As Kelowna burns...

I can't sit and do nothing. Especially when Alberta's premier is backing away from renewable energy and putting her power behind the fossil fuels that create the greenhouse gas emissions that have created climate change. 

I know, I know. I rely on oil and gas and all the products and plastics that they make so that I can live just as much as everyone else. But we aren't given any choice, are we? Imagine if the wealthy folks who are running oil and gas companies decided to turn around spend their money on sustainable forms of energy and renewable products instead. The world would change. 

And that's the exact kind of revolution we need right now. 

As timing would have it, I watched this video, forwarded from my friend, Mark, at the end of June, just yesterday. Kathleen Dean Moore's presentation is actually from 9 years ago, but what she has to say about what we should do still holds very true. I'm including it below, because it is what motivated me to write the letter to my premier. I've set the video (I hope) to start at the most essential point, but if you have time for the whole thing, I encourage you to hear what she says in its entirety. 

And I invite you to write your own letter to your own politicians about supporting renewable energy over fossil fuels. If you live in my neck of the woods, keep an eye out for Solar Alberta's #RiseUpForRenewables campaign. Maybe I'll even get me a lawn sign...

Dear Premier Smith and members of the Alberta Utilities Commission,

As I watch people fleeing for their lives from Kelowna and Yellowknife, I urge you to end the pause on renewable energy projects right now. We need clean energy more than ever. If you should be pausing anything, it is fossil fuel projects and subsidies. 

I am really angry that Premier Smith has called for this pause, especially when our fossil fuel industry is not being held to the same standards when it comes to end of life, land use, and reclamation concerns. I have seen with my own eyes the huge solar farm on poor soils/alkali flats near Claresholm, AB. I believe that our renewable energy community has the welfare of the planet in mind, unlike the fossil fuel industry that is padding the pockets of the wealthy in spite of evidence that emissions are causing climate change and killing too many of our planet's ecosystems.

I want my children and grandchildren to be able to breathe clear air. With AQHI reaching 10 or worse at times, that's not possible. Have you even noticed that Alberta's blue skies aren't as blue as they used to be? Pausing renewable projects is dooming us all to have to rely mainly on the fossil fuels that are changing our climate so quickly. If we haven't already reached the tipping point, we are most certainly running out of time.

End the pause on renewable energy projects now.

Sincerely,

Maria K

Saying no to coal

With the June 17th Alberta Energy Regulator's decision against the Grassy Mountain Coal development in Southern Alberta, ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, First Nations communities and people like me are breathing a huge sigh of relief.

For a few minutes, anyway.

But there are more coal projects in the works, and it's important that Albertans continue to fight against the decapitation of our gorgeous rockies, the destruction of our wilderness, and the pollution of the prairie provinces' river headwaters that many of us eventually drink, never mind the habitat of many creatures that are already endangered.

So the Council of Canadians has these wonderful lawn signs (above) that are available to help interested people make others aware of the issues, and they have also made it easy to send an email to the Alberta Coal Policy Committee that is reviewing the other potential coal developments. You can access a link to their email campaign by clicking here, or click here to request a lawn sign. 

Tomorrow I will be participating in a brochure campaign to keep the issue in the forefront of peoples' minds. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the links above, and to share information with the people around you. Coal strip mining is the last thing we need to be doing in a world that's in the midst of a climate crisis. Let's protect our rockies and headwaters for the sake of future generations.

Laudato Si: Sunday Reflection #34... Shouldering our greater responsibility

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's still there... but the good news is that humanity has stopped producing the chlorofluorocarbons that caused the hole. The Montreal Protocol was adopted by our world in 1987, and as a result, we still have most of the ozone layer that protects us and our earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, and it could potentially recover over the next 50 years, especially if we can adopt another working protocol when it comes to climate change. Here's an interesting video about what could have happened... which leads into what we still need to do, and today's reflection on Laudato Si.

This week's section of Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home reminds us that humanity is capable of working together to change the course of history when it comes to caring for our planet. We're looking at paragraphs 168 to 172, which you can access by clicking here and scrolling down. Paragraph 168 carries an important message about positive experiences where different conventions made good decisions for the sake of life on earth: the Basel Convention on Hazardous Wastes, the Convention on international trade in endangered species, and the Vienna Convention for the protection of the ozone layer, which led to the Montreal Protocol which eliminated CFCs which were creating the ozone hole.

