Autumn leaves settled on the Umatilla River in downtown Pendleton, Oregon, as it rippled gently over rocks one October day. Up an embankment and across a quiet street rose the stone tower of the First Christian Church. “I see churches as being a positive thing for change,” said Bill Aney, a retired U.S. Forest Service employee and church member.
The river was placid that autumn day as Aney walked over the Main Street bridge. But in spring 2020, heavy rains and rapid snowmelt in the Blue Mountains caused a massive flood. A levee in downtown Pendleton broke, inundating nearby streets. Part of Interstate 84 and many local roads closed, homes were evacuated, and one woman died. Climate change is projected to cause more frequent flooding in Umatilla County, according to a 2020 Oregon report. “God told us to take care of the Earth,” Aney said. He interprets that as a moral imperative to aid recovery efforts after floods and other disasters — and to push for broader climate action.
Aney belongs to Climate Vigil, an eastern Oregon organization founded about two years ago. It grew out of a prayer book written by founder Peter Fargo. So far, it’s mainly offered avenues for climate advocacy and reflection modeled on Christian practices, including a worship album and community vigils.
But Climate Vigil members felt that the issue’s urgency required them to join people of all backgrounds in fighting for common values: human rights, including the right to a safe climate. “We’ve prayed, we’ve sung, we’ve been inspired, we’ve lamented,” said Fargo. “That’s really deep soul work and hard work, and it creates this potential energy that needs to be channeled into action.” Climate Vigil’s moral and spiritual motivations could strengthen the broader movement for climate action, helping participants find the courage to persist during dark times. They saw youth climate activists in particular as people who shared their values, especially in the way young activists articulate their fundamental rights.
“We’ve prayed, we’ve sung, we’ve been inspired, we’ve lamented.”
In some ways, the idea of a broad coalition has been part of Climate Vigil since the beginning. Fargo was inspired to create the organization by two events at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland: a climate march that brought together tens of thousands of people from around the world in one noisy, energetic river of determination to turn political tides toward more climate action, and a Christian vigil at St. George’s Tron Church.
Since then, Fargo has left his communication job with the Forest Service to work full-time on Climate Vigil. He also began writing an Oregon constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a safe climate, which he hopes to get on the statewide ballot in 2026.
As part of that widened focus, Aney was preparing to host a community event — a film screening of Youth v Gov, a documentary about the lawsuit Juliana v. The United States of America, which argued that young people have a federal constitutional right to a life-sustaining climate. To garner support and inspire the communities of Pendleton, La Grande and Baker City, Climate Vigil volunteers were taking Youth v Gov on a three-day film tour.
THE RHYTHMIC WHIRRING of a popcorn machine crackled to life with a crescendo of pop-pop-pops outside a lecture hall at Pendleton’s Blue Mountain Community College, where the final screening was about to begin. The popcorn was courtesy of Umatilla County Public Health, which was hosting a booth to collect survey responses for its climate planning. The Eastern Oregon Climate Change Coalition also staffed a table, collecting contact info for its mailing list and promoting monthly Zoom climate conversations.
The film began by connecting the 21 youth in the lawsuit to their communities’ climate impacts: water scarcity on the Navajo Nation, hurricanes in Louisiana, wildfires in Oregon, and more. During an intermission, the audience — a few dozen people sprinkled through the rows of narrow tables and chairs in the lecture hall — broke into small groups to discuss the ways climate change affects them.
Pendleton High School seniors Persephone Bearchum, of the nearby Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and Aurora Whiskeyjack, of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, mentioned late-summer wildfire smoke. Bearchum runs cross-country and cheers, but coaches have to cancel or move practice inside when air quality is poor. “It’s not only impacting your physical well-being but also your mental well-being from being stuck at home,” she said. Whiskeyjack works as a lifeguard at the local pool, which shut down several days in a row last August due to smoke; she didn’t get paid for those days.
Bearchum’s mother, Claudette Enos, sat a couple of rows behind her daughter. She recalled digging for roots with her grandma in the 1990s, and said that Indigenous foods are harder to find today. Hotter summer temperatures and less rain threaten roots such as 仳áwš (cous), which Bearchum remembers digging with her family.
After intermission, the film continued rolling, with backdrops of Oregon farms, mountains and forests, among other images. Eleven of the 21 youth plaintiffs live in Oregon, a point Fargo hoped would resonate with local audiences. “Oregonians can lead on this global issue,” he said in an interview after the screening.
Still, the film ended on a somewhat despairing note: The plaintiffs’ case was dismissed. “It’s made me emotional,” said Bearchum, who teared up. “But it’s really empowering.”
In an interview the following week, Laura Hudson, co-pastor of First Presbyterian Church of La Grande, who helps host Climate Vigil events, stepped up to a metaphorical pulpit to discuss the role of hope in the climate crisis. She paraphrased the work of Miguel A. De La Torre, a Latinx scholar at Denver’s Iliff School of Theology, who writes that hope is not what gets you through the struggle to upset the status quo. “What’s necessary is the willingness to just keep working at this thing — perseverance,” Hudson said. “That helped me reframe how I saw the film. It’s the courage not to give up.”
“What’s necessary is the willingness to just keep working at this thing — perseverance. That helped me reframe how I saw the film. It’s the courage not to give up.”
Fargo hopes to grow the Climate Vigil movement through faith-based networks and churches in the region, even as he joins with others ready to support an Oregon climate amendment. Climate Vigil plans to hold a gathering in support of the amendment and a statewide climate vigil in Salem, Oregon’s capital, in the coming year.
Aiden Wolf, a Umatilla tribal member and theater student at Whitman College in Walla Walla who presented the land acknowledgment before the film screening, said that he appreciates the way Climate Vigil invites people of all cultures, in all their distinctiveness, to join forces. That’s echoed in Youth v Gov, which features young people from a variety of cultural backgrounds, including Native youth.
Wolf went home thinking about the significance of coming together. “The film made me think how different all tribes are — the practices they have, how they perceive the world around them, how they take care of it,” he said. “If we’re going to fight climate change, we’re all in the same country, all in the same planet, and we need to do it together.”
As Fargo puts it, all of us — including people of faith — are “tributaries in the big river that we all need to wade into to get to where we need to go on climate action.”
Rebecca Randall is a journalist who covers the intersection of climate change and religion and spirituality. She is based in Vancouver, Washington.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Shine a little light.
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