Pages tagged "Environmentalism"

Dear Friends: In its last issue, Western Friend published a letter to grandchildren everywhere talking about the environmental conditions we are leaving to our grandchildren. While I am grateful to WF for publishing that letter, I am concerned about editorial changes that were made that I was not given the opportunity to review before it went to press. The issue I have with these changes is that they misrepresent what I was trying to say in two important ways. First, the final version gives the impression that all our environmental and social problems revolve around the use of fossil fuels. Our overuse of fossil fuels is just one piece of a much larger puzzle that involves how we manage resources, not just which resource we use. Second, the published letter was edited in ways that oversimplified what I was saying about hope and the factors driving us towards what may be an environmental cliff. In addition to being a grandfather, I am also a geologist and a college educator. This means that I often talk with people who feel that environmentalists are misinformed sentimentalists who are naive about science, economics, politics, and human nature. Because some of the people I eventually hope to reach are adults like my students and colleagues, as well as “just plain folks,” it is important to me that the hope and optimism expressed in it takes into account the complex and harsh realities of our situation. Otherwise we grandparents concerned about the world our grandchildren might inherit from us will be discounted as just another gaggle of naive idealists. We cannot afford to be regarded in this way if we are to have any hope of changing our present course.

There is something you can do that is likely to make you happier, healthier, save money and lessen your impact on the planet. What is it? Consume less by practicing simpler living.

This late summer we welcomed a new resident into our home. She came in through the kitchen window, where she built her own abode. The day eventually came when we needed to close the window due to excessive heat. Our guest moved from the opening to the inside of the sliding panel. She incorporated the curtain and a bit of the houseplant on the windowsill into her dwelling-place, which is an edifice of beauty. We call her Esther.

Dear Editor: I am on page 12 of the May/June issue of Western Friend, and already my husband, Edwin, and I feel the challenge. I inherited some money recently and this issue of the magazine is helping me to ask how I can invest in the 7th generation rather than just our own comfortable retirement. “Leap into Wings” is a great model for limiting transportation and electrical use. Edwin and I have a long ways to go, but slowly and with some kicking and screaming we have been following a few of our leadings, i.e. we turned off our city water and used water we gathered from the roof this past winter. I also appreciated the letter to the editor from Peg Morton in that Edwin and I were faced with paying taxes for the first time in 25 years, and I wept as I sent off the checks. All this is to say,  “Keep keeping on.” This issue has been more relevant than you know. With appreciation, Barbara Christwitz

When I was a child I loved the cuddliness and innocence of animals, and I wished they could talk. A grownup and activist now, I look for ways to use art to awaken our empathy with the natural world and to increase our climate-change consciousness. As an artist and writer, I know what fun it can be to combine pictures and text. So when my Friends Meeting in Santa Cruz put out a call for adults to share their skills with children in the First Day School, I offered a project called “If Animals Could Talk.”  

The way of love is not a subtle argument,

To the editor: I appreciated and learned from Joe Snyder’s fine essay on the bonds of animal agriculture (May/June 2013). We have in many ways lost the balance of care, responsibility, and stewardship in our relationship with animals in what Joe calls the “monetization” of agriculture. He warns us that a simple rejection of the animal side of our food system, as some vegetarianism involves, may cause still more harm to nature, and even more death to living things. We need to hear this and develop a food system that respects our covenants with nature and sees the hazards of a simple “industrial” vegetarianism.

Dear Friends:  Nobody ever taught us to pray, “Give us this day our stockpile of bread with a shelf-life of forty years.” Hoarding resources for private gain is a course of action that despoils the Earth and obstructs our right relationship with God. Humanity today consumes resources 50% faster than the Earth can replenish them. In the United States, we consume them 400% faster. (See footprintnetwork.org.) Habitat destruction and other factors caused biodiversity to plummet by 30% across the globe and by 60% in the tropics between 1970 and 2008. (See wwf.panda.org.) Dozens of species go extinct and a thousand people die of starvation each day, due to human greed, ignorance, and inertia.

Shelley Tanenbaum serves as clerk of Quaker Earthcare Witness and Quaker Institute for the Future.  She is a member of Strawberry Creek Meeting in Berkeley, CA. Shelley and her husband run a consulting company, ENVAIR, which conducts research on regional air quality trends, with an emphasis on ozone and particulates.