Monthly Archives: January 2006

This may apply to you, too…

Every three weeks, I talk to my ministry expert. She’s a church consultant and licensed therapist, and she coaches me in being a good minister. We talked today, and I told her I was feeling a little stressed.

She got right down to brass tacks: “Which days do you work? How long do you work on Sunday? How many hours on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? –does that include evening meetings? How long does it take to write your sermons on Thursday? Do you always take Fridays off as you’re supposed to?”

I answered. She added up the hours. “You’re working too many hours a week. And what happens if there’s a pastoral crisis? –if you have a funeral, that’s another ten hours that week, at least.” Conclusion: I need to cut ten hours a week out of my schedule. We talked about how I would do that, and as we did I could feel stress oozing out of me.

She then grilled me about my exercise habits. I’m doing all right, but I need more. My new goal is to spend one full day a month outdoors. Next time, she will probably grill me on my lousy eating habits.

My ministry expert reminds me that if you die from stress, you can’t be a good minister any more. So she tells me: “Don’t overwork, spend time with your family, get exercise, eat right.”

Come to think of it, that’s pretty good advice for anyone.

Memory fragment

Yesterday I was driving to the health food store — dark, cold drizzle, damp and raw — and I had a sudden flash of incredibly vivid memory:

…driving from our house on Manila Avenue in Oakland, up Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, shaded by palm trees, past the bright open buildings, early morning sun washing everything with that characteristic pellucid northern California glow…

I shook my head and said to myself: Why did I think of that? I rarely took that route to work; I usually drove up through the Berkeley hills. And why remember a fairly trivial part of my commute at all?

I tried to remember the rest of that drive up Telegraph Avenue, but my thoughts moved on before I could… I guess it was just one tiny fragment of memory dropping into awareness at an odd moment.

Less than moral

Carol’s car wouldn’t start, which meant she had to stay up in Cambridge a couple of extra nights. She was supposed to go to a meeting of New Bedford Public Interest, but since she couldn’t, she sent me instead.

A little background for those of you who live outside New Bedford: the Fairhaven Mill building at the head of New Bedford harbor has been in limbo for many years. The first floor houses an antique market, there are a few other businesses, but mostly the building is empty. Given its location right on the Acushnet River with beautiful views of the harbor and the city, and given the fact that it sits right next to an interchange on Interstate 195, the site is ripe for creative development.

What I learned at the NBPI meeting is that Home Depot is trying to push a deal through the city quickly, a deal that will allow them to erect a big-box retail store on the mill site. Of course, their business plan does not allow for such contingencies as utilizing a historic brick mill building that happens to stand in a very visible spot, so they will bulldoze the building. According to Home Depot, decisions have to be made quickly, there is no time for long studies or discussions, the city council has to vote now. The New Bedford city council voted to bulldoze the building.

To be fair to the city council, Home Depot holds out the prospect of 400 jobs coming from this development, which means a lot in a city like New Bedford. But the city councilors forgot to ask if that meant 400 net new jobs for the city; or if, as was the case when Home Depot built a store on Cape Cod, there will in fact be a net job loss for the region.

You know the rest of the story: most of the people in the surrounding neighborhood are not well off, many are people of color, and the nieghborhood looks like it’s unlikely to cause any trouble to Home Depot. So yes, this is a classic ecojustice issue of putting less desirable development in poorer communities.

I hate to see an outside corporation bulldoze a historic building, destroying some of New Bedford’s sense of place, simply because their business plan is inflexible. As a minister, it’s my job to point out when a person or group of people is being less than moral and ethical. Home Depot could be ethical and moral corporate citizens and figure out a way to use the historic mill building, and grace a poorer neighborhood with a more attractive development. This could be a win-win situation — but so far Home Depot refuses to bend. Personally, I think they should be ashamed of themselves.

The NBPI Web site has links to New Bedford Standard-Times coverage of the situation. Read the stories, do some investigating on your own, and tell me what you think.

NOFA winter conference

Carol and I drove out to Worcester today for the winter conference of the Northeast Organic Farmers’ Association (NOFA). Carol was on the NOFA/Massachusetts board fifteen years ago, and wanted to go to some presentations on permaculture; I went along for the ride.

