This paper will discuss how religious institutions can and have protected the environment. It would build on my resent co-authored publication titled: Food for the Soul and the Planet: Measuring the Impact of the Return of Meatless Fridays for (some) UK Catholics. As the title suggests, this work measures the environmental (climate change) impact of the return to meat-free Fridays for English Catholics. It will emphasise both the historical and religious setting of this rule and its reinstatement. Including the resource impacts generated by Protestantism when the abstenance days were eliminated and the so called 'Secular Lent' that was reinistated (unsuccessfully) in Elizabethan times. It would then discuss the concept of 'internalisation' and how these rules have the potential to increase religious practice. This will then be contrasted with instrumentation of religious rules. The second part of the paper will discuss a potential framework for historical and comparative institutional research into investigating the relationship between religious institutions and environmental protection in different societies and at different levels of social organisation. For instance, the church often regulated the amount of meat that was eaten for centuries in Europe. Along these lines I would like discuss the building of a qualitative database to measure different religious institutions' rules that relate to environmental protection and the impact they had (or still have).