Tag Archives: ecology

Anglican clergywoman chains herself to a tree

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It’s all part of protecting the planet from the Kinder Morgan pipeline, which, for Anglicans these days, supposedly signifies a deep Christian faith.

If only Anglican clergy could bring themselves to expend as much energy protecting the future inhabitants of the planet they feel is in such dire peril: unborn babies, 100,000 of whom will be killed in 2018.

From here:

A priest and her parishioner were arrested on Burnaby mountain after they chained themselves to a tree outside the Trans Mountain terminal Friday morning, according to Burnaby RCMP.

The two women began their protest around 7:30 a.m. They were identified by a friend as Rev. Laurel Dykstra and Lini Hutchings, both members of Salal and Cedar, an Anglican church part of the Diocese of New Westminster. Around the same time, a group of protesters from Protect the Inlet began blocking trucks from leaving Kinder Morgan’s Westridge marine terminal in North Burnaby. Some thirty people had gathered on site that morning. Burnaby RCMP arrived at both locations around 8:30 a.m.

[….]

Rev. Emelie Smith, the parish priest at St. Barnabas Anglican Church in New Westminster, said the two women were protesting because of their religious beliefs.

“I think it’s an act of faith. I think people should know they are doing this out of their deep Christian faith and need to protect the planet,” she said.

Rev Dykstra is bisexual, participates in the Vancouver Pride parade, thinks drag queens should be invited to speak to school children, and enjoys chaining herself to trees in her spare time.

Diocese of New Westminster blesses a petrochemical

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The demon fossil fuel – oil – is being blessed by Bishop Melissa Skelton; but only if it is to be used on a bicycle chain. If only I lived in Vancouver: I would have a can of oil blessed and pour it into my SUV – well, I don’t actually have an SUV but I would be sorely tempted to go out and buy one.

From here:

Praying a blessing over a canister of bicycle chain oil may seem unorthodox, but the Anglican Bishop of New Westminster assured Metro her ritual, conducted Wednesday, was doctrinally sound.

“Yes, it’s something I’m allowed to do,” Rt. Rev. Melissa Skelton said with a laugh, as she stood on the lawn of the Diocesan offices in Shaughnessy. “It’s the every day and the useful where God shows up.

“In this case, we’re blessing things … that lead to better stewardship of the environment. It starts with the small and goes bigger.”

[…..]

Adapting the ritual for chain lubricant may seem unusual, but the ideas of community and being anointed for action in the world is related to environmental commitments, Skelton said.

“This is also the oil used in vehicles that would be the implements of action — protecting the climate and finding other ways to get around that don’t depend so much on large amounts of fossil fuels,” she explained.

Diocese of Ottawa voting on whether to divest from fossil fuels

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From here:

Delegates from 114 area Anglican congregations will decide this weekend whether to make a major statement on climate change by divesting their diocese of $1 million in oil and gas stocks.

“It’s become a moral and ethical issue,” said Carleton University biology professor and ecologist Lenore Fahrig, one of a small group of church members who will table four climate change-related motions at the Anglican annual diocese synod, or summit, beginning Friday.

“We know how it’s affecting nature and we know how it’s affecting people and we know how to avoid it,” she said. “It is entirely about profits, about money. What divestment does is make the statement that we have to pull out of this fossil fuel-based economy.”

Local Anglican churches have a combined stock portfolio worth $30 million administered centrally, she said.

Fahrig, a member of the St. Matthew’s Church congregation, has been speaking with Anglican groups about possible oil and gas divestment for more than a year.

“I’ve done at least 15 presentations around the diocese,” she said, “and pulled together a small team of people interested in this idea.”

The group will table four motions:

  • To divest locally in oil and gas companies.

  • To propose to the General (national) Synod meeting next summer that the entire Anglican Church of Canada divests of oil and gas stocks.

  • To launch an education program on climate change for all local churches.

  • To devise a plan to “de-carbonize” all Anglican churches.

If the motion passes, delegates will be forcibly de-carbonized.  Their cars will be impounded, they will be given bicycles to ride home and they will be searched for plastics before leaving. Technology items such as iPhones and computers will be liberated since they depend on fossil fuel for their production. Plastic lens spectacles along with all synthetic cloth garments, including cassocks, will be confiscated.

Nude delegates will be invited to cover themselves with copies of Greening Sacred Spaces: A Practical Eco-Spiritual Workshop, available for purchase in the foyer. No credit cards, please – they are plastic.

Anglican Church of Canada: mission and the big picture

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I have two rain barrels fed by the water running into the downspout from my roof. Up until now, I had no idea how to link my rain barrels to the “big picture” of the mission of the church. Come to think of it, I still have no idea but, I’m happy to say, St. James the Apostle Church in Ottawa is going to find out.

I am awaiting the answer with bated breath because I have been labouring under the naïve delusion that the barrels were just handy for supplying water to the garden. I have been blissfully unaware of the cosmic and possibly transcendent significance of a barrel of water with a few leaves floating in it.

From here:

Creation Matters, the environmental working group of the Anglican Church of Canada, has partnered with Greening Sacred Spaces to offer a program subsidizing “green building audits” for parishes.

[…..]

Enthusiastic beneficiaries of the Green Audit program include two Ottawa churches, St. James the Apostle Church and the Church of St. John the Evangelist.

Following the audit recommendations, St. James installed a rain barrel to help cut water consumption, as well as a composter. Meanwhile, a parish team began exploring opportunities to link the “big picture” audit findings to enhancing mission work.

I forget to mention that I also have not one but two composters. Last week, as I was digging a dead rat out of one of them, I thought to myself: this will be the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. I have to stop now; I’m getting all emotional.

