For a Greener Palm Sunday Celebration

Workers in Uaxactun, Guatemala, prepare "eco-palms" for shipment to the United States. The fronds are harvested in a way intended to benefit the environment and the harvesters. (University Of Minnesota Via Religion News Service)

"People, especially churches, are very into habits, and so they don't often change what they've already established," Loss said. "And so just getting them to order means that they have to be pretty excited about the project."

Dennis Testerman, the environmental stewardship coordinator for American Baptist Churches of the South, said his Charlotte congregation questioned the idea of switching companies since its palms came from a Florida plantation and weren't contributing to the destruction of Latin American rain forests. But he compared improving the livelihood of Mexican and Guatemalan harvesters to helping people with a church mission project.

"From that point, it was a relatively easy sell to the congregation," he said.

The Rev. Glenn Berg-Moberg of St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minn., said his church's practice of buying fair trade coffee for several years made it easier to switch to "fair trade palms."

Churches such as his have helped small farmers in Latin America and Africa by buying organically grown, high-quality coffee to help provide a living wage to members of the cooperatives that grow it.

"Christian stewardship intends to be as thorough as possible," said Berg-Moberg, whose church was in the pilot palm program last year and bought the palms again this year. "We are affecting people we never meet or see because we celebrate Palm Sunday using these palms. This means our worship practices have an impact on forests in Central America. It's all too easy to ignore such hidden connections."

Lutheran World Relief representatives joined University of Minnesota specialists on a trip in January to Guatemala and Mexico to see the project firsthand. The project involves close inspection of the palms to ensure they are the right color and are without defects. They're banded into bundles, wrapped in brown paper and kept in shallow tubs of water until they can be trucked away.

"The more of these steps that can stay within the responsibilities of the communities, the better for them," Meier said.

Loss said training harvesters has reduced waste from 50 to 60 percent to about 5 percent and has helped to preserve diversity of species, including colorful birds, sloths and monkeys.

The protection of the environment, which also helps sustain jobs for the people in the region, appealed to churches across denominations.

"The environmentally conscious piece is the one that sticks out for me," said the Rev. Karen Cox, pastor of Boulder Mennonite Church in Colorado, who used to order dozens of fronds from a grocery chain but this year is sharing a crate of 200 with five other congregations.

Cassandra Carmichael, eco-justice program director of the National Council of Churches, bought the eco-palms for her United Methodist Church in Annapolis this year.

"We felt like it was a way to exhibit in a pragmatic way our right relationship with creation as we celebrate Palm Sunday," she said of the council's promotion of the program. "And to do it any other way just wouldn't do justice to the celebration and the joy we feel at Palm Sunday."