When the ozone hole was discovered, it was a serious problem for the entire planet. Every living thing on earth is touched by the sun. Everyone was affected by the news. And global climate change is the same sort of problem -- there is nothing on earth that can't be affected by weather which causes droughts and fires, floods and disasters. Here in Edmonton we had a tornado in 1987. Calgary had the flood of 2013. And for most of us in Alberta, these were fairly minor events. But for people living in developing countries, a typhoon like Haiyan causes more deaths and destruction than we can imagine, and the people there don't possess the resources we have to deal with such disasters.

"With regard to climate change, advances have been regrettably few," says the Pope in Laudato Si, his letter to the entire world. "Reducing greenhouse gases requires honesty, courage and responsibility, above all on the parts of those countries which are more powerful and pollute the most" (paragraph 169). That would be most of the countries in the western world, including us.

Unfortunately, instead of just tackling greenhouse gas reduction by adopting more stringent measures when it comes to reducing the use of fossil fuels, our past leaders have pointed fingers at other countries, poorer than ours, who aren't doing their share to protect the environment. So we in Canada have wasted valuable time, and haven't done much to stop climate change as of yet. But the Pope reminds us:

there is a need for common and differentiated responsibilities. As the bishops of Bolivia have stated, "the countries which have benefited from a high degree of industrialization, at the cost of enormous emissions of greenhouse gases, have a greater responsibility for providing a solution to the problems they have caused." (Quote from the Bolivian Bishops' Conference Pastoral Letter on the Environment and Human Development in Bolivia, El universo, don de Dios para la vida from March 2012 (86).)

Those Bolivian Bishops have a lot to say when it comes to the environment, and Bolivia has been a leading country in fighting for the rights of Mother Earth. I wish I could read the entire letter, but it's not available in English, so I'll stick with Laudato Si.

I was happy to see that the Pope and his encyclical writing team addressed the issue of "carbon credits" in paragraph 171. It has never made sense to me that countries could pay a certain amount of money to "remove" so many tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- after the fact. If I fly to Tahiti and buy a carbon offset so that I can feel better about "dealing with" the greenhouse gas emissions caused by my tropical vacation, someone might plant a tree somewhere with that offset money, but it will take years for that tree to actually remove my emissions. It would be better not to fly at all... and maybe I need to be more serious about how I'm creating greenhouse gases from the beginning.

Unfortunately, so far no one really believes that climate change is so serious that we shouldn't be taking tropical vacations. Of course, I applaud people who do what they can to offset their air travel, and I'm not saying that carbon offsets are bad -- heaven knows our world needs all the help it can get with trees being planted and whatever else offsetters do. But we also need to reconsider frivolous things like tropical vacations! And our big, polluting corporations need to stop polluting instead of buying carbon credits from developing countries that don't produce their share of greenhouse gases. The idea is to reduce our greenhouse gases and improve the health of our atmosphere, not just to maintain things at the present level of pollution!

Paragraph 172 references the difficulties faced by poor countries and the help they will need from wealthier nations to develop less polluting forms of energy production. It also contains the encyclical's first mention of solar energy as a solution, noting that

Taking advantage of abundant solar energy will require the establishment of mechanisms and subsidies which allow developing countries access to technology transfer, technical assistance and financial resources, but in a way which respects their concrete situations, since the compatibility of [infrastructures] with the context for which they have been designed is not always adequately assessed (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Energy, Justice and Peace, IV, 1, Vatican City (2014), 53.)

I am underlining and bolding the statement that follows the above comment: "The costs of this would be low, compared to the risks of climate change."

It seems to me that, here in North America, we are too afraid to change, to take on our greater responsibility as people who live in some of the countries that contribute the most to climate change. We think it will be too expensive, or too difficult, but in reality, climate change will be more expensive, and more difficult. We're especially concerned about our livelihoods here in Alberta, where fossil fuel extraction and related industries have been our main employer for fifty years. But if we really think about it, fossil fuels are a dead end because our great-great-grandchildren can't live on a planet choked with greenhouse gases and terrorized by catastrophic events caused by an unstable climate. So we need to change now.

