Author: Breeze Richardson
This afternoon Focus Groups were held around areas of concern that those gathered wanted to explore more direct action around; I choose “Liberating the Earth from Consumerism, Over-Consumption and Greed.”
How can we bare witness to these concerns with clear language that’s inviting, not berating?
There are 5 parts to prophetic witness. One might feel led to do just one; or might feel led to do more:
– speak out (Speak Truth to Power)
– build and demonstrate the alternative
– celebrate what around you that is already good
– take symbolic and practical action
– envision
What does it mean to “live a good life” today? How does an individual answer such a question, and find resources to explore & discover new answers?
Resources:
(a list which is in no way exhaustive, but represented by those gathered)
• Living Witness Project (of Britain Yearly Meeting) – to help Meetings learn how to do this corporately
• Friends Testimonies and Economics (a project of Quaker Earthcare Witness) – learning/teaching about our economic policies in a context of ecological impact
• Quaker Institute for the Future, a research initiative which has just published Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (2009)
• Quaker Earthcare Witness – demonstrating how we can better live with right relations towards the earth; has many online resources on specific issues
• National Council on Churches (NCC) Eco-Justice Department
• Mennonite Creation Care Network – includes resources on connecting to Mennonite farmers, eco-friendly conference/gathering planning, and other initiatives
• NewCommunityProject.org
One particularly interesting action that caught my attention was the use of a Volunteer Fuel Tax Fund. One participant shared the success of his congregation to implement a voluntary tax each participating church member pays to a special fund, equal in amount to their personal consumption of gasoline (so for example, his family pays 50-cents a gallon). The money raised has refurnished the building: new environmentally-friendly windows, better insulation and low-flow toilets, to name a few. Wall cards accompany the renovations, explaining their funding. (Note: another participant mentioned a Quaker initiative that has begun along these lines, called the “Dime-a-Gallon Project“.)
In the end, we authored two-sentences at the direction of Gathering organizers:
We witness… and lament our participation in our economic system, which has led to catastrophic results: over-consumption, unequal distribution of resources, and the destruction of God’s Creation.
We are called to… return to our communities to speak out about the structural economic injustice around us, reduce our ecological footprint, and seek to live in right relationship with all God’s Creation.
I am again and again led to contemplating this issue as core to my walk with the peace testimony and I am so glad to see it here in this discussion about Quakers considering how to forward peace.
I cannot help but constantly bring forward the concern of what consumerism is doing to our environment, to those who produce the goods, to the earth’s resources, but also to our own families and communities. How do we return to enjoying simpler things? It is a struggle at times because we have been raised in a culture addicted to stimulus and to not come from a place of understanding and compassion for this in ourselves as we attempt to grow away from it is its own kind of violence. How do we lovingly help one another away from consumption and into joyous simplicity? It is constant work, and work I often find inspiring and uplifting, as well as hard.
Hello all –
Wonderful thread!
I share Breeze’s and Jacqueline’s concerns (because I am human, and American, though not specifically because I am Quaker or even Christian), and found the link to the Dime-a-gallon project particularly interesting.
It seems important to me to emphasize over and over that if we Americans do not curtail our consumption of water and other resources (not to mention our production of wastes including “greenhouse gas”), our very own quality of life will be affected. In fact it already is: more asthma, topsoil erosion and flooding here in the Midwest, etc. etc. Ultimately, too, if and when the polar ice caps melt, it won’t just be Mumbai or Tokyo underwater; it’ll be New York City too. So, joyous or not, yes, we must quickly put in place strategies for the sort of simplicity Jacqueline mentions.
At an Oak Park (IL) Children’s Religious education program last weekend, moreover, I think it did little good to emphasize to one young woman that her 15 minute showers were related to all sorts of world ills (loss of habitat for Lake Michigan animals; worldwide human deaths–one every 8 seconds–due to unclean water; etc.); however, other lessons probably sank in, such as the sheer unavailability of fresh, let alone clean, water to many of the world’s people. So education–but gently!–is one key; sharing of information is another.
In peace
Patricia McMillen