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I figured I probably would go to prison, and so I had to ask myself if I could live with that. But on the other hand seeing this opportunity to protect some of this land, keep some of this oil in the ground and give us a better chance of a livable future, if I turn my back on that opportunity can I live with that? And I thought, “No.”

SEVERSON: He ended up purchasing 13 lease parcels — over 22,000 acres — for about $1.7 million until the auction was abruptly stopped.

Ron Yengich

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And then a BLM agent came straight over to me and showed his badge and said, “Lets go speak outside.” And then he asked me what my intentions were — whether or not I intended to pay. And I told him very clearly that my intent was to disrupt the auction, that this was an act of civil disobedience.

RON YENGICH (Attorney): If you’re charged with a federal felony you’re in serious trouble.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher’s attorney, Ron Yengich, acknowledges his client committed an act of civil disobedience, but because it’s against federal law to bid without the intention or means of paying, his client is facing three to five years in prison.

Mr. YENGICH: The idea that he is a good kid — he’s a nonviolent kid. He did it, if not on the spur of the moment, he certainly did it because of a deep-seeded belief that this country should be green.

KATHLEEN SGAMMA (Director, Government Affairs, Independent Petroleum Association): Right, I think he should be prosecuted.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma is director of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association. She says the industry has a good record when it comes to the environment, and DeChristopher did wrong and should be punished.

Ms. SGAMMA: I don’t think this rises to the level of a case where civil disobedience really is warranted. We reclaim the land. We are very protective of the environment with out activity, despite what you hear in the press and despite the rhetoric of environmental groups. So unfortunately in this case I believe the perception that oil and gas is going to come in and destroy the land has caused this person perhaps to do something to break the law.

Kathleen Sgamma

Dr. DAVID KELLER (Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for the Study of Ethics, Utah Valley University): Civil disobedience is ethical because the law and morality are not always the same.

SEVERSON: David Keller is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University.

Dr. KELLER: We have the responsibility to be civil-disobedient where in situations where our complacency emboldens the power and those laws which are unjust.

SEVERSON: Pat Shea is a former director of the BLM in the Clinton administration and is also a lawyer defending DeChristopher. He says DeChristopher’s behavior may have been illegal, but it was patterned after the actions of some of the world’s great leaders.

PAT SHEA (Attorney and Former Director, Bureau of Land Management): Just as with Thoreau or Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, he had this ability to look at this situation, deal with it in an existential way, and then come through with his actions on a principled manner, a nd that’s something that I think most people would love to see in their children and maybe in themselves.

SEVERSON: Attorney Yengich says civil disobedience in and of itself it not a defense.

Mr. YENGICH: But the primary defense would be what lawyers would call the “choice of evils” defense, and that’s an historic defense about someone who is basically protesting a government action, and they are saying that I did this, even if it may be technically against the law, because there is a greater evil out there.

SEVERSON: One of the concerns expressed by critics was how near some of the leases were to national parks. In fact, national park officials were so concerned they had asked the BLM to delay the auction. Ten of the parcels DeChristopher won were located near Arches National Park in southern Utah.

Former BLM director Pat Shea:

Mr. SHEA: I think that they were trying to push through in the Bush administration as many energy leases as they possibly could. So there were a number of commercial energy companies that had an interest to get as much as they could before the curtain came down and there was a new administration.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma’s association represents many of those energy companies, and she says they are performing a valuable service with little impact on the environment.

David Keller

Ms. SGAMMA:  In Utah less than one percent of public lands — much less than one percent of public lands — is disturbed for oil and gas so that we can provide people heat for their homes. That’s a basic human necessity. We can’t go back to freezing in the dark or back to burning, you know, firewood in the fireplace or shoveling coal like we had to do 100 years ago.

Mr. KELLER: That’s certainly one of the benefits of civil disobedience — bringing attention and stimulating public discourse, and in the case of Tim DeChristopher, I do think that it is beneficial that we are having a discussion in Utah about whether he is a terrorist or not, a saboteur, an exemplary citizen, a criminal — or the charges should be brought against him or not. All this is healthy for a democracy.

SEVERSON: What makes civil disobedience ethically acceptable and when is it not?

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I think when it’s nonviolent, first off, and non-destructive is one of the things that make it ethical.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher says he would never think of destroying property or vandalizing equipment to stop actions he thinks are illegal. Attorney Yengich says that, above all, civil disobedience must be done in a civil way.

Mr. YENGICH: We’ve got to be careful, and I guess this is why we say when we talk about doing acts of civil disobedience that they’ve got to be done with respect to everyone. And maybe, maybe if the government rules against you, then you have to take the punishment as part of the process, yeah.

SEVERSON: As of now, the Obama administration has withdrawn those leases offered in December. Now Tim DeChristopher is waiting to find out how this will affect the case against him.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a profile today of the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for peace. Wangari Maathai is a conservationist whose movement has caused the planting of 30 million trees in Kenya and also helped lead to free elections. Recently, Maathai visited Chicago, as Judy Valente reports.