The Diocese of Nova Scotia lost in a maze

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While some of us have been distracted by the mass beheadings of Christians in Iraq and Syria, the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island has kept its ever vigilant eye on what really matters: it is fearlessly battling a corn maze that has a “conflicted history of corporate interests”.

There are quite a few eco-maze zealots in the diocese. Much as a rotting log is crawling with woodlice, the diocese, apparently, is “crawling with environmentalists”:

Through a network format, Lucas-Jeffries drew the circle wide. Now more than eighty committed Anglicans from Nova Scotia and PEI “encourage and support each other around caring for creation,” she says. Lucas-Jefferies is thrilled with her new role and the abundance of committed Anglicans she meets along the way. “The church is crawling with environmentalists,” she exclaims.

As an example of both the pervasiveness of environmentalists and her skills as a networker, Lucas-Jefferies recalls a happenstance meeting in a corn maze in Truro, Nova Scotia. There, among the groomed rows of corn the environmentalist priest met a kindred Anglican woman from down the road in Dartmouth. The two forged a strong bond when they discovered, with dismay, that the maze had a conflicted history of corporate interests and genetically engineered corn.

It didn’t take long for Lucas-Jefferies to recognise the limited interest the rest of us have in the corporate contamination of corn mazes: she quickly moved on to the much trendier evil of fracking, a subject about which she confidently claims to know nothing:

Lucas-Jeffries spoke from the heart. She also spoke not as an expert, but as someone committed to listening and learning and discerning the movement of the Spirit in this space. With her time at the mic, she put to the room questions she thought essential for the fracking conversation, “Why do we need to do this? Who is going to benefit? What about the pitfalls?”

She ends on the high note of declaring Creation rather than Jesus as the reason for her relationship with God:

“It is because of the existence of Creation that I have this particular relationship with God—and with others—that is enhanced by the beauty of it.”

The Anglican wave of the future: composting toilets

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In a flash of rare brilliance, the Church of England has found a new way to entice the next generation of Anglicans into its churches: the opportunity to do number two in a church supplied composting toilet. It doesn’t get any more seeker friendly than that.

I do think the church might still be able to go one step further, though; especially parishes with adjacent allotments.

From here:

In our office we have a large map entitled ‘Devon’s Green Churches’ which contains a series of dots and stars covering the county from Ilfracombe to Ivybridge. Each symbol represents a church with a composting toilet or solar panels, or has completed an energy survey, or is registered as fair-trade or an ‘eco-congregation’, or runs a wood-burning heating system, and so on. They are examples of church eco projects. In total there are more than 200 coloured symbols and we add more each few weeks.

The Anglican Church of Canada mining justice

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Clerics from the Anglican Church of Canada met in Toronto and started digging for justice. I’m expecting to see giant drills and back-hoes roll past my door any minute.

From here:

As churches, we recognize our internal contradictions and complicity with respect to resource extraction, and the urgent need to practice responsible consumption and citizenship.  Therefore as people of faith who are members of local church congregations, we need to further develop our theological understandings of the issue, address our individual and collective lifestyles, develop an alternative economic model, and challenge the political and economic powers that drive the resource extraction industry. This conference may be a step toward a clear church expression of the need for change.

Oh, I get it, they are not excavating for justice at all: they just don’t like mining. Or consumption; or doing anything that violates the rights of the Earth; or capitalism.

I expect all the attendees, copies of Walden in hand, walked to the conference and shacked up in cardboard boxes under the Gardiner Expressway.

Mass extinction could eradicate 75% of life on earth

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From here:

Earth may be on the brink of a sixth mass extinction on the scale of the apocalyptic event that wiped out the dinosaurs, a study claims.

The researchers say that unless action is taken now to reverse the harmful effects of human activity on eco-systems, a full-blown mass extinction could occur within a few centuries.

Recovery from such an event, which could eradicate more than three-quarters of all life on Earth, may then take millions of years…………………………

Scientists believe humans are causing the sixth mass extinction by fragmenting habitats, introducing non-native species, spreading diseases, killing species, and changing the climate.

But Professor Barnosky said it was not too late to prevent the loss of species reach an extinction ‘tipping point’.

‘So far, only 1 per cent to 2 per cent of all species have gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth’s biota to save.

‘It’s very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation if we don’t want to be the species whose activity caused a mass extinction.’

Obviously Professor Barnosky is not offering a scientific opinion when he says it’s “very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation”.  Scientifically, it’s no more important that a species lives than it dies; science merely observes what happens. A theist might lament that God’s creation is being decimated but would have confidence that God is able to look after his creation in spite of man’s determination to muck it up. Professor Barnosky is probably not a theist, so he should stick to science and keep his value judgements to himself.

Katherine Jefferts Schori to walk to Canada for the ACoC Synod

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At least – assuming she does not want to participate in our collective sins when she attends GS2010 – that’s how I interpret this:

The still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is good evidence of the interconnectedness of the whole. It has its origins in this nation’s addiction to oil, uninhibited growth, and consumerism, as well as old-fashioned greed and what my tradition calls hubris and idolatry. Our collective sins are being visited on those who have had little or no part in them: birds, marine mammals, the tiny plants and animals that constitute the base of the vast food chain in the Gulf, and on which a major part of the seafood production of the United States depends. Our sins are being visited on the fishers of southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, who seek to feed their families with the proceeds of what they catch each day. Our sins will expose New Orleans and other coastal cities to the increased likelihood of devastating floods, as the marshes that constitute the shrinking margin of storm protection continue to disappear, fouled and killed by oil.