Noah Was an Environmentalist

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Shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I was touring the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward with local environmental justice advocate Margie Eugene-Richard. Convinced that God needed to be reinserted into the environmental debate, Richard had recently graduated from theology school. We were driving that day through a post-apocalyptic landscape of boats dangling in trees and houses smothering cars, and God was clearly on her mind. “Wake up,” she said to an unseen congregation. “As it was in the day of Noah, so shall it be on the day of the Son of Man. Get together.”

Nearly a year after the hurricane struck, many evangelical Christians seem to have heeded Richard’s advice. Or at least started listening to some unlikely prophets. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s global warming opus, has earned rave reviews on the aptly dubbed website Inconvenient Christians. The website is helping build on the work of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a group that has angered some fundamentalists by seeking to broaden the right-wing conception of family values. Some interesting blogs have begun to chronicle this nascent movement, among them, God’s Green Thumb, published by a student at Pontifical University in Rome.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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