Compassion in Politics: Christian Social Justice, Non-Profits, and Life Theology

What are we to do with a “Planet In Peril?” Here are 9 suggestions for personal action from Dr. Matthew Sleeth:

• Set up a recycling program at my workplace, church, or school.
• Cut way back on the Christmas frenzy.
• Give away or sell anything and everything that is cluttering my life. Donate the proceeds to charity.
• Use no pesticides or chemicals on my lawn or garden.
• Instead of a birthday gift or flowers for a funeral, send a donation to charity.
• Start a study group on what the Bible says about caring for creation.
• Ask my utility company to conduct an energy audit on my home and follow up on their advice, and do the same for my church.
• Follow our grandmother’s advice: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Want to save the planet? Dr. Matthew Sleeth suggests finding information about energy conservation at Energy Star as well as at the Serve God Save the Planet website where he suggests Time Magazines 51 Things We Can Do to Save the Environment. Finally, you might like my a couple of my 25+ suggestions for saving the environment from Blog Action Day. Finally, you might also check out I Need to Change or 43Things.

Thoughts? What did you think of CNN’s “Planet in Peril”?

thanks to Ari Hahn for the flickr photo

Actually I wish I was a much better tree hugger. I strive to be better in my personal environmental ethic by informing myself and adjusting my own personal behaviors. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this…but its certainly frustrating to want to recycle in public and see no recycling bin on the horizon. Does anyone else feel like the recycling movement has stalled?

I read Becky Garrison’s Red and Blue God and Black and Blue Church earlier this summer. It has a great analysis across a range of salient political issues, including the environment from a faith-based perspective. One great quote she highlighted:

“Only after the last tree has been cut down; only after the last river has been poisiones; only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money can’t be eaten.” Cree prophecy

For more information check out Becky’s book and reviews or the Evangelical Environmental Network

thanks to Jeirdan for the creative commons flickr photo

Current TV is featuring Chris Jordan’s work in segment entitled “Art of Consumption“  Jordan takes on materialism and mass soceity by examinging handguns, SUVs, plastics, cell phones, prisons, mail order catalogs, and the war in Iraq.  Building Blocks (above) “Depicts nine million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.” Chris’s commentary suggests:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to affirm and sanctify the crucial role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images.

 I just wish we could see how truly expansive these works were. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to this issue and his words ring true even today. King proclaimed, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism, are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” Thoughts? What might a Christian response look like? Cans Seurat: “Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.”

You gotta keep it real! The green movement does itself a disservice by shifting a focus from real world ongoing environmental and health threats to less verifiable claims about global warming.

Alternatively, Co2 and other forms of pollution are toxic and result in death. Additionally, oil independency should help us avoid a cycle of deady invasions in the Middle East as that historic tinderbox inevitably re-experiences the rise of sub-national extremism. If you want to curb carbon emissions in your own daily life, the Slate has some practical suggestions. Thoughts?

(thanks to davesag for the photo)

Are Factory Farms Immoral? One of my favorite blogs, Justice and Compassion discussed the issue and then today I ran into a decent resource for finding environmentally sustainable food sources.

Earlier this evening I was @ Portland Coffee Brew (note: not where my earlier post about hate speech originated) and ran across this publication: Local Table. It has fabulous info about more environmentally sustainable ways to eat, which can help you locate environmentally sound local resources and food outlets in your area. For instance the American Community Gardening Association and the Community Food Security Coalition.

Slow Food Nashville also provides surprisingly great resources for Nashville folk too. For those outside of the Nashville TN area, Slow Food Nashville suggests Slow Food USA andFoodroutes.org

Thoughts? Resources? (thanks to mac_vegitarian/peta for the pic)

 Well…if you heart the environment, I would encourage you to put your money where your mouth (or really your blog where your mouth is…but that sounds kinda sick. Anyway love your earth) is on October 15th.

I’m going to do a more extensive post later. However, I was at a loss earlier in the week for a sweet post like this and it magically ended up in my inbox, so I thought that I would pass along some links.

Update: I just ran across an article about this very subject at Justice & Compassion about cooperatives, personal boycotts, and other tactics for combatting waste and injustice

Additionally, my friend Saqi, just went to see the Think Progress preview of the 11th Hour, an indepth documentary about our destruction of our environmental home. Here is the only review posted at IMDB.

21 Solutions to Save the World-Innovative solutions for inequality, Aids, poverty, foreign aid, disease, the war on terror, religious extremism, and the environment from the worlds leading experts, including, Jeffrey Sachs, Howard Garner, Joseph Nye, Bill McKibben, Homer-Dixon, and Amy Jaffee.

Most imporant issue covered? Any issue get overlooked? Best solution? And what does “expert” mean or how do we determine who is an “expert” in this new media era?

(Its too bad than in an age of open-source, that Foreign Policy and other publications cling to their information. So you’ll probably have to use your local bookstore, newsstand, or university electronic pubs database….)