"Green sisters are ascribing new meanings to their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience through the practice of non-materialist poverty that uses few of the Earth's resources, and remains chaste from consumerist desires," Northwestern University religious studies professor Sarah McFarland Taylor told a University of Toronto audience May 22.

Taylor is the author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology. She spent 10 years studying the ecological movement among American and Canadian women religious.

{amazon id='0674024400' align='right'}Taylor characterizes blossoming ecological awareness and fast-spreading eco-ministries among North American nuns as "a green blade rising amidst what some authors characterize as the post-Vatican II rubble of women's religious life."

The eco-sisters have found new ways of reinhabiting their traditions, including reviving and reinventing habits. By committing to wear only used clothes — whether they buy them or exchange for them — or even going so far as to wear habits made from materials derived from sustainable manufacturing and organically grown cotton, the green sisters are once again making their clothing part of who they are, as it was before habits were largely discarded in the 1960s and 1970s.

For contemplative sisters, an ecological focus has led to a rediscovery of the rule of St. Benedict, said Taylor.

"In Benedictine terms, the sisters' commitment to using self-generating, renewable resources fulfills St. Benedict's insistence on community self-sufficiency," she said.

Sister of Charity of Halifax Gertie Joksch believes that if her order's founder, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, were alive today she would be a green sister. St. Elizabeth's care and concern for the poor would lead her to address the ecological crisis, Joksch said.

"It's the poor who are in the most polluted areas. Because of our pollution, young children have lung problems when they grow up in areas where they're breathing toxic air all the time," she said. "It comes around again. It's the poor who suffer the most."

The first Sisters of Charity founded and taught in schools so that poor children would not remain outsiders in their own society. When today's Sisters of Charity embrace ecological causes they're acting on the same basic impulse, Joksch said.

Living with ecological awareness also means a new and deeper awareness of the evangelical counsels — the three vows all Catholic religious make to live in povertry, chastity and obedience, Joksch said.

Being aware of the damage consumerism does to God's Earth puts a new impetus behind many sisters' desire to live the vow of poverty, she said.

"We live in a way that's sustainable with the Earth," she said. "I think we're called to live our poverty that way, in relation to what's sustainable for Earth."

As the green sisters find their way back to the roots of religious life through environmentalism they are also revitalizing their communities.

"Not that communities of sisters aren't aging and haven't aged, but I was privy in this research to a very different window on the lives of Roman Catholic religious communities," said Taylor. "I've been privy to a world of athletic, Levi-clad, suntanned nuns out digging vegetable beds, pruning fruit trees, building eco-villages, launching clean water campaigns and celebrating planet Earth's seasons and cycles."

A focus on how humans are part of God's creation has also attracted novices to religious communities which previously seemed to be heading for extinction.

"This moving ahead with this mission of Earth healing, it is about a kind of reinvention that generates interest in younger generations," Taylor said.