Betsy Gaines Quammen first saw the light in Louisiana, where poor black women had organized through their Christian church to fight a large oil refinery that was releasing poisonous dioxins into the air.

“The campaign was unlike any I’d seen,” said Gaines Quammen, who had spent years working to protect wildlife and served on the national Sierra Club board.

The Louisiana fight combined the passion of religion with a concern for taking care of “God’s green Earth.” Community meetings “were like revivals,” she said. And the black women won their fight.

Gaines Quammen said that’s when it occurred to her that religious groups could be a powerful force in saving the Earth. They are, first of all, already organized. And second, she said, “Each faith has a mandate to take care of creation.”

The upshot was that in 2004, she founded The Tributary Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to harnessing the world’s religions to the missions of saving species and their habitats.

“Every successful movement has had a religious component,” she said, from abolition to women’s suffrage, to the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements.

Gaines Quammen has seen her fledgling organization grow from just herself working out of her closet into a small nonprofit with a handful of employees in Bozeman, Mongolia and Bhutan. Last year it spent $252,000, according to IRS filings.

Now 43, she is married to renowned science writer David Quammen and pursuing a doctorate in environmental history and religion at Montana State University.

The Tributary Fund won recognition two weeks ago from a much larger, older organization, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, founded by England’s Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth.

It was “really exciting,” Gaines Quammen said, to be honored at ARC’s meeting in Assisi, Italy, by Princess Michael of Kent, before a group that included leaders from Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish religions.

“Eighty-five percent of the world practices a faith,” she said. “That’s 5 billion people.

“Religions have been around longer than governments, empires or political parties. That’s where you’re going to have an impact, making strides in how people look at the environment.”

Gaines Quammen said her first attempt to enlist religion on behalf of the environment started in 2002 in Mongolia. There, the taimen, one of the world’s largest salmon, was badly threatened. Local people didn’t eat the fish, but did serve as guides for poachers.

She and American fisheries biologists met with local Buddhist monks. They rebuilt a monastery and sent a monk to get environmental training.

They asked the monks if there was anything in their prayers about the fish. The monks found a saying that, “The death of one taimen equals the souls of 999 people suffering.”

“As soon as the monks started talking about the issues, the community started to listen,” she said. Now the area has a poaching patrol, and the main monastery has an environmental department. Monks have become passionate about protecting their area, in the middle of a gold rush, from pollution.

At the ARC conference in Italy, Gaines Quammen said she gave religious leaders reusable water bottles to promote the idea that when millions of people embark on religious pilgrimages, whether Hindus in India or Muslims visiting Mecca, they needn’t use throw-away water bottles that contribute to waste and climate change.

The Tributary Fund is also working to raise awareness of the environmental impact of burial practices, she said. For example, huge funeral pyres used to cremate bodies in India are wiping out forests and could be replaced with solar crematories.

The Tributary Fund is also working with the Pollinator Partnership, an environmental group concerned about the disappearance of bees and other pollinators, to spread its message to church groups. They’re encouraging churches to plant pollinator-friendly gardens instead of lawns kept green with chemicals.

“It really feels like we’ve created a new way to go about conservation,” Gaines Quammen said. “I’m very hopeful. … We know these (religious) institutions have changed the world over and over again.”

Faith has the power to change people’s behavior, she said. “Conservation becomes a sacred act.”

Gail Schontzler can be reached at gails@dailychronicle.com or 582-2633.

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