Dear Editor, I appreciated the recent article about indigenous peoples. This is an area where environmental justice and social justice meet, as these are the cultures who have a better sense of how to live in harmony with the land. I want to draw attention to a local...
Shelley Tanenbaum Greetings, Friends! We hope as 2014 draws to a close you are feeling a sense of gratitude and hopefulness about the changes we’re seeing—and making—in the world around us. Quaker Earthcare Witness coordinates a network of Quakers working on...
Shelley Tanenbaum, General Secretary Alaska Friends have a deep connection to their land, as I learned on a recent visit when I facilitated a daylong workshop on earthcare, climate change, and witness in the world. The title of this article was the theme for their...
A Report from UNFCCC Negotiations Lindsey Fielder Cook. QUNO Representative On June 4-15, 2014, international climate change negotiations were held in Bonn, Germany under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These...
Mary Gilbert Snapshot 1: Patti Muldoon and I are kneeling on the floor working on a blue cloth rectangle, painting in the letters on the banner we designed: “QUAKER WITNESS.” It should be useful for many events, not just the People’s Climate March. The...
Shelley Tanenbaum The ice is melting in the north. The only way to change our ways is to melt the ice in our hearts. This is a slightly paraphrased statement from Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, an indigenous leader from Greenland, one of the many inspiring speakers at the...
Dear Friends, A carbon tax—widely thought to be the most rational and effective means to reduce fossil fuel and other carbon usage—is not on our government’s current agenda. We can, however, voluntarily tax ourselves and devote the taxes we raise to organizations or...
Roy Taylor, QEW Clerk When does a march become a March? Was it six months ago, when the idea for the People’s Climate March was hatched and the first hundred groups coalesced to bring it forward to the world? That was when QEW got on board as a sponsoring...
By Shelley Tanenbaum. General Secretary Our world is heating up, quite literally—and QEW is ramping up our activities and enlarging our network to address this challenge. More than ever, our network of Friends carrying concerns for Earthcare is needed to share...
We hope you’ll consider joining us this fall and help form the goals and projects that are ahead for QEW. What do you feel are the key issues for us to be engaged in, and how can we best witness in the world during 2015 and beyond? We work toward nothing less than a...
Greetings from Friendly Mystics Greetings to Friends everywhere from the participants in “Naming Our Spiritual Condition: The Second Annual Gathering of Friendly Mystics,” organized by What Canst Thou Say (WCTS) which is a Quaker journal, a meeting for...
By Ruth Small While reading The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Daphne Miller, M.D. began underlining more and more passages from a chapter titled, “The Body and the Earth,” riddling its pages with a surfeit of pencil marks and notations...
Join the People’s March for Climate Change! Come join us September 21, 2014 as we participate in what is being billed as the largest climate rally ever. It is time to stand up and be counted. Quaker Earthcare Witness is one of the many sponsors of this event. The...
By Justin Mog, Louisville Friends Meeting Like my fellow Kentuckian, Wendell Berry, and my fellow Ohio native, Gene Logsdon, I consider myself a bit of a contrary farmer. I reject the notion that agriculture can occur only in the wide-open countryside on farms...
By Tom Small Virtually all of us, expelled from the garden that was our heritage and birthright, seek to recover, somehow, a seed that will germinate and flower, nourish and sustain us. In that seed is the genesis of contemplative action, its harbinger and its sign....
There are still five remaining spots in the Continuing Revolution 2014 YAF Conference at Pendle Hill this June 6-11. QEW’s support for this conference has taken many invaluable forms thus far: financial support, programmatic expertise, workshop/interest group...
By Robert Howell THE AUSTRALIAN RELIGIOUS RESPONSE to Climate Change was established in 2008 (http://www. arrcc.org.au/). It is an initiative focused on multifaith environmental action, linking with like-minded groups such as 350.org, Go Fossil Free Australia, the...
By Mary Gilbert, QEW Representative to the UN TIMETABLE FOR THE SDGS In March the Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) completed 12 months of stock-taking in 37 areas of human interaction with our natural environment. As of April, the OWG...
By Angela Manno Out of the depths I cry unto you, Oh Presence, Maker of this perfect world Out of this silence but for my own breath Out of the darkness and weightlessness The black infinite night Encrusted with countless stars, cool, distant, white. I turn my gaze,...
Brad Stocker, Ed. D. WHEN I SAY THAT I FACILITATE Earth Literacy—as I recently did at the Palm Beach Friends Meeting—the question often comes: What is Earth Literacy? In this article, I’d like to introduce QEW friends and readers to the concept and invite you to...