Stephen C. Gates Several years ago, I started a regenerative vegetable garden in the sunniest place on my property. Little did I know then that the garden, immediately next to the street, would lead to what I now understand to be...
Common Ground: One Community – One Earth Quaker Earthcare Witness Fall Gathering October 16 to 19th, 2025 Powell House and Online (Hybrid) Each fall, Quaker Earthcare Witness gathers to rejuvenate and reconnect. Our community is strengthened during this time of...
A Spirit-Led Journey to Sustainability Grinnell Friends Church Solar Field Jim Kessler By way of introduction, Grinnell Friends Church, which is on the edge of Grinnell, Iowa, is a growing pastoral Meeting that averages 100 to 115 worship attenders on a Sunday...
by Allen McGrew. Six months before I joined Quaker Earthcare Witness Steering Committee, I was stricken by a nasty infection that got into my blood and precipitated a near-fatal cascade of platelet death, septic shock, that plunged my blood pressure to 35/50,...
by Sheree Cammer. On a train trip back east last year, my cousin and his wife introduced me to the Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve in Fremont, Indiana. Bill “Three Paws” Elias drove our tour in a pickup truck. I had the best seat: front seat passenger. The herd was...
by Hayley Hathaway. In fall 2022, QEW launched its first 10-week course on ecological grief. The course came after organizing two popular online workshops on the topic: over 200 Friends registered from across North America. At these workshops, Friends shared about...
by Bill Cahalan. I agree with Wendell Berry, who wrote in his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, that the United States is an unsettled country. We, not only in North America but in all the industrial world, are disconnected from our natural sources. So most of us...
by Mary Conrow Coelho. There are remarkable discoveries now offered to Quaker Earthcare Witness that can greatly strengthen its work and witness. One evening in the early 1990s, a small group gathered to listen to a talk in a video series describing the changes in...
Join Hayley Hathaway, of Quaker Earthcare Witness, for Exploring Ecospirituality: Old & New Ways to Imagine & Transform, a workshop for young adults (ages 18-40). The workshop will be held online, Thursday, February 17, 7:30 – 9 pm Eastern Time. “The world is...
Dear Friends, As our beloved outgoing clerk, Mary Jo Klingel, writes: “If the past two years of virtual meetings, workshops, and worship sharings have taught QEW Friends anything, it is how very precious our Earthcare community is.” She continues: Those who work...
I love this part of the winter holidays—when our sense of wonder and light corresponds to the natural pivot point of the solstice. Since June in the northern hemisphere, days have been getting shorter and shorter, with the shortest day today, on December 21. From this...
by Marcelle Martin. When I was in my mid-twenties, my graduate school program was not meeting my great longing to understand the nature of reality. I began to seek inwardly. Yearning to know what life was about, I paid attention to my inner experience in a new way. I...
by Mary Jo Klingel, Clerk. “Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will feed thee more. But stand still, and act not, and wait in patience, Till Light arises out of Darkness and leads thee.” – James Naylor I know that many Friends and many others...
by Jennie Ratcliffe. Any and all of us who’ve held a vision of transformation grounded in what really sustains us—remembering that we don’t live by bread alone, but by the divine All That Is, that bread is sacred too, and there is no ultimate separation between...
by Bill Cahalan. Bill Cahalan is an eco-psychologist. His booklet, Awakening to Earth, is currently being updated by Quaker Earthcare Witness and will be available to share and download. This meditation is an excerpt. Bill writes, “Here is one version of a guided...
by Louis Cox. DO YOU SWEAR that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God?… Early Quakers were known for their refusal to take such oaths in a court of law (often at the risk of fines and...
by Quaker Earthcare Witness. Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown is expanded and updated from their book of the same name published in 1998 (New Society Publishers, 2014, Gabriola Island, BC). The Deep Ecology work of Joanna Macy, also called the...
QEW’s PROGRAMS and publications stem from a conviction and consciousness that the global crisis of ecological sustainability is at root a spiritual crisis. Even as individuals in our network or our steering committee support political and social action in...
by Noah Merrill. Editor’s Note: Noah wrote this piece in spring 2020 and his reflections speak to us still. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. —José Ortega y Gasset JUST OFF THE shore in Gibara,...
By Ruah Swennerfelt (Updated 2021 by Hayley Hathaway). To become more active on behalf of Earth, start by making yourself aware of the issues. Learn from sources in addition to the conventional news reports. Begin examining ways you can reduce your purchases, buy...