Cautious Optimism, Recycled

I have been impressed that for years some European nations, particularly Germany, have laws requiring manufacturers and retailers to take back packaging from products after they have been sold. This responsibility encourages those who sell products to consider how much packaging is necessary, and there is considerable benefit to keeping the stuff our stuff is wrapped in out of landfills and recycling plants. In North America municipal recycling programs are overloaded and some jurisdictions in Canada have tried to ship garbage to distant countries, only to have it "returned to sender."

I am cautiously optimistic about the announcement here in Ontario about a plan to make product manufacturers and retailers responsible for the province’s Blue Box program, a move the Progressive Conservative government says would help reduce waste and save municipalities millions of dollars each year. Environment Minister Jeff Yurek said Thursday the transition will happen in phases starting in 2023 and be completed two years later.The program will encourage industry to change how it packages products to cut down on waste and would harmonize the 240 existing Blue Box programs, which each have their own lists of accepted materials.

As a Christian who attempts to be environmentally responsible this sounds good, although I have to admit that the current government is guilty until proven innocent in my eyes, simply because virtually every initiative it has undertaken has a goal of reducing the deficit rather than as part of a comprehensive plan for sensible governance. Mr. Ford is determined to cut and download and privatize his way through his mandate and this could be more of the same. Add to that the hope many of us have that his government will have been voted out of power by 2023. How is that for damning something with faint praise!



Corn, husked and packaged in plastic 

It is important for provincial governments to do everything possible to develop practical legislation to reduce the mountains of trash we produce, often without thinking. The federal initiative regarding single use plastics is also a step in the right direction. And every day, in every way we as individuals must take care of Creation through our choices of products. It's not enough to put out the blue boxes every week and hope for the best. 



Protestors Outside the Canadian Embassy in Manila, Philippines

The Garden Legacy of Woodstock

Woodstock 1969

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden...

Woodstock Joni Mitchell

I was in my mid-teens when the Woodstock music festival took place over several days on a farmer's field in New York State. I vaguely remember being slightly scandalized by what we were hearing about what happened there -- sex, drugs and rock n roll -- even though I was a huge rock fan and had long hair that my old man hated. Fifty years later we watched the PBS documentary about an event which attracted more young people (400,000) than the population of Iceland despite an eye-opening lack of organization or infrastructure. This largely peace-loving throng hung out in the rain and mud to listen to some amazing bands, including some such as Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash which weren't really established in the public eye until Woodstock. We're ancient enough that we eventually heard CS &Y at Maple Leaf Gardens. 




Woodstock Album Cover Shot (this couple is still together!)

We decided that the farmer whose land was used, Max Yasgur, was a saint, and the residents of nearby communities were amazingly generous. One reminisced that the bible encourages Christians to "welcome the stranger." so they did. Where did that America go? 

The quintessential Woodstock song was written by someone who wasn't there, Canadian Joni Mitchell. Her song speaks of stardust, and getting back to the land and the garden, which is a modestly biblical image. It speaks of simplicity, and wonder, and a sense of the world around us. It's strange, don't you think, that this hippy, anti-establishment generation, myself included, ended up what may be the most affluent and planet-destroying crowd in the history of the planet. We Baby Boomers "sold out to the man" without being aware of our entitlement, and now the Earth is paying the price.

Perhaps the 50th anniversary of Woodstock can be more than nostalgia. We really do need to humbly return to the Garden of the Creator in ways which will ensure the well-being of all creatures half a century from now. 

Listen to CSN&Y Woodstock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrWNTqbLFFE

Joni Mitchell Woodstock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRjQCvfcXn0




The Yasgurs

Liquid Gold as a Gift of Creation

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
    making wise the simple;
8 the precepts of the Lord are right,
    rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear,
    enlightening the eyes;
9 the fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
    and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold,
    even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
    and drippings of the honeycomb.

