Even in West Virginia, where coal mining is an important industry, churchgoers have been more receptive to listening to climate-change issues than might have been guessed, according to Father Christopher Bender, a priest at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Morgantown. Van Reitmann, a wheat farmer in eastern Oregon, may be an example of the mainstreaming of environmental concern among churchgoers. Since 1948, he has gazed across his wheat fields knowing that his crop depends on elemental forces beyond his control. Earth revolves in its orbit. The sun rises.
Clouds release life-giving water.
The soil nurtures. Sowing and harvesting to the cadence of the seasons has been Reitmann's life. He says his observations are only anecdotal. He goes to church every Sunday but wouldn't describe himself as fervent. Yet when Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol, signed by the United States and more than 100 other nations in 1997, the confluence of Reitmann's belief and common sense was too much to ignore.