May 1, 2019 | 2019, April-May-June, BeFriending Creation, Indigenous Peoples, Meetings Taking Action, Number 2, Uncategorized, Volume 32
By Bonnie Peace Watkins AS THE TWIN CITIES Friends Meeting Fellowship Committee, we were excited about the Quaker Earthcare Witness Spring Steering Committee meeting here in mid-April. We have long felt that food and fellowship are vital parts of witnessing,...
May 1, 2019 | 2019, April-May-June, BeFriending Creation, Minutes on Earthcare, Number 2, Quaker-Specific, Spirituality, Theology, Uncategorized, Volume 32
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...
May 1, 2019 | 2019, April-May-June, BeFriending Creation, Number 2, Sustainability, Uncategorized, Volume 32
By Paula Kline. Alan Wright and Paula Kline first took students to the Mexican Cloud Forest in 2003. Teachers at Westtown School in southeastern Pennsylvania, the couple had initiated the Quaker school’s agriculture program for its bi-centennial in 1999. Inspired by...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, Action-Oriented, BeFriending Creation, Climate Change, January-February-March, New & Exploring, Number 1, Practical, Uncategorized, Volume 32
Josephine Ferorelli created this flow chart—a helpful resource for anyone who doesn’t know where to start. Josephine is the co-founder and co-director of Conceivable Future, a women-led network bringing awareness to the threat climate change poses to reproductive...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Uncategorized, United Nations, Volume 32
By Philip Emmi. It is increasingly clear that we have gotten off on the wrong foot when addressing climate change. It can not be primarily a matter of nation-state cooperation on international policy, as once thought. Rather, addressing climate change requires a...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, United Nations, Volume 32
By Lindsey Fielder Cook. THE AIM OF THE DECEMBER climate change conference in Poland, known as the Conference of Parties 24 (or COP24), was to define an implementation ‘Rulebook’ for the Paris Agreement. After two weeks of exhausting, if not ‘fierce’ negotiations,...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, BeFriending Creation, Climate Change, January-February-March, Number 1, Volume 32
By Keith Voos. I’M SURE THAT MOST readers of this newsletter hold it to be true that the human race now faces the biggest threat to its survival since its near extinction in the last ice age, when the population of the earth was reduced to between 15,000 and 18,...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Practical, Volume 32
By Ruth Darlington. WHEN PAUL HAWKEN’S book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming came out in 2017, many hailed it as the “new Green Bible.” I rushed to get a copy. When I held it in my hands, it felt like proof that there...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Volume 32, Youth & Young Friends
By Dan Kriesberg. AN EXCELLENT MEASURE of how much children are learning is to count the number of times the teacher says “Pay attention.” The fewer “pay attentions” the more learning. In my own experience of 30 years as a science teacher, a 4th-grade teacher, and...
Feb 6, 2019 | 2019, Action-Oriented, BeFriending Creation, January-February-March, Number 1, Peace, Quaker-Specific, Spiritual, Spirituality, Volume 32
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...
