FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Tourism is big business in the Holy Land. Millions of Christians comes here for the chance to retrace the footsteps of Christ. Among their most sacred rituals is to be baptized in the Jordan River.

BRUCE STIBINSKI: Being baptized for the first time in the Jordan River, which is where Jesus was baptized, was just awesome. Words cannot explain how I felt.

SARA AUTUNES: I feel very freed. I feel at peace. My heart feels like it’s been opened up. I can’t put it into words.

GIFTY QUAINOO: No words to express why I feel very—I feel very happy and free, free.

DE SAM LAZARO: What few of these tourists know is that unlike their faith, the river itself is in very poor shape. The immersions take place in a two-mile stretch of the Jordan, about the only place now considered safe enough for human contact. For much of the rest of its 140-mile journey, the Jordan has been reduced to a trickle as it meanders through a region riven by war and tension. Gidon Bromberg is with the environmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East.

GIDON BROMBERG (Friends of the Earth Middle East): Due to the conflict, due to the competition between the parties, between Israel, Jordan, Syria, Israel grabs half the water and a little more than a quarter is grabbed by Syria. A a little bit under a quarter is taken by Jordan and the demise is that 98 percent of the historical flow of the Jordan today no longer flows. We’re left with something around 2 percent, and this is not fresh water. This is a mixture of sewerage water, agricultural runoff, saline water. What’s left is this very, very sad sight of a river that is holy to half of humanity.

DE SAM LAZARO:And one that no longer flows into another fabled body of water.

BROMBERG: The Dead Sea is dropping by three feet every year. That’s from my hip down.

DE SAM LAZARO: Only the ruins are left of a hotel veranda from where tourists use to stick their toes into the Dead Sea. Today the shoreline has receded more than a half s mile away. From their respective sides, Jordan and Israel further drain the Dead Sea as they mine it for potash, a valuable fertilizer.

BROMBERG: At the moment our governments are trying to do absolutely everything. We’re trying to maximize agriculture, we’re trying to maximize mineral extraction, and we’re trying to attract as many tourists as we can. Well, the two don’t—the three do not always correspond, do not neatly benefit each other.

DE SAM LAZARO: Israel is a mostly urban nation, but it also has developed a thriving farm sector, and even though it is efficient and recycles 70 percent of its water, agriculture is a huge consumer of water in one of the world’s driest places—one made even more so by several recent years of drought. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Lake Kinneret, the biblical Sea of Galilee, says environmentalist Bromberg.

BROMBERG: I should be completely under water. The Sea of Galilee behind us here should be five meters higher in depth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Even though it is much lower, the lake remains a major source of fresh water for Israel and also to preserve a pristine stretch of the lower river Jordan for the Christian pilgrims.

BROMBERG: In order to keep just a small stretch of some 3 kilometers of the Jordan healthy because of baptism that takes place here and because of needs of agriculture, the water authority has built a dam wall here, and it’s pumping water from the mouth of the river just for a few kilometers.

DE SAM LAZARO: Near the baptismal site, Bromberg’s group recently organized what it calls a “big jump” with Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian mayors and other officials, hoping to draw attention to the stresses on the historic river, a cause that they say transcends regional boundaries, even if those boundaries are at the heart of so much conflict.

NADER AL KHATEEB (Friends of the Earth Middle East): We know the Jordan River means a lot, not only for the region. It is for the whole world, for humanity. The Jordan is very important for the three religions. We know what does it mean for the Christianity, the baptism site, and it is a dream of every Christian to be baptized in healthy water, not in polluted water like its nowadays.

Officials standing in Jordan River: One, two, three—jump!

DE SAM LAZARO: Even as the big media splash brought hordes of reporters and cameras, the baptisms and the prayers of pilgrims went on undisturbed. Pastor Daniel Santos, who organizes regular trips for congregants of his church outside London, had not heard about the river’s pollution problems, and since this part is not affected he was unconcerned.

PASTOR DANIEL SANTOS: We’re not much in it and now because we came here for a spiritual purpose.

DE SAM LAZARO: So it doesn’t particularly bother you.

SANTOS: Yeah, because we also don’t take much time here.

DE SAM LAZARO: That comes as a relief to tourist operators here, worried that the publicity might drive away business. They point out that Israeli authorities regularly test the water to ensure it’s healthy. Gidon Bromberg says the publicity has led to the construction of sewage treatment plants in Israel and Jordan and greater awareness of the Jordan in parts of the river away from the tourist sites.

BROMBERG: We need to be striking a balance, a fair balance of sharing water amongst people—Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians—and a fairer balance of sharing waters between people and nature. And we’re going in that direction, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

Originally broadcast December 11, 2009

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.

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.