Out on my garage roof, a fellow named Paul has been working away for the past week. He used to work in the Oil Sands near Fort McMurray, but he saw that the future for highly polluting chemical processes to extract bitumen from the sand, water and clay up north was going downhill, fast. So he pulled the plug on that career and retrained to install solar panels. Clearly it's hard work, but he says it feels right. Rather than adding to climate change, he's participating in less polluting work in the energy field and improving the earth's health, long term.

And more of us need to think this way. How can we change and find better ways to deal with the pollution created by our lives? How can we reduce waste? How can we save energy? How can we in North America, who have created greater greenhouse gas emissions with our larger homes, multiple vehicles, and excessive possessions, shoulder our greater responsibility for providing a solution to the problems our lifestyles have caused the planet?

What is one right thing we can do in the week ahead? Or one change we can make?

We found a way to help the ozone layer. Now we need to help the rest of our beautiful planet.

*******

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe

and in the smallest of your creatures.

You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,

that we may protect life and beauty.

Fill us with peace, that we may live

as brothers and sisters, harming no one.

O God of the poor,

help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,

so precious in your eyes.

Bring healing to our lives,

that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.

Touch the hearts

of those who look only for gain

at the expense of the poor and the earth.

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,

to be filled with awe and contemplation,

to recognize that we are profoundly united

with every creature

as we journey towards your infinite light.

We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

+AMEN.

(A prayer for our earth and all quotations from Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home © Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

Next up: Looking after our 'global commons'

Laudato Si: Sunday Reflection #14... We are all Noah

I remember how much I loved Bible stories as a kid... and this week's segment of Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home mentions a few of them as we continue with The Wisdom of the Biblical Accounts, paragraphs 70-75 this time (they can be accessed by clicking here). The thing with Bible stories is that, for children, they're great stories, but as we grow into adulthood, we see that they are much more than meets the eye because of their many layers of meaning.

We are reminded of the story of Cain and Abel in paragraph 70. In childhood, it was a story about giving God the best we have and looking after each other, but for Pope Francis and his writing team, it is a cautionary tale, illustrating that

Disregard for the duty to cultivate and maintain a proper relationship with my neighbour, for whose care and custody I am responsible, ruins my relationship with my own self, with others, with God and with the earth. When all these relationships are neglected, when justice no longer dwells in the land, the Bible tells us that life itself is endangered.

(If you ever want to read a thought-provoking and challenging book with a very interesting take on the story of Cain and Abel (and a lot of the other cultural myths that have affected humanity) I'd highly recommend Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, a novel by Daniel Quinn (Bantam 1992, ISBN 0-553-37549-7). I don't reread very many books, but this one has been haunting me lately, which tells me I should probably reread it. If you want more details, feel free to drop me a line...)

The story of Noah is mentioned as another cautionary tale, just before we hear Laudato Si's main refrain for the second time: "These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which today we share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others." I just wish we had shared this conviction from the get go -- the earth wouldn't be as messed up if we had been more interested in preserving all its interconnection rather than feeding human greed.

What I really like in paragraph 71 is the line, "All it takes is one good person to restore hope!" Referring, of course, to Noah's willingness to stand out from the crowd to do what God asked. Didn't you love that story as a kid? The guy who went against the grain, building a mammoth boat while all his neighbours laughed, loading on the animals and waiting for rain in an heroic effort to save creation -- except I always felt sad that the people around Noah didn't understand the need to change. Still, it's a good story with a beautiful, rainbow ending, one that we can only work and pray for with our current environmental crisis.

Another beautiful piece of these early Scriptures was the idea of Sabbath, or a day of rest, and giving the earth a break to "ensure balance and fairness" for the earth and its inhabitants, especially "the poor and the sojourner" (paragraph 71). This was carried further in what's called Shemitah, leaving the land fallow for in the seventh year to allow it to replenish itself and allowing those who work the soil to take a break and follow more "spiritual pursuits." And then, after seven times seven years, there was to be a jubilee year in which everyone took a break from work and forgave debts and started fresh once again.

