The summer has flowed like a river persistently searching for its home in the big Lake, and I am grateful for every chance I get to flow, like the rivers, to Lake Michigan near where I live. That spirit of gratitude extends to the work of the Great Lakes Spirituality Project, which has itself flowed into a new phase, and I’m particularly excited about it. While the Project has focused on interviews with people working to care for and protect the Great Lakes Basin from a variety of spiritual perspectives, the Project has also been slowly expanding and cutting new banks and curves in its path. From new partnerships to special events (including a great upcoming music performance), I’m looking forward to the next few months and all the Project will be working on.
Great Lakes Collaborations
For the last few years, the Great Lakes Spirituality Project has been developing collaborative partnerships with a number of organizations around the Great Lakes region. For example, the Project is now an official member of:
Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes Coalition, (HOW) - over 180 organizations in the Great Lakes are part of HOW, whose mission is to, “to secure a sustainable Great Lakes restoration plan and the federal funding to implement it.”
The Great Lakes Spirituality Project has co-signed a number of advocacy letters with HOW, including this letter advocating for funding in the FY2025 federal budget for Great Lakes restoration (one example of a letter sent to a number of different congressional committees)
Great Lakes Ecoregion Network (GLEN), a multinational organization that is developing “partnerships to protect water quality and the ecosystems within the Basin.”
GLEN has Issue Teams working on the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, Climate Change, Agricultural Policy, Toxics and Radionuclides, Physical Integrity, and Biodiversity and Habitat. I currently serve on the GLEN Board as Secretary.
Michigan Climate Action Network (MiCAN), a network of 130 groups and 40,000+ individuals which “amplifies, connects, and supports the people, organizations, and communities demanding urgent, bold, and equitable solutions for a just transition to a resilient future.”
In the fall of 2023, MiCAN co-sponsored a day of advocacy for clean energy in Michigan’s capitol, Lansing. You can read about that event in two Project blog posts - Part 1 and Part 2 - from that day, including interviews with some of the participants.
Special Projects
Collaboration is at the heart of the Great Lakes Spirituality Project’s efforts these days, and that includes hosting a very special concert with award-winning roots musician Wade Fernandez, a member of the Menominee Nation. On Tuesday, August 27 at 7:30 PM EDT, Wade will be performing his music and talking about how we can honor Grandmother Earth and protect the waters of the Great Lakes. If you’d like to take part, you can register here for this free event. A number of organizations are helping to sponsor the event (you can see the list on the homepage), but thanks in particular go to the Perennial Waters Project, the other main co-sponsor of the performance.
We are also working with partners on a new effort, tentatively titled, “A Spiritual Journey Around the Great Lakes.” We’ll have more to announce later, as we are in the very beginning stages of this effort, but the focus of the Journey will be the creation of online, self-guided materials that will help participants to know sacred places around the Great Lakes Basin more deeply and to reflect on the spiritual meaning of these locations, with the goal of inspiring people to care for and protect them. As I said, more to come, so stay tuned!
Educational Presentations
Education around protecting the Great Lakes Basin from a spiritual perspective has been a big part of the Project’s work, and it will continue to be in the future. Here are links to two presentations I’ve given in the last few years for church groups:
St. Philip Lutheran Church, Trenton, MI - “Healing Waters: Growing into a Spirituality of the Great Lakes”
Resurrection Catholic Church, Allouez, WI - “Care for God’s Creation”
If you’d ever like to have me and the Great Lakes Spirituality Project do a presentation for your organization, just let me know!
And of course, I’ll be doing future blog posts and interviews as I can in between all the other work that’s happening with the Project. It’s an exciting time to be working on protecting the Great Lakes Basin, and I believe a spiritual perspective is as essential as ever to creating a healthier and more sustainable future for all life that depends on the waters of the Great Lakes.
If you have ideas for future efforts for the Project, I’d love to hear from you. Just send an email to dan@glspirit.com. We can never have too many good ideas!
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