wfn.org | Ministry of Earth-keeping Honored Grass-Roots Activist Heeded

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

GA99050 
22-June-1999 
 
                 Ministry of Earth-keeping Honored 
                   Grass-Roots Activist Heeded 
 
FORT WORTH-Terri Swearingen could be stereotyped as "no bigger than a 
minute,"  but her achievements in  challenging the powers of corporate 
America in the Ohio River Valley are monumental.  
     Swearingen is a registered nurse, a dental lab technician, a wife, 
mother and homemaker, but hardly stereotypical. A member of Westminster 
Presbyterian Church in Chester, W.V., she is coordinator and founding 
member of the Tri-State Environmental Council, and is serving a six- year 
term on the Hancock County Board of Health,  overseeing West Virginia's 
Turning Point project. Her regional and national awards are too numerous to 
fit this space.  The most recent one came from Presbyterians for Restoring 
Creation Tuesday morning when she spoke at the group's annual breakfast 
meeting. 
     The effort from which all these awards spring began with her 
organization of the fight to prevent the construction and operation of Von 
Roll Waste Technologies Industry (WTI), one of the world's largest 
commercial toxic waste incinerators.  It was to be located in the flood 
plain of the Ohio River in an impoverished minority Appalachian community, 
320 feet from the nearest home and 400 yards from an elementary school 
      "While we haven't stopped that one yet, our efforts have halted other 
incinerators from being built around the country. Since 1992 we managed 
first an Ohio moratorium and then a nationwide freeze on toxic waste 
incinerators, motivated Congress to conduct a first-ever hearing to look at 
the ways EPA bends the rules, forced an overhaul of federal combustion 
regulations (setting a first-time standard for dioxin)  and compelled the 
federal government to acknowledge the serious risk that pollution poses to 
the food chain," she said. 
     "Even with these victories," Swearingen continued, "every day,  in our 
community and others like it, we are LOSING. We are losing good science, 
human decency, sound public policy, justice and democracy."  
     Swearingen pointed out how  the real energy for change comes only from 
the grass roots, people in threatened communities, those who care.  "But we 
can't afford the luxury of waiting until every citizen becomes a victim 
before taking action," she concluded. "We have to love each other enough, 
as Jesus did. Only empathy, not sympathy, leads to justice. Instead of 
saying 'something must be done,' each of us must say, I must do 
something'."  
     Also at the breakfast meeting a tiny congregation that changed its 
name and its lifestyle in the past year was honored. Sagemont Presbyterian 
Church in Houston, Texas, replaced the sagebrush with lush gardens and 
adopted a wholistic ministry of earth-keeping, becoming in the process 
Servant Savior Community Presbyterian Church. 
 
Midge Mack 

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