Monkservation Easements

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The laudable efforts to preserve the Huntsville Trappist monastery open land in Northern Utah (see: “Huntsville monastery has faded away, but preservation prayers have been answered for its farm fields”) caused me to ask myself an interesting question: what are other American monasteries doing to sustain and protect the pristine acres on which they sit? The answer? A lot!

I discovered part of this answer in a 2019 article I found online, “The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America” (see: Monastic greening article). In this article, Vancouver college professor Jason M. Brown explains some of the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications from the last half century of this rather unique green movement.

Among other things, Brown points to a letter that famous Kentucky Trappist monk/writer Thomas Merton sent to Rachel Carson. Carson was a marine biologist who helped spur the global environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring. Merton’s journal entry for December 11, 1962 indicated the monk wanted to obtain and read Carson’s book: “Someone will say: you worry about birds: why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world and are part of it and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves, spiritually, morally and in every way. It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.”

Merton’s 1967 letter to Carson noted, “If the monk is a man whose whole life is built around a deeply religious appreciation of his call to wilderness and paradise, and thereby to a special kind of kinship with God’s creatures in the new creation … then we might suggest that the monk, of all people, should be concerned with staying in the ‘wilderness’ and helping to keep it a true ‘wilderness and paradise.’ The monk should be anxious to preserve the wilderness in order to share it with those who need to come out from the cities and remember what it is like to be under trees and to climb mountains.”

Brown’s article also describes how the Abbey of Gethsemani—where Merton lived—held a 2008 conference titled “Monasticism and the Environment.” During this Buddhist/Catholic interfaith conference, monks/participants “argued for a shift toward a ‘green’ monasticism, whether Buddhist or Catholic, through theological and spiritual interpretation of their respective traditions and wiser use of resources and land bases. The talks each addressed some aspect of bridging between monasticism and environmental discourse, pointing to the Benedictine work ethic, the sacramental theology of Catholicism [God using nature to communicate grace to God’s people], or the examples of saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi.”

My Google searches on this issue also revealed that many American Trappist monasteries have been thinking about these same things—and taking some interesting and unique steps to protect their land—for several years.

In 2004, the Star News Online reported that South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings had obtained “a $32 million grant through a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that protects coastal areas. As a condition for the grant, a private landowner had to donate a conservation easement on their property in the area. Neighboring Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery, agreed to such an easement on its land, which includes 3 miles of riverfront. The easement means the property can never be developed.” (see: Monastery helps state acquire land) Mepkin Abbey, which is near Charleston, sits on some 3,000 acres of historic plantation land that Time magazine publisher Henry R. Luce donated to the monks.

Similarly, a 2007 article in the Georgia Bulletin, the Atlanta Catholic Archdiocese newspaper, reported that the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, had “agreed to protect a section of its land in perpetuity as a natural habitat, and, in exchange, the city of Atlanta paid the community over $750,000 for the conservation easement.” The Conyers Trappist monks used that payment to buy a parcel of land near the monastery and “secure it from development in the future.” (see: Conyers monastery conservation easement)

Sometimes the monks have worked with interesting partners in these environmental protection efforts. In 2010, the Bonneville Power Administration funded a conservation easement in Oregon’s Willamette Valley that included 1,300 acres from Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist monastery.

BPA acted to “partially mitigate for the impacts caused by the construction and inundation of hydroelectric and flood control dams in the Willamette Basin.” BPA identified the monks’ property as a “high-priority conservation area” filled with “native conifer woodlands, upland prairie, oak savanna, oak woodlands, grasslands and wet prairies” that supported “many species of plants and wildlife including several migratory and resident birds such as the acorn woodpecker, streaked-horned lark and white-breasted nuthatch.” (see: BPA easement fact sheet)

Such monastic actions not only are consistent with Catholic teaching, but sometimes they actually anticipate it. A November 2019 headline from the Catholic News Agency invited readers to “Meet the monks who decided to go green years before ‘Laudato Si’” (see Green Virginia Trappists). Laudato Si, of course, is Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical about Christian life and the environment, calling for “care for our common home.”

The 2019 news story reported how long before Laudato Si, the Trappists at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia took steps to be better stewards of the environment. Among other things, the monks employed environment consultants, changed their agricultural practices to protect both land and water, leased land to an organic farmer, offered “green burials” at their cemetery, and put most of their land into a conservation easement, promising to keep the land open and for agricultural use.

One monk explained, “We live a way of life that’s literally rooted in the land.” The Berryville Trappist monks also had history on their minds when they established one part of their easement. The monastery is located on the site of the biggest Civil War battle in Virginia’s Clarke County, the 1864 Battle of Cool Spring. In exchange for putting this land under easement, the monks received about $2.5 million from the Department of the Interior and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. (see: Conservation Easement Protects Monastery Property Forever)

Even without easements, other Trappist monasteries have been actively involved in various forms of preservation and sustainability for a long time, including my beloved (and now-closed) Holy Trinity Abbey in Utah (see: Sustainable Brother Stanislaus). The Abbey of Gethsemani is a Kentucky Registered Natural Area. The wine vineyards at New Clairvaux Abbey in California grow with recycled water and the monks use solar power when possible in their wine production. The beer-brewing monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts actively support the town of Spencer’s green belt initiative, which establishes a continuous corridor of preserved forests and streams to relieve stress on local wildlife.

New Melleray Abbey in Iowa builds and sells wooden coffins and urns, hewn from trees grown in a forest on the monastery property. For every person buried in a Trappist casket, the New Melleray monks plant a new tree in their sustainable forest. In their mission statement, the monks of Genesee Abbey in upstate New York promise to protect their “environment and natural resources.” And Utah monk Charles Cummings, author of 1991’s Eco-Spirituality: Toward a Reverent Life, wrote, “Perceived as Creation, nature invites us to turn to the Creator and to take up our responsibility to protect and enhance the natural world as the Garden of both God and humankind.”

Thus, the evidence is overwhelming. American Trappist monks are deeply concerned about preserving the outside world around us, and it is not some politically-correct sensibility. Instead, their commitment flows naturally from their abiding concern about developing the deeper life within, and indeed life in the hereafter.

As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si, “[T]he ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion…Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

These Trappists have a very unique form of environmental concern. I like to call it monkservation.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.