EcoGod

I had a thousand options for things to do yesterday. Music festival, friends' bands playing, bonfires, parties, etc... there was no reason I should have been in my house.

Except that God asked me to stay in.

I've done things against what God's asked me to do and it usually turns out fine, but that's it. It turns out fine. I don't get blessed, revitalized, nourished. I just keep on existing. Go me.

So I stayed in. And I got the revitalization I needed just from sitting around and journaling and backtracking in old journals and watchin' Narnia and playing music and watching thunderstorms (and, yes, standing out in the thunderstorms, because I wanted to become an active participant instead of just an observer).

In my life, there are a few flavors of journals and notebooks, and I'd strongly advise whoever cleans up my stuff after I die just to chuck 'em, because there's going to be a lot of them and it would take years to go through them all. I'm only 25 and I've got a stack of journals as high as my arm.

Anyway, I've got diaries, which are for blabbing about current life events; I've got notebooks, which are for poetry and writing music; and I've got my little red book. The little red book has only existed a couple of years now and I think it's a type of journal I'll be continuing. The little red book is easy to carry in a small bag or a large pocket. It started as a place to jot random song ideas but it's turned into my little red book of personal revelation from God. Whenever I feel Him talking to me, I write in it.

This is an excerpt from November 13. I had just wrapped up a 3-day young adult conference in Worcester, MA.

Yesterday, Jay [Pathak, our guest speaker] asked if there was anyone with a holy discontent on them, on their hearts, something felt of God's heart. I began sobbing. My chest started just to heave of its own accord.
And I tried to hide it.
It was like I was embarrassed to feel this way. The feeling was like, why can't I just be normal like everyone else? Why can't I just be happy living and not thinking about how bad the environment is getting?
What a terrible thought, but, you know, healing the environment is a great and terrible task. I have enough worldly knowledge about it now that I know it's a nearly impossible task.
...
I feel silly believing that I could feel the anger of God towards the destruction of His planet. But I have to believe it. I've known that the environmental attitudes of people is a spiritual deficit - I've known that it must upset God - I've just ever known that God would actually lift the walls between our hearts and let that feeling flood into me.
...
One thing... one thing that I need to say... is that I feel overwhelmingly pressured by other people [Christians] that God's heart is for people and not the planet. And certainly God's heart is for the people. Especially the poor. But God... God loves the things He has made. And He hates that those things are marginalized and set aside as "something to do after everyone gets saved."

See, I honestly think God stopped me from writing in here for a bit while He did some work in me. I used to get words when I first started going to my church that I wasn't ready to do anything, that it was just time to wait on the Lord and let Him build a good foundation that we can work from. Unfortunately, I'm impatient and impetuous, so this was frustrating to me.

But there is a great sweet joy in having a relationship with the Lord and I'm always happy when we spend good quality time together, like yesterday, and like all the time He was building our foundation.

When I first became a Christian, I was very shy about it. I wanted more than anything to follow God and not be a Christian. My prayer was, please, God, I love you, but please don't make me have to be a Christian. See, Christians were very scary people to me. They were the people that rabidly proclaimed God's hatred on most of how I lived my life or the values I held. Certainly not personally - just the impression I got from how they conducted themselves toward everyone else. So I guess I figured if I started calling myself a Christian, people I knew would begin to think of me as a terrible person.

But I didn't have a choice. God had me hooked. I knew He wanted to have a relationship with me, I began to understand that he was Love and not hate, and knowing this, I found it impossible to ignore His call.

So now, here I am, blabbing all about it. Why's it relevant to environment? Because it's not just "the environment." It's God's. He loves it. He made it. And when people get disconnected from what He has made, they're disconnected from Him. Even those who profess to follow Him.

I will no longer be ashamed or afraid to talk about Creation and God's love for it. I will no longer prance around the issue on this blog. This is who I am now.

I'm in a rut... multiple ruts... this metaphor just exploded.

