On April 24, three months after the deadly Eaton and Palisades fires that claimed the lives of 29 people and damaged thousands of structures across Southern California, the Diocese of Los Angeles held the first webinar in a new series focused on the environment.
“Climate Kitchen is intended to be a welcoming space for conversation around all that is going on in the Los Angeles diocese to act on climate,” Kate Varley Alonso, who hosted the webinar, told TLC. It was scheduled just in time to honor Earth Day, celebrated globally on April 22.
Earlier in April, the Creation Care Justice Ministry of the Episcopal Church invited Episcopalians to commemorate Earth Day on any Sunday this spring “by praying, preaching, and taking action to care for God’s creation.”
For the Los Angeles diocese, Climate Kitchen “will be the place to swap recipes on how best to live out our call to care for creation and fill everyone with a little food for the soul,” Alonso said, using analogies that reflect the series’ name.
The lifelong Episcopalian is a parishioner of All Saints’ in Beverly Hills and a member of the Bishop’s Commission on Climate Change, established three years ago to respond to the urgent global and local needs of the environmental crisis caused by the steady rise in global temperatures. The Rt. Rev. John Harvey Taylor is the diocesan bishop.
The Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy, the commission’s chair, said that after the deadly fires, the commission resolved to deepen its commitment to disaster resiliency and community connections. “Climate Kitchen is one of several ways for us to build those community connections,” McCarthy said.
Responding to Climate Impact
Twenty individuals from across the diocese, and one from Colorado, joined the webinar on Zoom, including Marco White, a third-generation member of St. Barnabas in Pasadena. “We’re ground zero for the Eaton fires,” he told the group. Half of the parishioners and vestry lost their homes or places of work, or both (for several families).
“There’s an extra layer to this conversation,” he said, referring to his and his fellow parishioners’ experience. “The rain that followed brought floods and then mudslides because the vegetation was all gone.” White depicted the parishioners’ experience as “wave after wave of climate impact.”
“What we experienced throughout our whole congregation was devastating,” White told TLC. “But certainly not as devastated as our sister Episcopal church, St. Mark’s.” During the fires, the decades-old church and its school campus burned to the ground.
“We know the serious reality of what we’re facing with climate change,” Alonso said at the beginning of the webinar. “We’re certainly not going to gloss over it or sugarcoat it, but instead of doom and gloom, we’re going to try to have some fun.”
The virtual meeting lasted just over an hour and felt more like a group discussion than a lecture. Participants were engaged, and over half a dozen spoke up, sharing their thoughts about the issue and their parishes’ actions.
Steve Slaten, who worships at All Saints in Riverside and is a member of the bishop’s commission, shared an update about his parish’s solar-energy efforts. He said parishioners’ ideas had seen “so many iterations” and “starts and stops” that to witness its realization is “something special.”
A solar canopy that will produce 120 percent of the parish’s energy usage is under construction. Slaten said it means “we can contribute to the grid clean energy for others to use.” Construction is expected to be completed by June, and by then, the new structure will be “plugged into the city, generating electricity for ourselves and others in the community.”
Gloria Sefton, a parishioner at St. John’s in Rancho Santa Margarita, has written green tips for the church bulletin almost every week since 2009. One of her recent favorites was simple: “You can make big batches of food rather than produce a meal every night that takes a lot of energy and pots and pans and cleanup,” Sefton said.
The content she has created over the years runs the gamut—from green travel to water usage. (“You name it, there’s a tip for it,” Alonso said.) It is available on the diocese’s website for anyone to copy and paste into a bulletin. Sefton’s advice concentrates on small actions that, though seemingly insignificant, “collectively will make a difference.”
She has been a parishioner at St. John’s since 1990. Raised in the Armenian Apostolic Church, Sefton attended Episcopal services as a child. “I found the liturgy very similar to the Armenian church, and best of all, I could understand it,” Sefton said, as it is conducted in English rather than Armenian. Sefton and her brother, Ron Saatjian, are now part of the Episcopal Church.
Saatjian worships at St. Matthew’s in Parker, Colorado, which is now exploring ways to go green. After he told his sister of the parish’s plans, she invited him to join Climate Kitchen.
Over Zoom, he suggested that the Diocese of Los Angeles share Sefton’s archive of green tips with other dioceses.
“It’s a great archive of tips, and you know, it only takes one more to make twice the impact,” Saatjian said.
An Expression of Faith
Alonso, who was part of the Episcopal Church delegation to the 29th session of the Conference of Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 29), said the series is for “any and all in the diocese who want to talk about climate change.” It’s a platform to build community and inspire others as they hear how parishes are taking action “to meet the moment.”
In describing how he met the moment, Slaten shared a confession. “I’ll be 72 this year. I’ve never been to a protest. I’ve never protested,” Slaten said. “So I went to the Hands Off protest here in Riverside, and I loved it. And I am going back.” Hands Off rallies have occurred on weekends in almost every state to protest the Trump administration’s policies, including its budget cuts to climate research.
Aside from proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life,” according to the investigative outlet ProPublica, the government also cut nearly $4 million in funding for climate-change research at Princeton University. The administration argued that it promotes exaggerated threats and increases “climate anxiety.”
“What creates climate anxiety is the destructive effects of climate change,” McCarthy said. “Responding to the Trump administration’s cuts on climate-change research is a necessary act of resistance to an administration that would gladly sacrifice any advances we have made in pursuit of their own agenda.”
“Continuing to educate and advocate for the health of a planet in peril” is part of the diocese’s response to the elimination of climate-related policies, the commission’s chair said.
As Climate Kitchen was being held just days after the death of Pope Francis, Alonso cited Laudato Si’, his encyclical on the environment, which spoke of the “urgent challenge to protect our common home,” requiring “a new and universal solidarity.”
“While the Episcopal Church doesn’t issue encyclicals in quite that same way,” she said, “creation care is certainly an important pillar of all that we stand for.”
Near the end of the webinar, Alonso referred participants to the Creation Care Justice Ministry website for more resources. She also invited everyone to a climate justice and interfaith rally on May 4 at Christ the Shepherd Lutheran Church, located at the heart of Altadena—an area devastated by the Eaton fires.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