Sections in this post:

  • “Organic growing 101
  • Phytoremediation through urban gardens
  • Lunch conversations
  • “Husbandry was once a sacred art
  • Bees

“Organic Growing 101”

We started out with “Organic Growing 101,” presented by Frank Albani, who works two and a half acres at the Soule Homestead in Middleboro. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because he started with a 30′ by 50′ garden, and in addition to his two and a half acres he still works a 50′ by 100′ garden. Market growing on that size plot (about an eighth of an acre) would be adaptable to urban settings. Albani works the 50′ by 100′ plot by hand, having built up the soil to the point where he no longer needs to use a power tiller. He grows much of his lettuce on this smaller plot, but because the plot is in full sun he has to partially shade it (which implies that partial shading on an urban plot could be used to advantage).

Albani went into many specific techniquess of market growing. He makes extensive use of row cover material like Remay: row cover will keep marauding insects of crops like cukes and squash; it keeps deer at bay; it will keep crops warmer in cool weather. Albani advocated drip irrigation if the grower has access to filtered water but unfiltered water will clog the drippers; he pumps unfiltered water from a nearby stream using a Honda 5 hp pump (he advises, don’t skimp on pumps but get a good one), and says it takes a good eight hours a week to irrigate his land if there’s no rain. His seeding is done with an Earthway seeder, which he finds greatly improves efficiency with such tiny seeds as carrots. Most important, Albani said: “Organic growing is all about feeding the soil” and about “promoting soil health”; good food is simply a byproduct of doing sustainable agriculture.

Phytoremediation in an urban setting

The second workshop we attended was the one I was most interested in. A small non-profit called Worcester Roots Project did a presentation on using plants to remove toxic substances from soils, a process known as “phytoremediation.” They are mostly interested in lead (from lead-based paints) in soils around urban housing. One of the dominant pathways that lead gets into children is by playing outdoors and ingesting lead. Worcester Roots Project has experimented with a couple of soil remediation techniques that are low-tech, inexpensive, and that can be implemented by ordinary citizens.

First, and most obvious, is to grow a good groundcover over affected soils. But before planting the groundcover, they discovered that research shows that adding a one inch layer of compost reduces the bioavailability of soil lead (“bioavailability” refers to the ease with which ingested lead can enter the blood). A study in Baltimore showed that tilling the soil, covering with 6 to 8 inches of biosolids (e.g., compost), and seeding with a turfgrass groundcover led to a 57% reduction in soil lead after one year. Apparently, compost application reduces plant uptake of lead, as well as supporting healthy groundcover growth; additionally, a phophate soil ammendment reduces bioavilability by putting the lead into a different chemical form. Worcester Roots Project has also had success planting scented geranuims in soil with high lead levels; the geraniums take up about 2-% of the soil lead per year, storing the lead it their leaves and shoots. They dispose of the geraniums in a lined landfill.

Lunch conversations

In true NOFA style, lunch was a potluck affair, and with thee hundred people bringing potluck we had lots of good food to choose from. We wound up sitting at a table with Josh from D-Acres in Dorchester, New Hampshire, and Jonno, a biologist and permaculture teacher from Leverett, Mass. Once they learned that Carol had co-authored The Composting Toilet Systems Handbook, Josh, and Jonno immediately engaged her in technical conversations about waste water treatment. A young woman named Anne also sat at our table, but she and I didn’t get a chance to say much; I mostly asked a few questions and sat back and listened with interest.

Josh found out that Carol had written Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. He looked impressed, and said all his interns loved the book. It’s always fun to see that in certain (very small) circles, Carol is well-known.

“Husbandry was once a sacred art…”

The keynote speaker, Brian Donohue, started off his talk by quoting Henry Thoreau: “…husbandry was once a sacred art.” Donohue, the author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord is an organic-farmer-turned-professor who has become interested in the cultural roots of a land ethic. “Where do we look for inspiration” for a sustainable way of life?

“The story we tell ourselves today in the environmental movement,” said Donohue, “is that the best thing we can do with Nature is to leave it alone.” He said for New Englanders, that attitude is based on the story we tell ourselves about how New England was settled. “The story goes like this,” he said: first were the Native peoples living in harmony with the land; then the English settlers arrived, displaced the Natives, and deformed the landscape; then around a hundred years ago the farmer went away, moving out to the Midwest, leaving us with a reforested and “re-wilded” landscape. Therefore, the landscape we have today should be left alone as much as possible.

But in Donohue’s view, that story is not quite right. The story we tell ourselves now says that there are only two options: pristine wilderness, and Native harmony with the landscape. Donohue wants to add a third environmentally acceptable option: a pastoral landscape where humans interact sustainably with the land through husbandry (as opposed to agri-business).