Of course, in our crazy consumer culture, we shop just as hard on our Sabbaths as we do other days of the week, never mind take the seventh day, the seventh year, or a jubilee year off. It's been over thirty years since our stores were given the right to stay open on Sundays in Canada, and for many city dwellers, it requires true effort to keep any day holy and restful when family members with retail positions have to work. How do you keep Sabbath?

Laudato Si then jumps to the Psalms, which exhort us and all creatures to sing praise and adoration of the God who lives with and beside us. Paragraph 72 is pretty weak when it comes to the emotion, poetry, power and depth of the way the Psalms can be prayed to express our relationship with God, but as they are quoted throughout Pope Francis' letter to the world, it's probably enough just to mention them.

In paragraph 73 the "prophets invite us to find renewed strength in times of trial by contemplating the all-powerful God who created the universe.... the God who liberates and saves is the same God who created the universe, and these two divine ways of acting are intimately and inseparably connected." The encyclical team closes paragraph 73's musings about the prophets with a quote from Isaiah, who reminds us that God "gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless." Just what we need to hear after reading all of the earth's problems Pope Francis listed in Chapter one that might leave us feeling overwhelmed.

The Babylonian captivity, when the people of Israel were forced out of their homeland to live in exile for almost 70 years, is mentioned in paragraph 74 as an example of a time of trial and persecution that led to a deeper faith in God. God's "creative omnipotence was given pride of place in order to exhort the people to regain their hope in the midst of their wretched predicament," and the same thing happened in the early Christian era when the followers of Christ found themselves persecuted by the Roman Empire.

What's interesting to me is that all of these examples of the trials and struggles of believers throughout the Bible are held up as examples to us who face the trials and struggles that have come about because of the overuse of creation's resources through rampant consumerism and human greed. Clearly, we are in similar straits, a time when we can glean some encouragement from the way that our ancestors came through trying times by trusting in God and doing what they could.

Paragraph 75 points out that "A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshipping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample [God's] creation underfoot." Our forgetfulness of the fact that we are not God and that everything is gift, as I mentioned last week, has gotten us into this mess. Remembering that we are only one of God's interconnected creatures and living as though everything in our lives is a gift would go a long way toward cleaning it up. Or as the last lines of paragraph 75 say, "The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim of absolute dominion over the earth is to speak once more of a... [God] who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality."

But I'm going back to the last lines of paragraph 74 for the last words in this Sunday's reflection: "The God who created the universe out of nothing can also intervene in this world and overcome every form of evil. Injustice is not invincible."

Injustice is not invincible! Especially if we are aware that We are all Noah. Every last one of us. We are called to see the wrongs around us, and to take a stand against them. Because injustices are ingrained in our culture, we may have to become counter-cultural, to appear a little crazy for a time in order to draw attention to the particular injustices to which our sleeping world has become immune. I doubt we'll have to build an Ark, but we might have to do something even harder in this day and age -- to be vocal about our choice NOT to shop on Sunday, or NOT to take flamboyant vacations in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are struggling to feed themselves and their families. To NOT buy the latest cool but unnecessary gadget or NOT to support a company that sells genetically modified foods. In other words, to BE A SIGN, a role model, and an example of doing the just thing -- even if it's only our families and friends who might notice what we're doing.

How will you be a Noah in the week ahead? For the rest of your days?

*******

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe

and in the smallest of your creatures.

You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,

that we may protect life and beauty.

Fill us with peace, that we may live

as brothers and sisters, harming no one.

O God of the poor,

help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,

so precious in your eyes.

Bring healing to our lives,

that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.

Touch the hearts

of those who look only for gain

at the expense of the poor and the earth.

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,

to be filled with awe and contemplation,

to recognize that we are profoundly united

with every creature

as we journey towards your infinite light.

We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

+AMEN.

