Eco-palms for Palm Sunday 

By Brother Ryan W Roberts, Institute Justice Team 

Although Lent started later this year, Palm Sunday will soon be upon us! For many of us, it’s hard to imagine the festive celebration of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem without palm fronds and branches waving and strewn throughout our worship spaces. While Matthew and Mark merely report that the crowd laid branches from nearby plants on the donkey’s path and Luke reports cloaks and no branches at all, John’s vision specifically including palms has captured our imagination and developed a huge spring industry to decorate our Holy Week commencements. 

A significant number of the 300+ million palm fronds used each year in the United States are grown domestically, but millions more are harvested and imported from other countries, particularly Mexico and Guatemala. As with so many commercial enterprises, much of this trade is done to maximize corporate profits. Gathering palms can make for lucrative seasonal income, but many companies pay by the count without regard for the quality. This means that much of what’s harvested can’t be sold and is simply wasted, and the short-term gain can lead to over-harvesting and either the long-term loss of palm trees or the loss of biodiversity to plant a monoculture of palm farms. What’s more, to offset the significant waste of this model, the farmers’ pay must be drastically reduced to maintain corporate profits, leading to an unsustainable wage in already impoverished communities. But a better model is on the rise! 

A number of church communities have come together and partnered with the Rainforest Alliance to develop a more sustainable system to support our Palm Sunday festivities. For over twenty years, the Eco-Palms project has been working with farmers to protect natural forests, encourage healthier palm trees through biodiversity without chemical pesticides, reduce harvesting through better pay for quality and per volume, and invest in communities with projects like school construction. Between the direct purchase price and social project investment, over 25% of the purchase price directly enters the farming community, well above the ratio for better-known products like Fair Trade coffees or Palestinian olive oil. 

What’s more, the fronds aren’t just eco-friendly “green”. Eco-palms are delivered as fresh-cut plants, a slender stem with many brilliant, emerald-green leaves. Some may lament that they can’t fold these into crosses, but the trade-off to embrace the full natural beauty of these plants is well worth the change. Beyond individuals waving them, some novel ways to take full advantage of eco-palms include using them as floral arrangements around the altar, adorning stationary or processional crosses, and blanketing the chancel, nave, and narthex floors to elicit the road into Jerusalem. Spring has come, and eco-palms can add visual flair and a foundation of justice to our cries of “Hosanna! Hosanna to the King!”