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Earthcare, Energy, and the Right Use of Things
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Spirituality
Love in the Wilderness: A Path for Climate Action
By Mey Hasbrook. LOVE SPEAKS OUT to me from the Biblical account of Exodus as a way to face climate breakdown. I hear this as someone of Cherokee Celtic-Irish descent and a Quaker carrying a ministry about Right Relationship, connecting care of the Earth and human...
In Uncertain Times: Wisdom for the Pandemic
By Mary Jo Klingel. I HAVE HEARD the conventional wisdom that the business community needs certainty to function, and that the stock market needs certainty to grow. When I hear that, I think, “Well, what you are really saying is that you need to know that you will...
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...
Book Review: Nothing Lowly in the Universe: An Integral Approach to the Ecological Crisis by Jennie M. Ratcliffe
By Ruah Swennerfelt. MANY, MANY YEARS ago, after having a deep-felt conversation with my father, who wanted to blindly trust his government, I gave him Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. I chose that book because Dad lived in Southern California, a desert turned into a...
Interfaith Earthcare Touchstones
Compiled by Beverly G. Ward. “A touchstone transcends any one religion, thought, or spiritual tradition and serves as a guide. These touchstones provide examples of specific prayers, passages or scripture, or inspirations from various sacred texts or philosophical...
Listening to Roots, Walking in Beauty
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Beckoned by Living Trees
By Marcelle Martin THE FIRST TREE that beckoned me silently, long ago, was a sapling on the far side of a lawn. When I investigated, I discovered it was being strangled by an orange plastic band encircling its trunk. After the sapling had been purchased from a...
The Call and Response
By Mey Hasbrook. THIS SUMMER at the Friends General Conference Gathering’s Earthcare Center, I spoke on “Transformative Earthcare: 18th-century Benjamin Lay for Today.” I shared how this third-generation Quaker lived a radical life at the intersections of concerns...
An Easter Reflection with Joanna Macy
By Sara Jolena Wolcott. “What do you envision for the future?” Joanna Macy—Buddhist eco-philosopher, scholar of deep ecology and systems theory—asked me last night, over a dinner of orange yams and tofu and lemon broccoli. Every time I visit her in her Berkeley home,...
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...
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...
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...
Sweet Balance with Earth
By Ann Marie Klaus. I have to admit, I do not harbor a wish to save Earth or reverse the process she is undergoing. Nor do I worry for her. Earth, in my mind, is a powerful, exquisite being, undergoing the same process of expansion that every bit of the universe...
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,...
Ecological Guidance and the Sense of the Divine
By Keith Helmuth. The fate of the human now hangs on our engagement with ecological guidance; the task Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.” The sense of guidance provided by the ecological worldview is not unlike a new revelation, perhaps even a new sense of the...
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...
Our Birthright: The Night Sky
By Shelley Tanenbaum. I’m not one to believe that the universe owes me (or anyone) anything. But, after spending five nights camping in semi-remote places between Denver and San Francisco, seeing what appeared to be an infinite number of stars and the Milky Way every...
Book Review: Our Life Is Love
By Judy Lumb. I have admired and been inspired by the writing of Marcelle Martin in Friends Journal, so I was very happy to learn that her book was released. It is a very effective juxtaposition of vignettes from the lives of early Friends and contemporary Friends....
Ecological Integrity and the Light Within
by Louis Cox and Ruah Swennerfelt. Ruah is the former General Secretary of Quaker Earthcare Witness IN THE COURSE of our travels to present on behalf of Quaker Earthcare Witness, we search with gathered Friends for ways we all can “walk more gently on the...