Giving up carbon for Lent

  
[From M.Z. Hemingway at GetReligion.org]
 

 
One of the things I wish we saw more were casual inclusions of religion in
stories about general life. It seems that there’s a lot of
compartmentalizing of religion — as if stories are completely secular
or they’re pigeonholed as religion news.
 
So I like the ideas behind theses two stories. The first comes from a U.S. News & World Report
blog called Fresh Greens. It covers the “green movement and looks for
ways to be an ecofriendly consumer without breaking the bank.” Producer
Maura Judkis looks at whether Lent will decrease Catholics’ carbon footprint.
She calculates that 354 million pounds of meat will go uneaten during
Lent — using the number of registered Catholics and per capita meat
consumption.
 
To put that abstract figure into perspective, that’s the
equivalent of to 1.5 million round trip flights from New York to Los
Angeles not being taken.
 
Obviously, I realize that this is not a precise science - more like
a game of “What if.” There are plenty of Christians other than
Catholics who give up meat for Lent, and there are plenty of Catholics
who don’t participate. There’s also the factor of the carbon emissions
from fish that many eat on Lenten Fridays instead, which I left out
because there are so many kinds of fish that we eat, and each has a
different carbon footprint. Either way, Catholics that participate in
Lent are automatically lowering their carbon footprint, which is a good
thing, since some church officials have urged Christians to give up
carbon for the 40-day period.
 

 I also just thought the blog post was funny in that way that makes
you think that sometimes journalists can only understand a Christian
spiritual discipline if in coincides with another political aim that
journalists admire. I guess it’s a good thing that Lent is politically
correct! Still, it’s a funny hook for a Lenten story and a good thing
to enter into the “religion of environmentalism” files.