I can't seem to focus on this blog, so here's the obligatory "I might not be blogging for awhile" post. Look out, here it comes:

Yep, folks, whoever is reading this thing, it's not because I don't care about the planet. I just don't have the time to blog. Time management continues to be one of those skills that needs refinement. So while I always keep my love for creation close, here's the skinny: I work, I run a choir, I host a bible study, I give guitar (and banjo) lessons, I try to snag the occasional gig or two, I'm looking to record, I practice, and... I have to do all the normal people things, too, like shop for groceries and yell at Comcast about how I don't think I should have to pay sixty bucks for internet.

Right now I just want to focus on my job, my music, and drawing close to things that give me life. Unfortunately, the eco-blog doesn't currently rank on that list, but I'm hopeful that it will, someday. Possibly there will be a music blog, but I'm not keen on crossing the two different types of blogs. I dunno. I'll think about it. If you have an idea, I'm all ears.

Thanks for understanding. Catch ya on the flip side.

Go Veg, one day a week!

Ghent, Belgium was the first city in the world to go vegetarian one day a week. According to the article on Vegetarianism on Wikipedia:

In May 2009, Ghent was reported to be "the first [city] in the world to go vegetarian at least once a week" for environmental reasons, when local authorities decided to implement a "weekly meatless day". Civil servants would eat vegetarian meals one day per week, in recognition of the United Nations' report. Posters were put up by local authorities to encourage the population to take part on vegetarian days, and "veggie street maps" were printed to highlight vegetarian restaurants. In September 2009, schools in Ghent are due to have a weekly veggiedag ("vegetarian day") too.

It's just one city in a world of cities. But the decision is huge.

First things first -- your meat was once an animal. It ate a lot of food and drank a lot of water. The food it ate (probably some sort of grain) was grown somewhere. The food needed lots of water to grow.

From Time.com:

To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle.

So, going vegetarian reduces water consumption. And note -- that's not "all hamburgers for the rest of your life." Just ONE hamburger = 40 showers (provided you're using a low-flow nozzle, probably about 5 gal/min).


Now, your pre-meat animal also contributed a lot of greenhouse gases. (Air pollution.) In 2006, the UN released these facts and info; meat production was found to have contributed 9% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions; 35-40% of the world's methane; 65% of the world's nitrous oxide; and 64% of the world's ammonia.

(And just FYI: In terms of Global Warming Potential (GWP): methane is about 21 times worse than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide is 296 times worse than carbon dioxide.)

So, Going vegetarian reduces greenhouse gas emissions. And even if you don't believe in global warming, you should know that the World Health Organization estimates about 2 million premature deaths can be blamed on air pollution.


Finally, your pre-meat animal, as we said, ate a lot of grain. Did you know that people can eat grain just like animals can? Did you know that in the US, in 1999, 70% of all corn and grain produced went into the bellies of our pre-meat animals? Did you know that, according to Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel, "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million"?

So: Going vegetarian increases the amount of total food in the world. Seriously... 800 million people?

I'm sorry if writing all this down makes meat-eating seem a bit... selfish. (But on the other hand, maybe it is and maybe a little guilt won't hurt you any.)

I should note that I, myself, am not completely vegetarian. I limit my consumption, but unfortunately I sort of forgot what I set as my limit. Originally it was supposed to be that I could eat meat two days a week, keep them lower on the food chain (poultry or fish). Red meat could be consumed about once a month. Honestly, I've slipped a little -- but reading facts like this is a wake-up call to myself about the reality of what I'm eating.

Anyway, take a note from Ghent, Belgium. Are you eating meat all week? Think you could go veg just one day? I believe that you can. Are you eating just a bit? Think you can cut back more? I believe that you can. Try it and see.

I'm an addict. An e-addict.

I need to confess something.

I’m addicted to the internet.

Checking e-mail becomes a 3-hour episode of “let’s look at everyone’s pictures on facebook.” Looking up a song to add to my repertoire becomes five hours of watching cats jump in boxes.

It sounds funny. It is kind of funny, but I find myself completely exhausted and kind of disillusioned about my ability to do anything.

I lose time, and time is precious when you’re a guitar teacher naturalist singer-songwriter choir director. So there’s that.

There’s also the notion that I don’t actually like being on the internet. I’m a tree-hugger, for cryin’ out loud. I don’t actually like sitting in front of a glowing screen all day. So it’s kind of bizarre that glowing screens can so easily ensnare me.

