But Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance organizers are mixing up a soup of all three.

So much for polite chatter.

In the next month, SUWA will launch a "faith-based" component to its Wild Lands Dialogue Project - a series of forums where Utahns of all stripes sit down to talk about drilling for coal and oil shale and opening wild lands to grazing and ATV riders.

This new round of workshops - the largest is Feb. 2 at Utah Valley State College - is meant to bring Utahns together by opening up what has been public policy subtext for generations: closely held beliefs about Garden of Eden concepts such as stewardship and dominion.

Utah Quakers, Jews and Catholics have signed on. And agnostics and humanists who consider sunrise over the redrock spiritual are welcome, too.

But let's face it, the environmental schism that most needs bridging in this state - if only because of demographics and the makeup of the state Legislature - is reflected in two competing Mormon notions of stewardship. One believer's 5.7 million-acres-for-wilderness bumper sticker is another's ancestral county road.

This path seems pocked with pioneer-era ruts and washouts. And secular SUWA seems an unlikely sponsor of road improvements. But SUWA, says organizer Deeda Seed, simply is acknowledging that for many, their love of the land is religious.

"It's not particularly confrontational. In this context, people seem to be very connected to each other," she adds. "Given the cultural environment of Utah, it's a really good place to start."

BYU professor George Handley takes the view that God created the earth and humans are here to watch over it and pass it on, intact, to future generations.

"Stewardship can mean recognizing that natural resources are sacred, that the sources of life - water and air and, obviously, energy, are sources that need our protection so they can be sustained," he says.

Handley teaches humanities, including a class that ties art and literature to the environment. But he's not opposed to sitting down with, say, state Republican Rep. Mike Noel, a Kanab cattleman, avowed Grand Staircase Monument-hater and one of the main pushers behind a proposed nuclear power plant on the banks of the Green River.

Tenneson Woolf, a Utah County consultant and Mormon, says that's the point: using Utahns' spirituality to shift this state's contentious environmental history.

"How we've been interacting just creates more conflict," he says. "SUWA wants to change the pattern."

Normally, I would say religion should be muted in public policy. But if a faith-based discussion can bring people like Noel and Handley to the same table, I'm all for it.

walsh@sltrib.com