(A prayer for our earth and all quotations from Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home © Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

Next up: #15... Changing ourselves and our world

Have your say on Alberta's Climate Change Strategy

The aftermath of July's forest fire at Medicine Lake near Jasper

Here's a really quick moodling to encourage my Alberta readers to share your thoughts about dealing with climate change. The Alberta government is looking for input about how to proceed toward the December climate conference in Paris.

Have your say by clicking here.

What our world is doing now clearly isn't working -- we are having more instances of severe weather that is leading to floods, forest fires, food shortages, the melting of our glaciers and icecaps, and that's all just the tip of the iceberg. What are you willing to sacrifice so that future generations have a chance? I don't mean to be alarmist, but if the alarm bells aren't already ringing, it's only a momentary reprieve. We human beings seem to think that if we're okay, the world is too... but there are too many places in the world where climate change is making life more difficult for all living things.

Our family continues to look for ways to reduce our energy use and cut our greenhouse gas emissions, and we hope that our leaders will do the same in Paris.

What do you think?

Have your say by clicking here.

Simple Suggestion #230... Organize a neighbourhood clean-up

I love April, with its warmer sun, longer days, and budding trees. What I don't love is that when the snow is gone, garbage is everywhere. All the stuff that got blown around in our winter storms and lost in snowbanks shows up in our parks and ravines, and often deposits itself under bushes or against curbs, fences, power poles, and between my house and my neighbour's.

Which is why I'm so glad for Capital City Cleanup, a program in my city that encourages residents, schools, businesses and organizations to get involved in making our neighbourhoods cleaner and safer. The Adopt a Block program invites Edmontonians to make a regular habit of picking up litter with family and friends as we walk our neighbourhoods, or favourite park paths or trails, with a volunteer website to register our chosen areas.

And the 28th annual River Valley Clean Up is coming soon, the first Sunday of May. I'm thinking it might be a day to skip church and get involved, hands on, in caring for creation with my kids.

But even if there are no clean up programs where my moodling readers live, it's really easy to start your own. When our kids were smaller, my neighbour and I chose a spring afternoon each year and cleaned the little area park across the street with our kids. It's good to teach our young ones the importance of protecting our environment from pollution and waste, and picking up litter (with appropriate safety precautions in place -- gloves, adult supervision, and a lesson about getting the adults to dispose of sharp or dangerous things) is one simple way to do it.

So this Simple Suggestion is a really a simple challenge in disguise. Why not organize your own neighbourhood clean-up? As we head into spring, if we all clean up more than our own property, we're doing the earth and each other a favour. And we're simply showing respect for the beautiful world in which we live.

Simple Suggestion #171... Live by the Hippocratic Oath

This idea was originally Simple Suggestion #5b, but lately I've been thinking that it deserves a better designation, not as a subset of another Simple Suggestion, but having a life of its own. Actually, it could be the heading for all the other Simple Suggestions found here, because if we all lived our lives doing as little harm and carried that even further by doing as much good as possible, there'd be no point in this blog. I could spend my days living more simply and writing more novels, ha.

When I wrote about the Hippocratic Oath back in May of 2011, we had just experienced a week with a strong, drying Spring wind that blew almost non-stop, and daily radio news about wildfires in Alberta -- most notably, one that destroyed almost half the town of Slave Lake, population 7,000. These days, we're experiencing abnormal weather patterns that caused severe flooding in Southern Alberta, my yard has already seen three hailstorms, and we've faced several severe storm watches and warnings, another one expected tonight.

In our developed world, we usually manage to cope with Global Climate Instability (I'll call it that because it's easier for people to recognize the sudden volatilities in our climate than it is to see long term climate change a la Al Gore and his graphs). The people of Calgary, High River, and Canmore are pulling together, pooling their considerable resources, and getting on with things. The Calgary Stampede organizers vow that the show will go on "come hell or high water." But there was a flood in India as it began flooding here, and close to a thousand people in Uttarakhand State died. In Alberta, we were so absorbed in the loss of homes and property, and our pride in our resilience and resourcefulness, we hardly noticed the disaster affecting our brothers and sisters in India, people who don't have the kind of resources we do to deal with disasters on a large scale.

