By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
Saturday, April 8, 2006; B11
Combining ecology and theology, hundreds of churches are choosing "eco-palms" for their Palm Sunday services this year.
The idea is resonating with congregations that had not given much thought to where palms come from. But many of them have taken an interest in similar causes, such as fair trade coffee, which benefits Third World coffee growers.
"To have in our hand on Palm Sunday a palm that we know has been harvested in an ecologically friendly way, in a way that's going to benefit the communities and the people who harvested them, adds that much more depth to our celebration of Palm Sunday," said Brenda Meier, parish projects coordinator for Lutheran World Relief.
The Baltimore-based relief agency has taken the lead in promoting palm fronds that are produced in a way intended to preserve the environment and protect the livelihood of the Mexican and Guatemalan harvesters.
A pilot program last year involved 20 mostly Midwestern churches and the purchase of 5,000 palm fronds. This year, 230 churches in at least 26 states have ordered more than 65,000 fronds.
That's a fraction of the more than 300 million palm fronds that experts say are harvested each year for U.S. consumption, but advocates hope interest in eco-palms will grow as more people learn about the movement.
Activists say Palm Sunday, when Christians recall Jesus's entry into Jerusalem, is the perfect time to draw attention to the issue. Always a week before Easter, Palm Sunday will be celebrated tomorrow by most Christian denominations; Eastern Orthodox churches will celebrate the day a week later.
The movement involves agricultural experts at the University of Minnesota, who work with an exporter that has taught harvesters how to operate with less waste and fewer middlemen. Proponents of eco-palms say typical harvesting practices emphasize quantity rather than quality, provide harvesters with scant earnings and threaten birds and other wildlife that thrive in the shaded forests where the palms grow.
The 22-cents-a-frond price for eco-palms is more than double what some other fronds cost, but it includes 5 cents to help Latin American communities with development projects such as building a school kitchen or providing health care or insurance.
The project is sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management, which is working with nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala and Mexico. Officials and participants say it is making people think about how the green stems they have taken for granted get into their hands once a year.
"People are really surprised," said RaeLynn Jones Loss, program coordinator for the project at the university. "Most people don't know where peaches come from. They don't have any idea where palms come from."
But it can be a challenge to get churches to consider changing their buying practices, she said.
"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."