So Donohue likes to tell a new story of how New England was settled. He starts with Native harmony with the landscape. But his research shows that when the English settlers arrived, they managed to live sustainably in the New England landscape by adapting the European tradition of mixed husbandry (i.e., farms that combine tilled soil, pasture lands, orchards, wetland meadows for hay). This sustainable lifestyle ended at the end of the 18th C., as farmers increasingly grew for the marketplace and a cash economy. That meant land wasn’t seen as something to husband, but just something to exploit for cash. Then in the early 20th C., most farming died out in New England, leaving a forested landscape — a landscape which is now being eaten up by suburban sprawl. Donohue suggest that we go back to the husbandry attitudes of the 17th and 18th C., and “resist letting the market decide how we relate to the land.”

Working with others at Harvard Forestry, Donohue has come up with a specific proposal for Massachusetts. He says we should set a goal that 50% of the state be protected as forested land. Of that land, 90% would be managed sustainably as woodlands, and the other 10% would be protected as wildlands. His current work is to include farmlands in that proposal.

In short, Donohue wants to change the economic model so that an engaged citizenry supports sustainable farming and farmers. This, he said, would return to making husbandry a “sacred art” once more — instead of just setting land aside untouched.

Bees

For the last workshop, I went to a presentation on bees and beekeeping. I’ve been thinking about urban beekeeping as a possibility. But the presentation was really about the kinds of plants bees prefer, and I sort of dozed off. The samples of honey were good, though.

This blog is dark green

On the reading list today is Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, by Patrick Curry. Curry divides environmental ethics into three schools: “light green” or “shallow” environmental ethics, which maintains an anthropocentric bias and includes “lifeboat ethics” and stewardship; “mid-green” environmental ethics, which still assigns a higher value to humans and includes animal rights and biocentrism; and “dark green” environmental ethics which does not privilege human beings above other beings and includes Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” the Gaia Theory, Deep Ecology, the Earth Manifesto, Left Biocentrism, etc.

Curry includes this interesting statement in his account of Left Biocentrism:

The Left Bio movement is also well place, by virtue of its dual ancestry [i.e., left political thought and ecological thought], to put ecology onto the progressive political agenda, where it is now glaringly absent. Extraordinary as it may seem, feminists, anti-racists, and socialists are almost as likely as those on the neo-liberal and anti-democratic right to ignore the claims of even mid-range ecological ethics (e.g., animals), let alone ecocentric ethics. This fact is sadly evident in the programmes of nearly all of today’s so-called green parties, where the green values are strictly shallow, that is, advocated insofar as they further human interests, and not when they exceed them, let alone conflict.

Of course, politics in the United States is even “shallower,” ecologically speaking, than in Curry’s native England. I cannot imagine any political figure in the United States advocating for non-human interests over human interests; and something like ecofeminism and ecojustice are at best obscure academic notions that have no place in the public discourse.

In the realm of liberal religious theology, the situation is probably worse: if you can find any ecological theology at all, it will almost certainly be a “light-green” Christian ecological theology emphasizing stewardship, and probably based on Genesis 1.24 and 2.15 (a human-centered garden metaphor). That’s a problem for people like me who are “dark green.” My own denomination, Unitarian Universalism, is probably mostly in the light-green end of the spectrum, albeit with a “theology” grounded more in a secular ethic than a religious ethic. Yet while liberal religionists are mostly light green, there are high-profile exceptions like Rosemary Radford Ruether to show us dark green folks other possibilities.

Seashells

Walked to Fort Phoenix in Fairhaven yesterday.

Waves from Wednesday’s storm must have hit the beach at Fort Phoenix. Big rolls of seaweed, mixed with seashells and grains of sand, lay at the high tide mark. Most of the seaweed appeared to be Knotted Wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum), and true to its name its six-inch strands were knotted together, the bulbous ends impossibly tangled.

The seashells, as usual at Fort Phoenix, were thick between the low-tide and high-tide marks. The vast majority of the shells are always Common Slipper Snail (Crepidula fornicata), usually open and empty. But yesterday there were lots of live Common Slipper Snails clinging tightly to empty Northern Quahog shells (Mercenaria mercenaria).

