REUBEN MARTINEZ: The Columbia River courses 1,200 miles across some of the Pacific Northwest's most beautiful country, a land that has also been mercilessly exploited for its natural resources. But for the people who live along the river, its waters have a deeper meaning. Bishop William Skylstad of the diocese of Spokane grew up on an apple farm near one of the Columbia's countless tributaries.Bishop WILLIAM SKYLSTAD (Diocese of Spokane): The river for us was a place to see wildlife; it was a place to see the ducks, certainly in the summer and the fall months, the salmon migrating up the river. The river meant a lot to us.
MARTINEZ: For millennia, the Columbia's waters sustained the physical and spiritual life of native peoples in the region. Like the bishop, Umatilla leader Armand Minthorn's childhood was dominated by the river.
Mr. ARMAND MINTHORN (Umatilla Tribe): You know, I hear a lot of our older people talk about when they were growing up, and they talked about this river, and they talked about the salmon runs and how plentiful they were. That's how it was then, before the dams.
MARTINEZ: Massive dams like the Grand Coulee harnessed the river for irrigation and power, but they have also spelled disaster for the salmon and the river. The Columbia has been polluted by chemical runoff from mines and farms, its tributaries muddied by erosion from logging and overgrazing. The river now faces an environmental crisis that has stirred communities of faith, giving rise to an environmental movement rooted in spiritual rather than secular traditions.Practically every mile of the mighty Columbia has known human intervention. It was the profaning of these waters that gave birth to this spiritualized environmentalism. But if there's one symbol of the sacred that unites communities of faith, it's the waters that give life.
Mr. PAUL GORMAN (National Religious Partnership for the Environment): We affirm that the Earth, with its salmon, are yours.MARTINEZ: At this crossroads of politics and faith, theology is being rewritten. The Old Testament talks about man's dominion over nature. But many religious leaders around the country now talk about stewardship, mankind's responsibility to protect God's creation.
Mr. GORMAN: This is a coming to awareness of civilization and of the faith community more particularly of what it means to be here and human and in right relationship with creation.
Bishop SKYLSTAD: For us, the Church, I think an important role is to reflect in ethical ways about the environment and what's happening in our environment. How can we help the land continue to be fertile? How can we help the river system continue to be a fertile place, so to speak, so that the salmon species will continue to survive, so that agriculture in our area will continue to be a sustainable agriculture?MARTINEZ: The boy who once swam in the river is now a Catholic bishop. He has been traveling the Columbia basin for the past year, together with his fellow bishops from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, investigating the river and its problems.
Unidentified Man #1: If you look below us on the right, you see some of the early farms here. This is Sagemoor Farms, one of the older ones ...
MARTINEZ: This trip is leading up to an unprecedented pastoral letter the bishops plan to issue next year, calling on people of faith to join in saving the river's ecosystem.
Man #1: You're seeing here some of the nuclear-related complexes.MARTINEZ: A big concern is the now-inactive Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which produced plutonium for the atomic bomb during World War II. Leaking radioactive storage tanks now threaten nearby waters and land.
Mr. ILLYN: And then this whole area here is wilderness. This is 12 Heartbeat Rule.
MARTINEZ: On this day, Target Earth has gathered a group of Christians to restore and protect vegetation on the banks of the Lewis River, a tributary of the Columbia where erosion from cattle grazing has silted the waters, a potential danger to salmon runs.
Mr. JIM TIMMONS (Environmentalist): Is that your view? Well, it seems to me that basically what we're looking at here is an increase in cost of operation of getting that water up there. And we might find ourselves here in a few years where the dams -- say we decide to keep the dams, and that fish go -- are exterminated.
Mr. ILLYN: I think it's gonna be a bit ugly, that they'll be -- the politics are gonna increase. And that's why we're so dedicated to -- to standing up and reminding at least the Christians involved in the process that the moral aspect of how we treat the Earth is -- is more important than the political and the economic. This is probably the most important moral issue facing the rest of human history.