Psalm 19:7-10

I'll admit that I never saw the film Easy Rider, which starred a young Peter Fonda, who also produced it. The movie was low-budget but a huge hit and introduced us to Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and some guy named Jack Nicholson. Fonda didn't receive the acclaim that his father Henry did, nor that of his sister Jane, but he did well through the years. 

I was thinking of another, much later, Peter Fonda film called Ulee's Gold. Made in 1997 it is about a 50-something Viet Nam war vet and widower named Ulee Jackson who is a bee-keeper (honey is the gold in the title). It is a thoughtful story about both the solitary life, loneliness, and family, with a bit of suspense thrown in. We liked it a lot. 

It seems fitting that the day after Fonda died it is International Honeybee Day, not to be confused with International Bee Day which is earlier in the year. Of course you already knew that. I enjoyed my relatively brief stint as a beekeeper with a member of one of my congregations eons ago. We were fairly successful back in the days before a wicked range of pesticides decimated pollinators across North America. Without pollinators so many of the crops we demand on would fail, and only recently have countries awakened to the imperative of protecting these flying wonders. 



I read recently that flowers have a slightly negative charge compared to the air around them. Bees have a positive charge because of the friction of flying. When they land on a flower the pollen of the flower is attracted to the bees and, voila, it gets transferred to the next flower. The truly remarkable thing is that both flowers and bees know this, and they amp up their respective charges as the interaction takes place. Wondrous, don't you think? 
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/22/172611866/honey-its-electric-bees-sense-charge-on-flowers

Give a thought and perhaps a prayer for honeybees and all other pollinators today, as an essential aspect of the glorious web of Creation. And make sure you buy local honey!



An excellent documentary about bees

Greenland's Ecological Grief

Greenland melting 

Solastalgia  is a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause solastalgia as well.

Northern regions are warming at two to three times the rate of the rest of the planet. Permafrost and glaciers are melting because of record temperatures, some species are in dramatic decline, and there are wildfires in areas which have never experienced them before. Scientists say that earlier this month  Greenland's ice sheet experienced its biggest melt of the summer on Thursday, losing 11 billion tons of surface ice to the ocean -- equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools.

This has a profound psychological and physical effect on the humans who live there as well, whether they are the residents of Canada, or Russia, or Greenland -- climate change doesn't respect borders. According to Courtney Howard, the board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, who lives and works in the Arctic, the intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.



Eastern Greenland Children 

A recent national study in Greenland found that the climate crisis is causing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety for people who are struggling to reconcile the traumatic impact of global heating with their traditional way of life.

The  survey examined the human impact of the climate emergency and shows that more than 90% of islanders interviewed fully accept that the climate crisis is happenimg, with a further 76% claiming to have personally experienced global heating in their daily lives, from coping with dangerous sea ice journeys to having sled dogs euthanized for economic reasons tied to shorter winters.

This has been described as "ecological grief" and "solastalgia" (defined above.) This is also a spiritual crisis, as many Indigenous cultures connect the rhythms and balances of the land with their awareness of the Creator. They are bearing the brunt of our disconnection with creation, the natural world, and as I've offered recently, we need to listen to them again with humility. 

“The weather, which we had learned and predicted for centuries, had become uggianaqtuq—a Nunavut term for behaving unexpectedly, or in an unfamiliar way. Our sea ice, which had allowed for safe travel for our hunters and provided a strong habitat for our marine mammals, was, and still is, deteriorating. I described what we had already so carefully documented in the petition: the human fatalities that had been caused by thinning ice, the animals that may face extinction, the crumbling coastlines, the communities that were having to relocate—in other words, the many ways that our rights to life, health, property and a means of subsistence were being violated by a dramatically changing climate.” 

The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet

― Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Wake up? See! Listen!

 Let anyone with ears listen!

Matthew 11:15 (NRSV)

It is only months to the next federal election in Canada. Many of us, including lots of Christians, are fed up with the indecisiveness of traditional political parties intent on getting elected or re-elected without developing clear measurable plans to address the climate crisis. Wake up! See! Listen! 