And then there’s the environmental side that I’m thinking of. Not so much my own computer – most personal computers these days are getting pretty energy-efficient. What I’m thinking of is the internet in general. How much electricity does it take to keep all these servers going, all the time, 24/7, and to air-condition the buildings they’re kept in? (They have to be air-conditioned, otherwise they could run too hot.)

I’ve got a general idea that each site or service has its own set of servers, and I vaguely understand that the more activity a site or service has, the more servers it needs. But I don’t get much beyond that, if there is anything about that.

The most electronics-deficient I’ve ever been was in Alaska. We had 20 minutes of satellite phone time a week. We also had a laptop that we’d use to input our data. We had electricity and all – just most of it we used to power the freezer, and some for the lightbulbs at night. I love situations where I’m working outside and I’m too busy for the internet. I always come home thinking, “YEAH, I’ll just stay off forever!”

I’m on again in less than a day.

Wendell Berry railed against "hypertext." But now people use it without even knowing that they use it. How simply can I be living if I have facebook, myspace, flickr, and a blog? Not to mention, some old website stuff on comcast. It's just such a huge part of our culture and our relationships now. I tried deleting facebook -- I think I lasted like a week, maybe. Best week ever, but... I have scads of friends in North Carolina who I enjoy spying on.

Anyway, I’ve tried setting boundaries for myself and they’re just so easily ignored. I don’t really know where to go from here.

Hold off on that ark.

Yesterday, I was trying to get to work at the White Clay Creek State Park nature center, and I ran into a minor obstacle.


Much of the east coast got slammed Thursday by remnants of a tropical storm... or was it a hurricane? Anyway, it rained more than Hurricane Floyd. The flooding uprooted this bridge (which normally allows for car access to the nature center).


It turns out that the schools were all canceled anyway, which put a nix on the geology program we were supposed to run. That's probably a good thing, since the gravel bar that we normally go to was very much underwater.


According to the staff, the flooding will "recharge" the gravel bar, though, which basically means that the old rocks will move out and we'll get some new and exciting rocks.

This year, the White Clay Creek celebrated its tenth year as a National Wild and Scenic River. It's not a national park, but the designation is a partnership between locals and the National Park Service. In light of this flooding, it's a good thing that this land is all preserved.

In the first place, trees and other plants are HUGE help when it comes to preventing floods. Instead of going into the stream, water gets absorbed by trees. Their roots also aerate the soil, helping the water to go into the ground.

In the second place, most development that happens today actually increases flooding. This is basically because we like to create impermeable surfaces like parking lots, driveways, and rooftops, where water just slides right off where it used to be absorbed. So preserving land and protecting it from development helps decrease flooding.

Given these facts, it seems like it would be nice if we could develop responsibly -- making efforts to put back what we take from the earth, put those natural flood barriers in place when we remove them as a part of development -- but I'd argue that it's not only "nice." It's our responsibility.

Plus, everyone likes a parking lot with some trees in it anyhow.

The Onion's water bottle article

This is sort of a cop-out as a blog post, but I really think that the Onion captures the destructive force of nonchalance and false justification.

Click here to read the Jan 19, 2010 article: 'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

It's funny because nearly every single one of us is guilty of at least one of those thoughts -- and we know it. It's not the behavior that really needs attention, it's the attitude behind it. Once you turn nonchalance into a sincere care for the Earth, you won't need to force behaviors down throats in order to get people to choose what's best for themselves. Recycling and reducing consumption will be an absolute must, and it will be by popular demand.

That's what the Earth really needs. It really just needs its people to care about it. A lot. Maybe just as much as - or more than - they care about themselves.

A happy little joyful thing

A monarch caterpillar!


Which I found at work. (I'm a part-time naturalist.) (Which is not the same as being a nudist, which one or two of the pastors at church may erroneously believe.)

I get real wrapped up in how terrible everything is going for the environment, and I'm pretty sure that's not really healthy. So it's good when I just get a little moment to just feel some joy without any guilt or anger attached to it.

And look! There it is. A little bit of joy, just crawling along a leaf of milkweed. He gets to eat, and eat, and eat, and then he melts down and re-forms and BAM, butterfly wings. And let's face it, no one else could pull off that fashion statement. Just sayin'.