It seems that our recent disaster has converted more people when it comes to climate change. We're starting to realize that our highly energy consumptive lives are heating up our planet and creating these incredible storms that cause major damage. Of course, we must light and heat our homes, transport things and people and cook our meals, but the problem is that we never think about the "hidden" energy it takes to run the factories that make the stuff that fills our lives, and the harm that a lot of our large companies and corporations do because no one calls them to account for their environmental impacts. We also don't give as much thought as we could to our personal conservation strategies. It's always easier to use throw-away paper plates instead of washing dishes when a large crowd comes to visit...

At a Social Justice institute some time ago, the keynote speaker, Dr. William Cavanaugh, mused about what the world might be like if corporations were forced to live by the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to our planet. And my mind wandered off, thinking about the shape our Earth would be in if all governments and people had focused our energies not just on doing no harm, but on having a positive impact on our world. Unfortunately, harm is built into The System, no mistake about it. And too often we feel powerless to change The System.

Facing facts, neither the world's corporations nor its governments will ever take an oath to do no harm. But individuals can. And while we may not be able to do NO harm, if all of us, together, reduce the harm we do to the lowest common denominator, and call corporations and governments to account, that's a start, the best start we can make. It seems that enough of us raised our voices about the poor conditions faced by factory workers in Bangladesh that many corporations took notice. We can also raise our voices, write letters, and start online campaigns against other things that are messing with the well-being of our planet and its inhabitants. We have a lot more power than we think.

So, to improve the earth's well-being today, I am redoubling my efforts to do no harm. I also planted a few more green, living things that make oxygen, rode bikes with my daughter to her swimming lessons, washed some "disposable cups" from yesterday's Canada Day party for reuse, and gave air conditioning a miss (ha, we don't have it... but our basement is nice and cool, so I'll head down there in a few minutes). There are always ways to do less harm and more good. They might be less convenient, but what's convenience in the grander scheme of things?

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.

International Year of the Forest

Trees are extremely important to the health of our planet and our health as human beings. Here's a stunningly beautiful video to celebrate the International Year of the Forest. Enjoy, and do what you can to support organizations that preserve the world's woodlands...

You don't know what you've got til it's gone

Tomorrow evening between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. is Earth Hour, a time when many people make an effort to live without electricity, to give some consideration to our dependence on energy and come up with ways we can conserve it. Spending an hour in the dark is an interesting exercise in simple living. Not only does it foster a deeper appreciation for the electrical devices we take for granted, but conversation and relationship become more important than our gadgets and gizmos, as they should be.

If you watch Earth Hour coverage or commercials, you'll see that many places and people have turned it into another reason to party, but with a slightly higher consciousness of their energy use. Earth Hour has a high energy, feel good tone, saying, If you can do this, imagine what else we can achieve! That's great, but just IMAGINING isn't enough.

So what can we DO, to not only use less energy, but to save the earth's resources for future generations? Here's a basic list, in no particular order:

1. Shop at thrift stores rather than buying new. If everyone does this, all fashions will be in style, and no one will feel pressured to buy the newest line of clothing.

2. Use recycled products. If everyone does this, we will save a lot of trees in particular, but also a lot of other resources.

3. Avoid highly advertized products and seek simpler solutions. If everyone does this, we will cut down on chemical and resource use, not to mention advertizing energy and materials.

4. Reduce, reuse, recycle, recover: compost organic kitchen scraps, repair the broken, give away the good, share, and lend. If everyone does these things, we can stop extracting important elements from Earth's fragile ecosphere.

5. Dry clothes in sun and wind, or on a clothes rack/line. If everyone does this, we can get by with fewer nuclear facilities, hydro installations and coal burning power plants.

6. Grow food wherever possible, and buy local. If everyone does this, we'll be eating healthier foods and ingesting fewer chemical preservatives.

7. Eat lower on the foodchain. If everyone does this, we'll save the huge environmental costs of raising so much livestock.

8. Use rainbarrels, water-saving fixtures, and don't let clean water flow down the drain. If everyone does this, we also save energy because our water treatment plants aren't working needlessly.

9. Walk, bike, use public transit. If everyone does this, air quality will improve, as will our overall cardiovascular health.