The Presidential Salmon?

We all know that an early symbol of the Christian faith was the fish, a visual symbol of the acronym ICHTHUS. I=Jesus, Ch=Christ, Th=Theou (God's), U=Uios (Son), S=Soter (Saviour). I've never heard anyone suggest which fish this might be, although the disciples Jesus called from the shore of the lake called Genesaret, or Galillee, might have been hauling up tilapia. 

They weren't salmon, a marvelous species which thrived in their millions on both the east and west coasts of North America for millennia. When I was but a lad in the 1950's it was common to eat tinned wild salmon, which were still caught in abundance, although I don't recall our family eating a poached or broiled salmon. 



Today most salmon stocks are in crisis and wild Atlantic salmon are hard to find.. When we moved to Newfoundland after ordination there were folk in my congregations who still netted salmon to eat, although this fishery was in free-fall. I actually went fly fishing on the Gander River with a fisheries officer from one of the five churches. While this river has been legendary for its salmon, I was not part of that legend. I may have known a salmon poacher or two back then, although I must maintain the privacy of the confessional. 



All of this came to mind when I saw a New Yorker article about the "presidential salmon", a tradition started more than a century ago by a fly-fisherman from Maine. He decided to give the first salmon caught in the Spring to the president, who at that time was William Taft. The last presidential salmon was presented in 1992, after a century of assault on the rivers of the east coast of the United States. Turning those rivers into open sewers and conduits for industrial waste, along with over-fishing and building dams, destroyed the stocks. 

Salmon are an indicator species: in a fracturing ecosystem, they’re among the first to die off. States across New England have spent the past half century trying to bring back the fish. They’ve dismantled dams, stocked fry, and instituted fishing regulations. Connecticut alone spent eight and a half million dollars over the past thirty-two years on restoring salmon, largely without success. The last significant wild population left in the continental United States is in Maine. (There are still scattered populations across North America—mostly in Canada.) 

Today Newfoundland and Labrador claim 60% of the Atlantic Salmon rivers of North America (about 200) with catch and release being the rule for much of the season. While these fish are a treasure in Creation they are certainly under threat. As "people of the fish" we can encourage every effort to protect salmon, and the cod, and all the species of the seas. 

Active Hope in the Climate Emergency

The United Church Observer, the denomination's award-winning magazine no longer exists with its traditional name. It is "reborn" as Broadview, for better or worse. I've appreciated the subjects this magazine has addressed through the decades and the willingness to venture into controversial discussions of the "where angels fear to tread" variety. 

In the most recent issue there is an article by the excellent journalist and author Alanna Mitchell, who is a United Church member. She writes about the Friday Climate Strikes around the planet, the rallies by young people, the majority from Generation Z, who want to grab the attention of leaders so that they will address the climate emergency -- now. While 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg, is the high profile face of this movement,  Mitchell looks at all this through the eyes of an Ontario university student Aliénor Rougeot, who has become a climate activist. 

Rougeot’s objective is strikingly commonsensical. It’s not anarchy or bloody revolution or a new world order. Instead, she and her generation want to persuade government leaders to meet with them. And then, to not just listen to their demands, but also take those demands deadly seriously. In other words, the aim is to use the power of youth to shift the responsibility for fixing the climate crisis back onto the policy-makers who have not just the ability, but the duty, to do it. 



Toronto rally, May 2019

There have been a number of critics of Thunberg and the student protestors, claiming that they are hysterical and misinformed, and fomenting hopelessness. Mitchell speaks of the "active hope" of these determined young people, an unwillingness to let a generation which will not live through the grim outcome of irresponsible actions continue on a disastrous course. 

I do wish that the article had touched on our Christian hope in the face of the desecration of Creation as well -- this is a magazine for a community of faith, after all -- but it well worth reading. 

https://broadview.org/youth-climate-crisis/