May 1, 2020 | Action-Oriented, BeFriending Creation, Friendly Landscapes, Number 2, Permaculture, Practical, Soil, Sustainability, Theology, Volume 33
By Jim Kessler. SERENDIPITOUS moments are transformative intellectually and spiritually. In 1970, close to the first Earth Day, I was finishing a Masters in Biology at the University of Northern Iowa. I bought a Sierra Club book entitled A Moment in the Sun. Its clear...
May 1, 2020 | 2020, April-May-June, BeFriending Creation, Climate Change, Number 2, Peace, Volume 33
By Emily Wirzba and Alicia Cannon. THE QUAKER VALUE OF PEACE calls us to advocate for a reduction in Pentagon spending and military interventions abroad. The value of stewardship urges us to address climate change and seek an earth restored. While it might seem...
May 1, 2020 | 2020, April-May-June, BeFriending Creation, Hopeful, Number 2, Spiritual, Spirituality, Uncategorized, Volume 33
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...
Mar 4, 2020 | Climate Change, Foundations, Pamphlets for Sharing, Skeptics, Timeless, Uncategorized
By the QEW Sustainability: Faith & Action Working Group What are the effects of human-induced climate change? Human-induced climate change threatens to overarch all the human misuses of creation, including rapidly growing human population, habitat destruction,...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, BeFriending Creation, Climate Change, January-February-March, Number 1, Quaker-Specific, Spiritual, Spirituality, Volume 33
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...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, Action-Oriented, Advocacy, BeFriending Creation, Climate Change, January-February-March, Meetings Taking Action, Minutes on Earthcare, Number 1, Practical, Quaker-Specific, Volume 33
By Patricia Finley, Ruth Darlington, Liz Robinson, and the Eco-Justice Collaborative of PYM. MORE THAN 50 FRIENDS gathered on a snowy morning at Germantown Monthly Meeting on January 18 to learn, share, and discern how to effectively address environmental injustice...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, BeFriending Creation, Books We Love, January-February-March, Number 1, Spirituality, Volume 33
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...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, Art & Poetry, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Volume 33
By Mary Ann Iyer. The cells of this earth are our cells. The wind that blows across its surface is the self same air that we breathe. Our life blood courses through our veins with no less certainty than the rivers cascading to the sea. And what are we to make of this?...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, Volume 33
By Judy Lumb. HOW DO WE ensure a future on Earth for humans and other creatures? Three recent reports analyze solutions to climate change that meet the ambition of the Paris Agreement. The Climate Urgency: Setting Sail for a New Paradigm Coopération Internationale...
Feb 1, 2020 | 2020, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Volume 33
By Shelley Tanenbaum. THE MOST RECENT Conference of the Parties (COP), held in Madrid, Spain in December, appeared to balance the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 on a knife’s edge, a sharpened knife’s edge. Lindsey Cook of Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) referred...