10. Remember that every choice made matters, and that there are always earth-friendlier possibilities that might require a little sacrifice or inconvenience. And yes, imagine what else we can achieve! If everyone makes positive choices for the earth, that haunting line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi won't apply to the planet's limited resources -- or our existence as human beings.

Here's young Joni herself in 1970. Have a good Earth Hour!

Simple pleasures... and laundry

I'll never forget the laundry room of a family I lived with in Belgium. It was a small, dark space with a washing machine... and no dryer. Instead, there were wooden racks near the furnace, on which clothing and bedding and everything was hung to dry. I thought it strange at the time, but now I see how smart it is.

We have both washer and dryer at our house, but in the past two years, haven't used our dryer much at all. In the summer, everything goes out on the clothesline, and in the winter, we use our laundry room space to the max.

It started a few summers ago, when I hung all our laundry outside each week. When our electricity bills arrived, we noticed a 15% decrease in our electricity use. Clothes dryers are incredibly inefficient, and clothes don't seem to last as well when they're thrown around in the heat of a dryer drum on a regular basis. So my husband and I talked about it, and determined that it wouldn't be difficult to turn our laundry room into a place for drying clothes during the 7 or 8 months of the year when the weather outside is uncooperative. Lee found four wonderful retractable clotheslines to string across the room, and now our dryer sits idle most of the time. Our electricity bills are also easier on our finances.

True, it takes a little more time and effort to do the laundry this way, but we don't really mind. I love to see things hung up in order on the line, and feel some sort of spiritual connection with my grandmothers, who hung their clothes to dry before the advent of labour-saving devices. As I spread a tea towel over the line and fasten it with a clothespin, I often think of Amy from one of my Simplicity Study Circles, who talked about "Zenning" her laundry: handling each piece with an appreciation for its texture and colour, and being grateful for the fact that she could own such things at all. Being mindful of our clothing, giving thought to where it comes from and who might have made it, its weight and warmth, is not something that a lot of us have time to do. But perhaps if we did, our garments would become more precious and less disposable. Maybe we would care for them more and wear them longer, rather than spending our lives shopping for new things.

Or maybe I'm all wet, and should be hung out to dry!

See also, http://simplemoodlings.blogspot.com/2010/10/ode-to-clothesline.html

Being sisters and brothers of nature

Have you noticed that the weather is getting to be less and less predictable? Sometimes I get the feeling that our sciences, maths, probabilities and meteorological indicators are stories we tell to convince ourselves that everything is "normal." I keep wondering... if our polar icecaps are melting, where is all that water going to go? We've sure got a lot of snow this season... and people in Brisbane and Brazil aren't doing so hot with their homes destroyed by water or mud. Freak occurrences, or part of what's now called Global Climate Change?

We'll never really know because so many variables are at play, but I have my suspicions. And my suspicions lead me to believe that it's time human beings woke up and paid more attention to things that are happening, rather than trying to explain them away. The calendar on my wall this month quotes Ekhard Tolle: "To awaken within the dream is our purpose now." In North America, we've been dreaming that the earth will always be able to supply our every need and satisfy our every whim. We've dreamed until a lot of Earth's species and resources have disappeared because of us, and now it's starting to look as if Nature is about to revolt. Who can blame her? We certainly haven't been very good stewards in our twin quests for luxury and convenience. Personally, I could handle a lot less of both if it would mean fewer disruptions in the health of our planet.

For too long, we've been taking the easy way out. We've lost touch with so many of the processes that allow us to live. It wasn't that long ago that we grew our own food, built our own homes, and worked with our hands to provide for ourselves and our communities, and we were much healthier for it. We didn't have to worry about diets or exercise because both were balanced and integral parts of our daily lives. We knew how to make do, and we lived in solidarity with each other, rather than in competition to see who had the most or best of everything.