JUDY VALENTE: Wangari Maathai of Kenya has been called fondly Mama Miti, Swahili for Mother of Trees. Since winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, she has become an international ambassador for care of the environment.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I want to thank you for coming to this program, ’cause it means a lot to my school and to the community.

VALENTE: She preaches a gospel of conservation wherever she goes, like this school on Chicago’s struggling West Side, where students recently named a garden in her honor.

Dr. WANGARI MAATHAI (Founder, Green Belt Movement, speaking to students): Wow. Thank you very much. But even before we met, you thought that you would associate me with a lovely garden such as this.

VALENTE: Her message is simple, but urgent.

Dr. MAATHAI (speaking to students): We cannot live in peace with each other if we do not manage our environment responsibly and accountably.

VALENTE: Trained as a biologist, and the first black woman in East Africa to earn a PhD, Maathai began in the 1970s speaking out against the rapid deforestation of Kenya’s once rich woodlands. The destruction of trees had led to a shortage of topsoil and fresh water. She sought international funding to put Kenya’s women to work cultivating trees. The project became known as the Green Belt Movement. Maathai says she drew inspiration from her movement from the Bible.

Dr. MAATHAI: The Book of Genesis came to mean much more to me than just a book on how God created. It helped me understand that the creation is how God has made it possible for us to live on this planet — that we need to be very grateful for what he gave us, and we need to take care if it. God would have wanted us to be his custodians rather than dominion, because dominion reflects exploitation.

VALENTE: Maathai grew up in a village at the foot of Mount Kenya. Her family was Christian, but as a child she took to heart the spiritual beliefs of her Kikuyu ancestors, who revered Mount Kenya for the fresh water it provided. They considered some trees as sacred.

Dr. MAATHAI (speaking at Trinity United Church of Christ): I want to urge you that as you leave church today you look at the trees and the green vegetation with a special respect, and you thank them. You see a tree, you see a bush — you thank them for taking care of the carbon dioxide you breathe out.

The actual process of planting a tree is very, almost very spiritual. So you’re almost repeating the acts of God. There is something about touching the soil and going down on your knees. It’s almost like you’re humbling yourself to the wonders of creation.

VALENTE: Maathai was educated by Italian and Irish missionary nuns and converted to Catholicism as a teen. Through a Kennedy family scholarship, she was able to attend Mount St. Scholastica, now Benedictine College, in the Midwest.

Dr. MAATHAI (speaking to students): I was recommended as one of 300 students who came to the United States in 1960, and I ended up in Kansas where I picked up this accent. Sister Thomasita, come here, Sister Thomasita!

VALENTE: She rarely misses an opportunity to acknowledge the Benedictine sisters who encouraged her interest in science, provided support over the years, and recommended her for the Nobel Prize.

Dr. MAATHAI (with Sister Thomasita Homan on school steps): These are the sisters that are responsible for my being here for four years in Atchison, the four most wonderful years of my life. Thank you, Sister.

In Kansas, I stayed for four years with those nuns. They’re like my mothers, my sisters, my family, and that one of the greatest things that people still ask me is, “Why do you do what you do?” And a lot of times I like to tell them, “That’s the nun in me.”

Sister THOMASITA HOMAN, OSB (Benedictine College): She has listened to people. She has heard their pain. She has listened to the planet, and she has heard the planet’s pain. And she has carried that Benedictine value of listening to a point that’s worldwide. She’s said yes, by my actions the world is my community.

VALENTE: In her 2006 autobiography, UNBOWED, Maathai describes how her environmental work led her to seek democratic reforms and greater human rights under a repressive regime. She was, at various times, placed under house arrest, beaten, and thrown into jail.

Dr. MAATHAI: The fact that I am not going to jail doesn’t mean that the struggles and the tribulations have ended. I guess that only happens when you die.

(addressing crowd at Al Raby School): We need to govern ourselves in a way that we promote human rights and promote the rule of law. We promote democracy and we promote inclusiveness, so that everybody in the community will feel that they are a part of that community.

VALENTE: Today, as a member of Kenya’s parliament and her government’s assistant minister of environment, she makes a strong case that caring for the environment is also a path to peace.

Dr. MAATHAI: I realized later on that when the environment becomes degraded and resources become scarce, people who would ordinarily call each other brothers and sisters suddenly are quite willing to confront each other. Psalm 23 is, for me, a wonderful psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

VALENTE: The divorced mother of three grown children, Maathai usually travels with her daughter, Wanjira. At 67, the Nobel laureate has embarked on an ambitious new project — the planting of a billion trees worldwide.

Dr. MAATHAI: We need at least 10 trees to take care of our own carbon dioxide, and so if you don’t have 10 trees somewhere where you can say “these are my trees,” you are using someone else’s trees and you ought to get out and plant your own.

VALENTE: When she tires these days from her many speeches and world travels, Maathai often takes comfort from a hymn which she first learned to sing in her native Kikuyu tongue.

Dr. MAATHAI singing “Amazing Grace” in Kikuyu and English.

VALENTE: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.