Category: Quaker-Specific
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Durham Friends Install Solar Panels
By Dale Evarts. IN AUGUST 2019, following a spiritual leading to live in harmony with Creation by harnessing the energy of the sun to power our meetinghouse, Durham Friends Meeting (DFM), a member of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting Conservative, began generating electricity from solar panels installed that summer. After…
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Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Mutual Aid Experiment
By Keith Runyan and Rebekah Percy. WHEN the shelter-in-place order took effect throughout California earlier this year, a small group of Young Adult Friends from Pacific Yearly Meeting organized a mutual aid project with the goals of sharing resources and creating greater equity and self-sustainability within our communities during the…
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Weeding out Systemic Oppression in Our Garden
By Katie Breslin. THIS YEAR, I started a garden at a local farm. I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed up, just the basic principles like make sure the plants have water and to pull weeds, but that was about it. Thankfully friends and my plot neighbors…
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Population is Personal
By Stan Becker. Here Stan Becker shares his spiritual and professional journey initiated by his early concern for the growth of human population on Earth. It is a story of his initial “vivid visual experience” in Mexico, which led him to search for an academic program that would allow him…
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Collective Evolution in the Face of Climate Crisis
By Keith Runyan. FROM THE EMERGENT PATTERNS of a monarch butterfly’s wing to the fractal branchings of a mycelial web, we find ourselves, as 21st-century Friends awash in a fundamentally beautiful world, unveiled. We find ourselves not in the universe, but of it, in a state of interbeing. Every day…
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Philadelphia Friends Confront Climate Crisis
By Patricia Finley, Ruth Darlington, Liz Robinson, and the Eco-Justice Collaborative of PYM. MORE THAN 50 FRIENDS gathered on a snowy morning at Germantown Monthly Meeting on January 18 to learn, share, and discern how to effectively address environmental injustice and the climate crisis. Over the course of the Thread…
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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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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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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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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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First Nation – Farmer Climate Unity March
An Introduction By Jeff Kisling. Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) Friends Peter Clay and I recently walked on the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March. A group of about thirty that included nearly a dozen Native Americans walked 94 miles along the route of the Dakota Access Pipeline from September 1 –…
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Birds, Bees, and Butterflies: Monthly Meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas Creates New Habitat for Wildlife
By Eric Fuselier. LAST YEAR FAYETTEVILLE Monthly Meeting’s Quaker Earthcare Witness Committee started a project to improve the grounds at our meetinghouse, the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice & Ecology, to include more habitat for wildlife, with the ultimate goal of the Center becoming certified as a wildlife habitat by…
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Stewardship is a Likely Place to Start: Mountain Valley Pipeline Resistance
By Jenny Chapman Jenny Chapman, a birthright Quaker whose ancestors made the pilgrimage to America with William Penn, lives on a farm on Bent Mountain in rural southwest Virginia and is a member of Roanoke Friends Meeting. She and her husband raised their two sons on the Mountain and now…
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Love & Political Power
By Bruce Birchard I WANT TO LIFT UP two sentences from Martin Luther King’s 1967 address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference about the relationship between love and power: “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and…
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Meeting for Mourning: New England Friends Worship at Power Plant
By Hayley Hathaway. ON SATURDAY, JULY 28, 2018 I joined about 30 Friends from five New England states at the gates of the recently opened Salem Harbor Station, a natural gas (methane) power plant on the coast of Massachusetts. We gathered for a Meeting for Worship for the purpose of…
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Engaging in Earthcare at Yearly Meetings
DO YOU KNOW who is your Yearly Meeting representative to Quaker Earthcare Witness? DO YOU KNOW who is your Yearly Meeting representative to Quaker Earthcare Witness? Our 31 Yearly Meeting Representatives serve as liaisons between QEW and their Yearly Meetings, sharing information about what is on the hearts and minds…
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Peace, Justice and Ecology in Arkansas
By Eric Fuselier. Friends, we are happy to announce that we recently formed a Quaker Earthcare Committee within the monthly meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Members of the committee have a lot of passion and knowledge about the environment and we’re really excited about the projects we have going on here.
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Potential Surprises
By Shelley Tanenbaum. A LARGE GULF EXISTS between those who understand the magnitude of the environmental crisis we are facing and those who, willfully or not, remain unaware and disengaged. Just look around your community or your meetinghouse. Most people are not necessarily climate deniers or uncaring about the environment.
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Rooted in Reverence: Reflections on the Climate Pilgrimage
By Honor Woodrow. I AM WRITING TO SHARE a reflection on my experience of the recent Climate Pilgrimage, where Friends from New England and fellow travelers spent six days walking the 60 miles from the Schiller Station (which burns both coal and wood) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the Merrimack…
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Ecological Living at Quaker Retirement Community
By Elizabeth Boardman. PERHAPS, IF WE HAD ASKED THEM, our grandchildren could have told us before we came here to Friends House what benefits we would accrue by moving out of the big family home to a small apartment. And now we could tell them the advantages of a communal…
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Reverence and Right Action
By David Jaber I was not raised Quaker, but instead came to Quakerism after having developed an environmental conscience that has very much shaped my life and how I spend my time. You might take that as one indicator of the compatibility of deep earth ethics with Quaker practice. Let’s…
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What’s Emerging?
By Sara Wolcott. What is it that Quakerism contributes to my ecological journey? I am vexed by this question. Five years ago, when my primary sense of religious belonging was nestled deep within the Religious Society of Friends, it would have been easy for me to answer. My confidence that…
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Sustainability and Truth
By Louis Cox. THE TERM “SUSTAINABILITY” came into fashion with the modern environmental movement, particularly after the 1992 UN Earth Summit. The concept has offered hope in the face of relentless bad news by highlighting things that ordinary people can do that would make a big difference if enough…
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