What has seminary campus life to do with disaster survival, water critters, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs)?

“Community,” according to The Very Rev. Chad Hatfield, Chancellor at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and the administrator charged with assuring that the seminary environment coincides with the values expressed in the chapel worship and the theological education of the classroom.

New York City firefighter Bobby Kitson (left) trains Fr. Steven Belonick, Associate Dean for Student Affairs at St. Vladimir's Seminary (center), to evacuate disaster victims, as other seminary employees look on. Seminary employees are earning certification as Community Emergency Response Team members.

“There is no split between the spiritual and material life,” Fr. Chad stated. “One of our saints, Symeon the New Theologian, poetically writes that God enters our hands and feet, so that we might become his body, working in the world.”

He noted three areas in which the seminary is reaching out to the wider community and involving itself in safety concerns and ecological studies on city, county, state, and federal levels, connecting with the larger society in a manner consistent with the holistic theological approach that has marked the seminary since its inception.

Currently, seven seminary employees are training with the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), a program developed by the City of Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) and subsequently, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), made available to all communities nationwide. The City of Yonkers began CERT training in 2003, and has trained response teams in diverse venues — from Home Depot to the Boy Scouts of America to employees and students at public schools.

Following twenty hours of training during the month of July 2008, the seminary employees will be certified in basic self-help and mutual aid functions such as disaster preparedness, fire safety, disaster medical operations and psychology, light search and rescue, CERT organization, and the recognition and handling of terrorist incidents. Another group of employees will receive the same training and certification in October 2008. The Rev. Protodeacon Kirill Sokolov, Associate Chancellor for Systems at St. Vladimir’s, arranged for the cooperative effort between the city and the seminary.

“Having a certified team ready to help their brothers and sisters on campus or in the neighborhood, in the event of either a small emergency or a major disaster, is crucial to our common well being,” said the Associate Dean for Student Affairs, The Very Rev. Steven Belonick. Especially important in the training so far, he said, was the emphasis on team organization and the distribution of responsibilities, as well as on the importance of the team to continually process their emotions and performance following an emergency situation.

As a further example of community involvement, second-year seminarian Daniel Talley has volunteered to monitor the water quality of “Troublesome Brook,” which flows through the seminary campus, as part of the Westchester County Citizen Volunteer Monitoring Program (WCCVMP).

Seminarian Talley and his team of campus residents will be testing water in the stream weekly, from July through October 2008, by conducting chemical analyses and collecting macroinvertabrate samples (water critters without backbones), as well assessing the quality of the stream bank — tasks well suited to Mr. Talley’s background in ornamental horticulture and landscape design. The raw data they collect will help create a comprehensive database of water quality for the watersheds of Westchester County, since Troublesome Brook flows through the Bronx River Watershed.

Established in 2003, through the Safe Drinking Water Act funding distributed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the WCCVMP exists to create a baseline of water quality data on both streams and rivers and ponds and lakes and to make that water quality history accessible to the public. Rather than being a policing body, the WCCVMP creates a comprehensive database of water quality for the watersheds of Westchester County.

Seminarian Daniel Talley, second-year student at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Yonkers, analyzes the water quality of Troublesome Brook, as part of a volunteer citizens' watershed study run by Westchester County.

“This is a way to reach out to the people of Yonkers,” said Mr. Talley, “and to understand the watershed in which we live. The data we collect will begin to effect changes, and our ultimate hope is for cleaner streams running into the Bronx River, and eventually into Long Island Sound.”

Finally, as part of a broader goal of environmental sustainability, the seminary requested help from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), an agency that provides energy audits and analyses to small businesses, churches, schools, and other facilities to help them make informed decisions and implement energy-efficient strategies.

“NYSERDA literature informs us that ‘the largest controllable budget category in a school is typically energy related,’ ” said Fr. Chad, “and our seminary has taken that statistic to heart. Thus, in November and December 2007, we invested in complete energy audits for nine campus buildings, and in turn received detailed analyses and reports on these structures from NYSERDA, with each report including ‘Energy Cost Reduction Opportunities,’ which our Board of Trustees is reviewing, and some of which we are in the process of implementing.”

According to NYSERDA projections, implementation of all the recommended measures would result in (approximately) an annual reduction of the seminary campus consumption of electricity by 75,600 kilowatt-hours, and a reduction in annual oil consumption by 8,200 gallons.

“Implementation of energy-saving measures would further allow us to demonstrate environmentally sound practices tied to our theological vision of stewardship, while giving us the capacity to pursue our core mission of educating theological students for service to their local parishes and communities and to the world,” Fr. Chad concluded.

The NYSERDA audit, however, represents only one segment of St. Vladimir’s Seminary’s involvement in environmental stewardship. For decades, according to Theodore Bazil, Associate Chancellor for Advancement, the seminary has had a sustained program for the planting and greening of the campus, in cooperation with Christopher Nolan, Central Park Conservancy's Vice President for Capital Projects and Chief Landscape Architect. Mr. Bazil noted that the campus also had requested an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment be performed 4 to 5 years ago, to gauge the health of Crestwood Lake, which borders the west side of the campus.

But when Fr. Chad took office in July 2007, he began introducing other concept of environmental sustainability to the administration, faculty, staff, and students, specifically connecting “green” forms of sustainability to renewed theological vision. Thus, in September 2007, the campus launched a “Go Green” initiative, which included a keynote speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Theokritoff, who tied classic Orthodox theological perspective to stewardship of the earth’s resources, and a manager from the Yonkers City Department of Public Works who invited the seminary community to participate in new recycling and waste management efforts.

At the same forum, the Chancellor announced the corporate membership of the seminary in “The Fellowship of the Transfiguration,” an environmental agency under the umbrella of the Standing Conference of Orthodox Bishops (SCOBA), a multi-jurisdictional, national episcopal body that meets semi-annually for discussion and decisions on inter-Orthodox and ecumenical matters and to review the work of its commissions and dialogues.

Additionally, in its Fall 2007 Catalog, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press featured a 2-page spread of environmentally related theological works already published by press authors, and it plans to publish an entire book about creation and the environment by Dr. Theokritoff, as part of its Foundations Series, by 2010. Further, Protodeacon Kirill has concentrated on “greening” the technology on campus by reducing power consumption whenever possible.

“These activities are our response to a need,” Fr. Chad concluded. “This is part of what we mean when we say we are a community, and, a segment of the larger community.”