Category: 2019
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Permaculture: The Art of Designing Beneficial Relationships
By Carol Barta. Permaculture is said to be “the art of designing beneficial relationships.” Permaculture is a design science rooted in the observation of natural systems, the wisdom of traditional farming methods, and systems thinking. It uses both ancient wisdom and modern scientific and technical knowledge to create sustainable habitats…
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Farming for Social Change
By Sayrah Namaste “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves,” Gandhi said. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has been addressing the impacts of climate change through programs in New Mexico, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Baltimore, to name a few.
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For the Love of the Land
By Pamela Haines. I’VE LOVED THIS bit of land for over fifty years. Coming up over the hill, my heart always opens anew to the jewel of a valley spread out below, part of the rolling farmland and woodlots of central New York state. My father bought an old farm…
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Flows Repeatedly: Learnings from the Menominee Nation
By Tom Small. NAPANOH PEMECWAN—Menominee for “flows repeatedly.” In nature, there is no foreground or background, no hierarchy, only relations, patterns of change and repetition. Train yourself to see the repeated patterns, to understand, feel, and identify with the flow. With these two Menominee words and their implications, Jeff Grignon,…
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Listening to Roots, Walking in Beauty
By Mey Hasbrook. IN THE MEADOW, I gave thanks beside a beech tree. Sunset neared after a beautiful day with Swarthmoor Area Meeting of Southwest Cumbria, England. This area is called “the cradle of Quakerism” and brings to mind The Valiant 60, the 17th-century law-breaking mystics and traveling ministers from…
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Beckoned by Living Trees
By Marcelle Martin THE FIRST TREE that beckoned me silently, long ago, was a sapling on the far side of a lawn. When I investigated, I discovered it was being strangled by an orange plastic band encircling its trunk. After the sapling had been purchased from a local nursery, the…
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Cultivating the Next Generation of Naturalists
Fayetteville Arkansas Quakers Create Native Plant Garden for Ozark Natural Science Center By Eric Fuselier. The Fayetteville Monthly Meeting recently planted a native plant garden at the Ozark Natural Science Center (ONSC) located south of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. This native plant garden was a gift to ONSC, which is a…
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“We Had Something, Now We Don’t.” Bolivian Friends Face the Climate Crisis
By Emma Condori Mamani. My name is Emma Condori. I am from Bolivia. I was born near Lake Titicaca. Most of my childhood was very beautiful because I was raised in community life in one of the indigenous communities we have in Bolivia, called Aymara. One thing I really appreciated…
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Casa Pueblo: Truly the People’s House
By Liz Robinson. THIS STORY STARTS with Hurricane Maria and our Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting’s decision to select Casa Pueblo as the beneficiary for our 12th month charitable giving. Because of its outstanding reputation, and its amazing hurricane-disaster recovery work providing solar energy to restore power to vital community services…
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The Call and Response
By Mey Hasbrook. THIS SUMMER at the Friends General Conference Gathering’s Earthcare Center, I spoke on “Transformative Earthcare: 18th-century Benjamin Lay for Today.” I shared how this third-generation Quaker lived a radical life at the intersections of concerns that continue to weigh upon us today. In the 2017 biography The…
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When Climate Change Gets Personal
By Gayle Matson FOR 60 OF MY 65 YEARS I lived in Seattle and Portland, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and lush forests. The natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest is truly spectacular, though climate change has brought even rainier winters to the area. Last year, after pining for sunnier weather…
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School’s Out
Shelley Tanenbaum This past June was the hottest June on record, ever. This July was the hottest month ever recorded. Earlier this summer, temperatures were so high in France that exams were cancelled. You might not realize how significant this is, so let me put it in perspective by telling…
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How to Help Pollinators in Your Own Neighborhood
By Dave Crawford. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2014) suggests humans can restore natural landscapes as a gift to Earth in exchange for the gifts nature provides to humans. She suggests that Earth might say “thank you” to humans for doing this. I’ve done this in my yard, and Earth…
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An Easter Reflection with Joanna Macy
By Sara Jolena Wolcott. “What do you envision for the future?” Joanna Macy—Buddhist eco-philosopher, scholar of deep ecology and systems theory—asked me last night, over a dinner of orange yams and tofu and lemon broccoli. Every time I visit her in her Berkeley home, she feeds me these bright orange…
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Public Banking, Divine Vocations, and Fertile Ground
