Historically Black North Carolina church fights environmental racism through advocacy, education, creation care

[Episcopal News Service] For decades, the historically Black St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in southeastern Raleigh, North Carolina, has focused much of its ministry on improving its community through environmental stewardship.

In the late 1950s, during the time of Jim Crow segregation, Rochester Heights was established as the first planned subdivision in Raleigh for Black families; it was built on wetlands the city had for over 70 years used as a dumping ground for raw sewage and garbage. The wetlands are a floodplain for Walnut Creek, a tributary of the Neuse River. 

In 1965, St. Ambrose followed the growing Black population and moved from downtown Raleigh to Rochester Heights. In the decades that followed, the church has adapted its ministry to respond to flooding and other environmental hazards associated with its geography.

“God gives us the environment to be good stewards and good neighbors,” the Rev. Jemonde Taylor, St. Ambrose’s rector since 2012, told Episcopal News Service. “We have had a history of sinning against the environment, so how can churches be repairers of the relationship between humanity and creation? We fight against environmental racism and try to be good ecological neighbors with the environment.”

Environmental racism – also known as environmental inequality, ecological racism or ecological apartheid – is a form of institutional racism where environmental hazards, such as landfills, power plants, hazardous waste disposal facilities and incinerators, are purposefully and disproportionately located in poor communities, usually predominantly populated by people of color.

Polluting nature with sewage and garbage is “misusing and wasting what God has given you,” Carolyn Winters, a longtime parishioner of St. Ambrose, told ENS.

“If you’re not from here and you saw what it looked like, you may not think it as such a big deal – just somebody being lazy and dumping their trash. But it was more than that because the city of Raleigh knew who was living in the area when they dumped raw sewage there,” she said. “It was affecting the community that I had grown to love in a very negative way, and it was affecting me because we had to breathe that polluted air.”

Winters is a founding member of Partners for Environmental Justice, a secular nonprofit group of environmental advocates in southeastern Raleigh that began as a ministry committee of St. Ambrose and two other parishes, Trinity Episcopal Church in Fuquay-Varina and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cary. In the late 1990s, members of the group – then known as Episcopalians for Environmental Justice – began cleaning up Walnut Creek. Over time, they started collaborating with conservation organizations and academics, and business and community leaders. Partners for Environmental Justice was instrumental in the 2009 establishment of the Walnut Creek Wetland Park, which includes nature preserves and hiking trails and an education center with a free library with nature-themed books for all ages.

“We’ve been doing this work for more than 25 years, but we still have plenty left to do,” Winters said.

For St. Ambrose, working to eradicate environmental racism includes advocacy and civic engagement. For example, Taylor chairs the Raleigh Stormwater Management Advisory Commission, which manages resources to protect public infrastructure and residential property. He also in 2020 started ONE Wake, an organization of more than 50,000 people and over 50 nonprofits. ONE Wake’s first task was taking on one of the largest developers in the region that had proposed a 150-acre development, 3,000 feet upstream from St. Ambrose. The plan included razing 80 acres of forest, which would have increased the risk in Rochester Heights of flooding from stormwater runoff. After negotiating, the development added a flooding mitigation contingency to the plan.

“Combating environmental racism is in the DNA of St. Ambrose because we are doing it for the survival of our church, or else we cease to exist,” Taylor said. “Our efforts are not an exercise that’s detached from reality.”

Developing green infrastructure is also instrumental in environmental justice work for St. Ambrose. In 2021, The Episcopal Church awarded St. Ambrose a $24,000 Creation Care and Environmental Racism grant to establish The Healing Pod, a project that combines mental health counseling and a wheelchair-friendly healing garden with raised garden beds and pollinator-friendly native flowers, as well as an Ethiopian-inspired labyrinth designed to make water soak into the ground and avoid flowing into Walnut Creek. The project was developed in addition to previous conservation efforts on the church’s six-acre campus, including building three rain gardens and rainwater cisterns that capture rainwater for irrigation use.

“Your theology must match your geography,” Taylor said. “That’s how we look to see how to serve both the worshiping community and the surrounding community.”

The project also includes developing St. Ambrose’s Wading Deep podcast that addresses “the impact of environmental racism, economic disenfranchisement and the resilience and resurrection of a community.” Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was interviewed for Wading Deep’s 11th episode in April 2023.

“[Creation care] is engagement with God’s vision for the creation, for all of us from the beginning,” Curry said in the podcast.

Through its healing garden situated fully enclosed in the church’s courtyard, St. Ambrose also strives to support environmental justice through horticultural therapy, which involves promoting human healing and rehabilitation through gardening activities. Studies show that horticultural therapy can help improve mental and physical well-being and reduce stress. Children and adults are welcome to plant, tend to and harvest fruits and vegetables in St. Ambrose’s healing garden, which is open to the public. The church also hosts educational events throughout the year, such as herb potting and Malian bògòlanfini – mud cloth – dyeing, and offers meditative activities in the healing garden to help promote self-care.

Kirsten Reberg-Horton, a parishioner of St. Ambrose, is a professional landscape designer and therapeutic horticulturist who designed the church’s healing garden. She told ENS that “aha” moments occur every time someone enters the garden, which “always leads to wonderful conversations.”

“It’s amazing to see parishioners come in and be like, ‘That’s how strawberries grow. That’s how collards grow. I had no idea. And what role does the flower on the strawberry have in development? I want to learn,’” Reberg-Horton told ENS. “It’s also amazing to see people taking home fresh food and feeling nurtured by it. …Children adore the garden. They run out every week after church to see what’s growing, and they look forward to helping harvest and plant and water the garden.”

Taylor said every endeavor, whether it’s advocacy work, education or addressing mental health, plays an important role in fighting for environmental justice.

“As a congregation, one of our guiding principles is the last chapter of Revelation – 22 – where St. John the Divine sees that a new heaven is coming to Earth and a new creation is being made,” he said. “We’re always striving to work toward not going back to Eden, but to look forward to Revelation and how to make the signs of a new heaven and a new Earth visible and tangible today.”

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.