Saving the planet by using the golden rule

Marty Ostrow(right) and Terry Kay Rockefeller have created ''Renewal,'' a film about environmental work being done by religious groups around the country. It is in limited release. (Jodi hilton for the boston globe)

He was Al Gore before Gore was cool.

Two decades ago, Cambridge filmmaker Marty Ostrow filmed some episodes for the PBS series "Race to Save the Planet," trumpeting the threat of pollution and energy waste. Yet while exposing that inconvenient truth years before Gore won an Oscar for doing so, Ostrow was nagged by a sense that his work was incomplete.

The PBS series focused on science and public policy, but he had wanted to also address values and the spiritual imperative of environmentalism.

This student of religion and ecology has turned in his finished project. His latest film, "Renewal," made with Arlington colleague Terry Kay Rockefeller, is a 90-minute, episodic documentary on faith communities - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists - tackling environmental problems around the country.

It's been a spiritual journey for the 61-year-old documentarian, an unobservant Jew with a passing resemblance to Woody Allen. He gives Gore full credit for rousing the public from indifference to climate change through his movie. But years of research have convinced him that we can't save the planet without religion and religious believers.

Western culture, Ostrow believes, needs to confront and change its consumer-driven, waste-and-pollute ways, and then change them. "That sort of inward reflection goes to some deep places. Who deals with those deep places in our world?" he says. "Religions! That's what religions are good for. They're good for talking about moral or self-reflection [and] to treat each other [by] the golden rule."

And so "Renewal" shows, for example, Chicago Muslims supporting sustainable food production and humanely raised animals. One activist, a woman in hijab, explains to the camera that the Prophet Mohammed "told us that we should be kind to the animals, treat them with respect, treat them with dignity." Meanwhile, evangelical Christians in Appalachia organize airborne tours of mountaintops scalped by coal mining operations that "rape," as one puts it, the surrounding environment.

In New Jersey, a group called GreenFaith helps churches adopt energy conservation and recycling. A minister with the group says, "God created not just humankind with love, but the entire created order, with love and with a purpose. And we know for sure that that purpose wasn't to end up in a landfill."

Discussing these efforts, Ostrow grows animated, enthusiastic. You'd half think he might have found religion himself, finally. Yet he still doesn't go to temple. Growing up, he says, he didn't feel particularly spiritual, except in the presence of two works of creation. Music was one. The other was nature.

You might expect a kid raised on suburban Long Island to feel awed by nature on summer trips to the ocean or the country, where, he says, the stars at night filled him with "this feeling that, 'Oh, I'm in the presence of something I don't have words to explain,' the mysterious, the divine, the sacred."

As an adult, he was drawn to the writings of Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and self-described "geologian," who draws on Eastern and Western religions to advocate humanity's awareness of its bond with the environment. After "Race to Save the Planet" he stumbled upon scholarly conferences run by the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, which archives case studies of environmental activism by religious communities.

He approached Rockefeller, who helped create PBS's "Nova" and produced parts of the network's epic history of the civil rights movement, "Eyes on the Prize." He contemplated a movie mixing interviews of scholars with nature shots. But this Animal Planet-meets- Ken Burns approach would have been "pretty intellectual - not film material," says Rockefeller. Then Ostrow heard about the on-the-ground work by religious communities. "It became a different kind of story to tell on the screen," she says.

The partners identified 30 compelling stories and whittled them down to eight, using a process Rockefeller calls "mix and match. We didn't want three stories on recycling." They also determined to roam across the country, and across religions, in their coverage.

The film has had some theatrical screenings - Boston's Museum of Fine Arts showed "Renewal" earlier this year - but Ostrow has fingers crossed for an airing by public television stations in the spring. Numerous church groups have also shown it, according to Ostrow, nourishing its makers' hope that "Renewal" depicts an important cultural development justifying its $750,000 production cost.

"One of the things Marty and I kept asking each other was, 'Is this a movement yet?' " says Rockefeller. "I think that this is a movement that is still growing."

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