WHEN HEAVEN MEETS EARTH:
Faith and the Environment in the Chesapeake Bay
Farmers and watermen of the Chesapeake Bay watershed
share a common struggle to live off the Bay’s resources and
to maintain their cultural identities. Both communities felt they
were losing their cultural and economic way of life and that the
environmentalists of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation were responsible
for their problems. When Heaven Meets Earth chronicles Susan Drake
Emmerich’s faith-based stewardship approach to resolving the
conflict between environmentalists, farmers and watermen, and the
dramatic transformation of the faith and resource-dependent communities
of Tangier Island, VA and Sideling Hill Creek, PA toward greater
stewardship of land, water, fish and local economy based on their
biblical faith. .
The watermen made a covenant to change their ways from taking illegally
sized crabs and illegal amounts of crabs as well as polluting the
Bay to maintaining the fishery laws and cleaning-up the Bay. Kara
Unger Ball of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Susan Emmerich
and the leaders of the Tangier Watermen’s Stewardship for
the Chesapeake (TaSC) met with farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania
to share their story which included the biblical stewardship message
and their covenant. Badly managed farms can dump manure, pesticides
and silt into rivers and streams. These streams end up in the Chesapeake
Bay where run-off kills sea grass beds, crabs and oysters and other
wildlife. Farmers were invited to Tangier Island to witness the
watermen and their struggles. Later, those same farmers pledged
their own stewardship covenant and a series of land-use commitments
to better steward their farms and adjacent waterways in order to
care for their neighbors down the Bay, thus implementing the biblical
principle of loving your neighbor as yourself.
To download photos,
click here
To purchase a DVD, or to arrange for broadcast rights,
call:
1-608-445-2005 or
1-866-SKUNKFILMS
For information on Tangier Island and the Stewardship Initiative,
Contact Susan Drake Emmerich at: sdemmerich@yahoo.com