We can't go back in time, but we can return to our roots. It's high time we start to consider ourselves to be sisters and brothers of nature and forget all that biblical bosh about "filling the earth and subduing it." We need to wake from the dream that we are in charge and that every homeowner must have their own fill-in-the-blank. We need to get on with living lightly, with using as few of Earth's resources as possible, and remembering that we aren't the pinnacle of God's creation, but just a small part of it. I expect that God loves everything created, right down to the tiniest amoeba, and our challenge is to live in harmony with it all.  Henri Nouwen hits the nail on the head when he says:

When we think of oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, trees, plants and animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the galaxies, as God's creation, waiting eagerly to be "brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God" (Roman 8:21), we can only stand in awe of God's majesty and God's all- embracing plan of salvation. It is not just we, human beings, who wait for salvation in the midst of our suffering; all of creation groans and moans with us longing to reach its full freedom.

In this way we are indeed brothers and sisters not only of all other men and women in the world but also of all that surrounds us. Yes, we have to love the fields full of wheat, the snowcapped mountains, the roaring seas, the wild and tame animals, the huge redwoods, and the little daisies. Everything in creation belongs, with us, to the large family of God.      Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey, December 9th

God's dream is so much bigger than ours. It's time to wake and live God's dream. My seed catalogue arrived last week. I'm going to cooperate with God's dream today by ordering seeds to grow this year's vegetables to help feed my family.

What's your plan to live God's dream today?

An electronics moodling

My hubby is something of a computer geek, so I guess you could say I am, and our children are, by association. Some days, this is truly a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I love how our computer allows us to be in touch with people around the world with a click of a mouse, but on the other hand, I hate how, occasionally, we seem to have more screen time than face to face time. Of course, there is a solution -- limit those screens.

It's not easy, though, when school work now demands a computer, and everyone's friends are on Facebook, every Corner Gas episode is available on Youtube, Grandma and Grandpa can bridge a 500 km distance via Skype, and the computer stores all the girls' iTunes music files. But just as we've pretty much cut TV out of our lives, we can minimize the internet's influence on us too, by considering what kind of lives we really want to live and keeping time free for exercise, music making, and family time. We know that everything doesn't have to revolve around electronics and that living simply is better than being strangled by computer cords or numbed by wireless signals.

Speaking of which... here's another little video, newly released, from Annie Leonard, the Story of Stuff woman. She doesn't really talk about buying fewer electronics -- I guess our world will never go back to being Luddites -- but she does point out how toxic they can be if they aren't handled with care, and how we need to encourage companies to create computers that won't be obsolete every few minutes...

Love this computer age or not, it's here to stay. And if we all think about ways to reduce its impact on the planet, we'll all be better off.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends! And don't forget... tomorrow is BUY NOTHING DAY!

Convenience vs. saving the planet

Okay, I'll admit it. I drove to work today. And I've driven to work probably twenty out of twenty times in the past two months (I work part-time). The reason that this is something I don't like to admit is that my workplace is only a twelve minute bike ride or a thirty-six minute walk from where I live. There's really no excuse for taking our vehicle and adding to carbon emissions most days. Especially since I have a wonderful bike, and I enjoy walking.

So why don't I use my "alternative transportation" more often? I rode my bike all summer, but somehow, when school started, I got sucked back into that factor known as convenience, coupled with something we might call laziness. If I drive, I arrive at work in five minutes flat, unflushed in the face, unruffled in the hair, and unsweaty, period, and I arrive home in the same smooth condition. I also have a few extra minutes on both ends to futz around in my own space at my own pace.

When I walk or cycle, my cheeks are pink, my hair is messy, and I feel damp until that light perspiration evaporates. But I also take unbusy streets, avoiding the five-legged spider of a traffic circle where cars crawl and blood pressure rises. I enjoy the gifts of the seasons: light in the sky, birdsong, the smell of tree blossoms or fall leaves, the colours of growing things, or the secret sleeping mounds of plants hidden under the snow. My lungs fill with fresh air and my heart thumps rhythmically and my doctor has no reason to insist upon cholesterol medication before my time.

Most importantly, though, when I travel on foot or two wheels, I'm living simply. I save the planet, just a little bit, for future generations. Oh, I know I'm not making a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but what I can do now could matter in the long run, especially if other people join me in my little plot to use less of the earth's resources. Actually, a lot of people are already on the "saving the planet" kick. And if I'm at all wise, I will get more serious in this regard, too. I'll plan ahead, get organized early, and walk or cycle to work.