By Rev. Susan Engh
A few days ago I put my Just Elder self to work for the sake of a place that my family and I consider sacred. In St. Paul there was a hearing conducted by the U.S. Forest Service considering testimony regarding proposed sulfide-ore copper mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northern Minnesota. (Read about it at www.savetheboundarywaters.org.)
Full disclosure: my daughter works for The Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters. We first introduced her to this pristine wilderness when she was in elementary school. She went with me and some older youth from my church on more than one canoe trip there. Everyone in our family has been there multiple times over the course of our lives. My husband and I had each been introduced to the BWCAW on similar church youth group trips in our younger days. My husband’s father, also a Lutheran pastor, had taken youth from his church every summer for over 20 years. So our daughter follows in a long line of BWCAW devotees.
That evening my husband and I joined my daughter’s organization, along with about 1,000 other activists, to show our commitment to the protection of this vast area of wilderness wonder. My daughter convinced Mike and me to put our names into the lottery of those who would be invited to speak at the 2-and-1/2-hour-long hearing. My name was drawn and called about halfway into the evening.
As I stood to speak, my daughter reports that she and her colleagues started ticking off the categories of citizen that I represented: woman, mother, pastor, grandmother, transplant from another state (Illinois). All good! I guess officials listening to the testimony keep track of such things as well.
What I chose to talk about in my 3 minutes of allotted time was about how my trips as a young person to the Boundary Waters had shaped my appreciation of community and interdependence, my development as a leader, and my sense of awe about God’s creative design and our responsibility to protect and preserve it. I talked about how inspiring it was to take youth on BWCAW canoe trips from the churches that I pastored and witness them growing in their own understanding of each of those things. I talked about how even my late, very right-wing father believed that conservation of the earth is a sacred trust and a basic conservative value; so why have we let issues like this turn so partisan?
My two minutes were up in seemingly no time. But I felt proud that I had decided to put my name in that lottery. It felt right to stand and speak on behalf of something not only I believe in, but that generations of my family before and after me also have held dear. It felt necessary to acknowledge out loud that our Creator God has everything at stake in what gets decided about this alarming issue.
My two grandchildren were in the audience that evening. They’re too young to understand all that this is about. But there’s no doubt in my mind that, as much as this is about the BWCAW and protecting its lands, waterways, flora and fauna, this is also about those two children and about the legacy that my daughter, my husband and I want to pass on to them.
The tag line for the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters reads: You have one chance to save a national treasure. I didn’t want to miss my one chance.
