12/16/1999 701

RELIGIOUS LEADERS/SCHOLARS MEET TO DISCUSS ENVIRONMENT, DESTRUCTION OF SACRED LANDS IN THE AMERICAS

Anthony Guy Lopez, of the Center for Biological Diversity's American Indian and Endangered Species Program is attending the Parliament of World Religions in Capetown, South Africa. Thousands of religious leaders and scholars from around the world are gathering to discuss religion in the new millennium. Lopez (Dakota) will join Huston Smith of the U.C. Berkeley, Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabeg), Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Frank Dayish (Dine), Charlotte Black Elk (Oglala Lakota), Oren Lyons (Onondaga), Lenny Foster (Dine), and Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga) in a symposium entitled AMERICAÆS SHADOW STRUGGLE addressing issues of Native American religious freedom. LaDuke's panel entitled "Mother Earth-The Virgin Mother" will discuss pollution and clear cutting as religious persecution. Lopez's panel "The Jesuits Astrophysicists Say 'That Mountain is Not Sacred'" discusses the efforts to the Vatican and the University of Arizona to build observatories atop Mt. Graham, a sacred mountain to the Apache people and home to the endangered Mt. Graham red squirrel.