By Pamela Haines. THE ECO-JUSTICE Collaborative (EJC) of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has endorsed an effort in Philadelphia to create a public bank. Similar to credit unions for individuals, a public bank would hold public funds in the city to be directed toward local needs, rather than paying for big banks to…
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A Story of Interbeing: A Book Review of Climate: A New Story By Charles Eisenstein
By Ruah Swennerfelt. I’VE JUST FINISHED reading Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein and am so moved by the wisdom I found between the covers. Eisenstein critiques the climate movement, arguing that the reliance on numbers, such as 350, facts, and data will not bring about the changes that are needed…
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Southern Appalachian Quaker Youth Respond to Climate Crisis
By Robert McGahey. ARTHUR MORGAN SCHOOL and Celo Monthly Meeting recently hosted Southern Appalachian Young Friends (SAYF) for their annual retreat here. The Quaker Earthcare Witness Outreach Committee contacted the organizers to share about our work, leading an afternoon session with the youth. After a rigorous hike to idyllic Strawberry…
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Feeding Us with Love and Local Tradition
By Bonnie Peace Watkins AS THE TWIN CITIES Friends Meeting Fellowship Committee, we were excited about the Quaker Earthcare Witness Spring Steering Committee meeting here in mid-April. We have long felt that food and fellowship are vital parts of witnessing, sharing, and caring for our beautiful planet. As we prepared…
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Awaking Across the Branches of Friends
By Shelley Tanenbaum. SOMETHING SPECIAL happened at the March 2019 Friends World Committee on Consultation Section of the Americas meeting. Friends from across the branches of the Religious Society of Friends came together to express our love for the land and our dedication to environmental justice, with each of us…
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Quaker Teachers Take on Climate Change and Restore Mexican Cloud Forest
By Paula Kline. Alan Wright and Paula Kline first took students to the Mexican Cloud Forest in 2003. Teachers at Westtown School in southeastern Pennsylvania, the couple had initiated the Quaker school’s agriculture program for its bi-centennial in 1999. Inspired by the ground breaking work of John Jeavons’ approach to…
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So You’re Ready to Take Action Against Climate Change
Josephine Ferorelli created this flow chart—a helpful resource for anyone who doesn’t know where to start. Josephine is the co-founder and co-director of Conceivable Future, a women-led network bringing awareness to the threat climate change poses to reproductive justice, and demanding an end to US fossil fuel subsidies. Click…
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The Changing Context of United Nations Climate Negotiations
By Philip Emmi. It is increasingly clear that we have gotten off on the wrong foot when addressing climate change. It can not be primarily a matter of nation-state cooperation on international policy, as once thought. Rather, addressing climate change requires a multi-pronged approach including attention to climate science, finance,…
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The Bare Minimum: COP Climate Change Conference
By Lindsey Fielder Cook. THE AIM OF THE DECEMBER climate change conference in Poland, known as the Conference of Parties 24 (or COP24), was to define an implementation ‘Rulebook’ for the Paris Agreement. After two weeks of exhausting, if not ‘fierce’ negotiations, how did it all go? It depends on…
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Pachamama Alliance Promotes Grassroots Drawdown Action
By Keith Voos. I’M SURE THAT MOST readers of this newsletter hold it to be true that the human race now faces the biggest threat to its survival since its near extinction in the last ice age, when the population of the earth was reduced to between 15,000 and 18,…
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Project Drawdown In Practice
By Ruth Darlington. WHEN PAUL HAWKEN’S book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming came out in 2017, many hailed it as the “new Green Bible.” I rushed to get a copy. When I held it in my hands, it felt like proof that there really was something…
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Let Nature Teach
By Dan Kriesberg. AN EXCELLENT MEASURE of how much children are learning is to count the number of times the teacher says “Pay attention.” The fewer “pay attentions” the more learning. In my own experience of 30 years as a science teacher, a 4th-grade teacher, and even as a swim…
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Finding Peace in Troubled Times
By Jay O’Hara. ON CHRISTMAS EVE I went out with my in-laws to church service in upstate New York. The big crowd gathered in the chapel on the campus of Cornell University, and the minister hit all the right notes for this presumably liberal crowd: alluding to the occupant of…
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Changing Together? The COP24
By Frank Granshaw and Annette Carter. IN DECEMBER 2018 the 24th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (COP24) met in Katowice, Poland. Their task was to hammer out the rulebook by which the world could achieve the goals set forth…
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A Quaker Youth’s Journey in Climate Activism
By Kallan Benson. AS A 15-YEAR OLD QUAKER, I am accustomed to silence. I understand it is not empty; it can hold profound power. I have felt my spirit resonate in the silence of my Quaker community, but silence has recently taken me outside the meetinghouse to the steps of…
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