Aside from the slipper shells and clamshells, the beach had the usual sprinkling of Common Jingle Shells (Anomia simplex) and Atlantic Bay Scallops (Argopecten irradians). I saw two Whelk shells, one which was a good seven inches long and was probably a Knobbed Whelk; the other I think is a Channeled Whelk. I found one Eastern Oyster shell (Crassostrea virginica), and one well-preserved shell of an Atlantic Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus). I did not find any of the delicate Ribbed Mussel shells (Geukensia demissa), although we found some there just last week.

I would estimate that there were twice as many gulls as usual at Fort Phoenix, many of them in the air: carrying shellfish in their bills, dropping shellfish until the shells cracked, harassing other gulls to steal a cracked shellfish away, or gliding along looking for more shellfish to pick up. The gulls use the summer parking lot, now empty of cars, as another rock on which to drop clams, cracking the hard shells open so they can eat the soft mollusc inside; although most of them still use the rocks at the edge of the sea.

I walked through the parking lot looking at the broken empty shells. Nearly all of them were clams, but I saw an occasional scallop, and one or two slipper shells. I watched as one Herring Gull dropped a clam; I heard it crack; the gull dipped into the broken shell with its bill, snatching out the soft inside, gobbling it down, all the while keeping a fierce lookout for nearby gulls who might steal its treasure.

Eco-theology research

I’ve been re-reading John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (Praeger, 1969), looking at Mbiti’s section on “The Concept of Time as a Key to the Understanding and Interpretation of African Religion and Philosophy.” This was hot stuff when I first read it as an undergrad philosophy major back in 1983, as multiculturalism crept slowly into the philosophy curriculum.

I got interested in the African notions of time due to my growing interest in ecological theology, specifically eco-theological critiques of Christian notions of end-time; especially where such notions are used to justify exploitation of human beings and non-human beings. If Mbiti’s account is accurate, traditional African notions of time could provide an alternate view that might lead to more nuanced understandings of Christian notions of linear time. In particular, this also raises interesting questions regarding the persistence of African thought in North America, and North Americans’ cultural access to alternative understandings of time.

However, in the past few years Mbiti has been critiqued for bringing a colonialist/Christian viewpoint to his work. So now I’m looking for other, more recent, studies on traditional African religion; yet in my limited search of relevant literature I’m not finding another book that addresses the issue of time (and of course part of my problem is that I don’t have access to an academic library…). If any of my readers happen to know of such books, please do let me know.

Of course, all this may lead nowhere. But it sure is proving to be a fascinating path to follow. And I’ll let you know if I ever get anywhere with this….

Stuck indoors

A half hour before I was going to walk home for lunch, it started to pour. When lunchtime rolled around, I pulled on my trench coat, jammed my hat low over my eyes, and put up my umbrella. The wind came whipping around the corners of the buildings downtown and pulled at my umbrella; swirling around buildings it blew the rain at me now from the north, now from the west, now from the east. My trousers got soaked from the bottom of the trench coat to my shoes.

On the walk back, I put on full rain gear: hat, slicker, rain pants. It was raining and blowing even harder, and rain blew up my sleeves and into my face. I got back in the office and stripped off the rain gear. My shoes were soaked, so all afternoon I walked around the office in sock feet.

By sunset, the rain had stopped, but by then it was too late to take a walk. There are days when I just can’t get outside. I’ve had other jobs where it didn’t matter so much if I got soaking wet. When I worked for the carpenter, we had to be outside in all kinds of weather, and no one cared if we got wet. But ministers aren’t supposed to walk around the church in sock feet.

Working outside in bad weather can be uncomfortable and even draining, but it has advantages over being trapped inside — trapped by the clothes you wear and the conventions you have to follow. Not that I approve of “casual Friday,” where corporations allow their employees to come to work without a tie, or wearing sneakers. But for me as a minister, one barrier to living out ecological theology is this insistence in our society that we stay indoors; and this insistence is enforced in many subtle ways.

Tomorrow is supposed to be pleasant: temperatures unseasonably warm, windy but nice and sunny. My work will keep me stuck indoors most of the daylight hours. I love my job, but ecotheology leaves me vaguely troubled by the insistence that mine is an indoors job.

“UU Voice” now online

The UU Voice, long a journal of independent opinion within Unitarian Universalism, is finally online. The Voice is sometimes cranky, sometimes inspirational, always independent of denominational headquarters. The article on the front page of the winter, 2005, issue, for example, suggests that we Unitarian Universalists should be trying to start storefront churches and “house churches” — and the article is, by turns, cranky, inspirational, and independent of the generally stated position at denominational headquarters.

Of course, what the Voice really needs to do is find someone to run a blog for them….