"Workers packed recycled plastic for later use in road pavement in Bangalore."

Today’s wave of technology fascinates me, especially when it is developed to help reuse or recycle materials which otherwise negatively impact the environment. Take plastic for example, companies already make fleece out of soda pop bottles, but what about bigger scale projects? While it is true that we always need to concentrate on reducing our consumption and limiting our use of non-renewable resources, there is also a point where products like plastic bottles and bags are never going to totally go away. So why not focus on reusing/recycling the ones that still exist? Across the world two businessmen have thought of a way to use large-scale plastic waste to pave roads, making streets in India more durable against natural disasters and severe weather conditions. Check out the full story here.

~Lana

Someone recently asked me why, working in the field of world hunger, I was going to a conference on environmental justice. It’s not always an obvious connection, that between hunger and climate change. But a main reason ELCA World Hunger is concerned about climate change is that the poorest have the fewest resources to adapt and cope. The most vulnerable are at the greatest risk of suffering and hunger. If the rains don’t come as often anymore and your crop doesn’t grow, how will you eat? If the strangely frequent and severe storms damage your house, do you spend your small income on shelter or food?

But a picture is worth a thousand words, right? So check out this site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8390366.stm  It’s from the BBC and includes a picture of the globe with video clips from different countries, each one showing an impact of environmental strain and change. In particular, I found the clips from Bolivia, Egypt, and Iraq especially useful for clarifying how changing water supplies impact human life. The clips don’t directly connect the environmental issues to hunger, but they take you close enough to make the final hop an easy one.

In recognition of what’s happening in Copenhagen right now, watch some of the clips. And then, with your new-found inspiration, hold a workshop in your congregation or community to spread the word about how climate and hunger are related. The workshop materials and instructions are ready and waiting for you at www.elca.org/hunger/toolkits  We invite and welcome your voice in the fight against hunger!

-Nancy Michaelis

It wasn’t just me who was cranky about gifts last Friday, aka Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day, depending on your point of view. Washington Post columnist George Will declared Christmas gift spending “a huge, value-destroying hurricane” and quoted Harriet Beecher Stowe, speaking in 1850: “There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

Will’s bottom line: Better to donate to causes and charities (hint: ELCA Good Gifts!), give gift cards, or just spend the money on ourselves, rather than purchase a gift that will have little value to the recipient!

George Will sees misdirected giving when he looks at Christmas gifts through an economic lens. Asking ourselves the perennial question, “How much is enough?” lets us detect and thwart consumer excess (how many sweaters, scarves, or ties can a person possibly need?). To see Christmas giving through an environmental lens, remember these facts from the American Society of Interior Designers: For every one truckload of goods manufactured, 32 truckloads of waste are produced… and 90 percent of everything manufactured in this country ends up landfills within one year.

As a reader of this blog about hunger, you’re probably already looking at Christmas gift-giving through a lens of social and economic justice. As a Christian, you’re probably looking at Christmas through a lens of generosity, a mark of the early Christian community. Of course, you’re also seeing Christmas as the birthday celebration of our beloved Jesus, not a credit-card and calorie bacchanal.

With those lenses in place, how are you living out creative, life-giving alternatives to an economically, environmentally, secular Christmas—without being stingy?

If you need a few ideas, you can find resources on simplifying the holidays here and here, review Sue Edison-Swift’s suggestions for “value-full” gifts here, and of course support ELCA ministries like World Hunger and Global Mission here.

I’m planning to give very small gifts made by local developmentally disabled artists…offer my stuff-sorting, stuff-organizing, and stuff-recycling skills to siblings and parents for projects they want tackled…participate in a multicultural La Posada celebration….write checks to World Hunger and a couple other favorite causes…and be a witness against mindless consumerism by living every single day of this Advent and Christmas season as my oddball, simple self.

Anne Basye, “Sustaining Simplicity”

As you may already be aware, yesterday (December 1) was World AIDS Day, a day set aside for raising money, increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education.  This is the 21st year of the event and the focus was on improving access to life saving drugs and recognizing this access as a basic human right.  (For more, check out the this page from the HHS Web site).

AIDS and hunger are closely intertwined.  AIDS is rapidly spreading in the most impoverished areas of the world—places where education, women’s and children’s rights, and peace are hard to come by.  Many areas, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the symptoms of poverty facilitate the spread of the disease while the lives and productivity lost to the pandemic further impoverish vulnerable communities.  Moreover, AIDS is especially devastating to hungry persons.  Malnourished persons cannot take anti-retroviral drugs—an empty stomach cannot handle the powerful medicine.  In the absence of drugs and adequate nutrition, HIV develops into AIDS more quickly.  Once a person has AIDS, more food is needed to fight the illness and counteract weight loss.

On the flip side, when someone is given the food and drugs that are essential to effectively addressing the disease the results are miraculous. Check out this powerful video from the Gates Foundation on how a young girl’s life was transformed by giving her access to food and drugs (the entire 11 minute video is worth watching, but the compelling image of transformation takes place at the 3 minute mark).

To see what the ELCA is doing about HIV and AIDS, both here and abroad, check out http://www.elca.org/aids.  To support the work of ELCA World Hunger in fighting these diseases, click here.

Solidarity is a big piece of “accompaniment” – a way of engaging the world in mission which the ELCA defines as “Walking together in solidarity that practices interdependence and mutuality.”

It seems to me that we have at least two ways to walk together in solidarity with others we accompany. First, we can respect what they value. Second, we can try to understand the roots of their challenges, and then refuse to participate in behaviors that escalate those challenges.

Which brings us to a big uh-oh.

Theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda doubts that North Americans can actually accompany anyone authentically. At the recent ELCA Accompaniment Conference at Luther Seminary, she asked participants what it means for us Lutherans to accompany people “we are unwittingly or unknowingly killing” through our participation in an economic system she calls “life giving to us, but death dealing to others.”

She cited a woman strawberry picker in Central America who told her, “our children go hungry because this land grows strawberries for your tables,” and a community in India displaced from hereditary lands into urban poverty by bauxite mines that make aluminum for North American consumption.

Rather than examining our system to see how it harms others, she says, “We think our life is a good one, and we give thanks for it.” Professor Moe-Lobeda notes that while our hymns don’t typically thank God for material goods, our prayers do. “And a lot of those material goods are stolen goods.”

Welcome to the week we give thanks for our way of life, no matter what suffering it causes! Now what, as Christians and people concerned with hunger, shall we do?

Instead of reflexively thanking God for our lifestyle, can we reflect on how our prosperity harms the earth and others? Professor Moe-Lobeda believes that our faith calls us to recognize, name, and resist “social structural evils” that mean, for example, that a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries.

Just being willing to question ways of life assumed to be good is a significant first step. Owning up to our complicity in the systems that support it—confessing that we participate and benefit—is a second step. Avoiding the temptation of shrugging our shoulders and declaring ourselves powerless to change anything is a third step. Seeking to create or nurture fairer alternatives is a fourth step.

That’s a lot of ground to cover over the mashed potatoes on Thursday. Since I’m not always tactful, I’ll probably focus on my fork and limit my efforts to leading a slightly less self-centered prayer.

Friday is another story! No early mall trips for me–I’ll be celebrating Buy Nothing Day, a holiday that helps me think about shopping and realize more deeply how tangled I am in our consumer economy. This year I’m hoping to be inspired to do less willful “not seeing” and creep a little closer to embracing what Professor Moe-Lobeda calls “the pan-human and inter-faith “great work” of our day: forging ways of living—at the household, institutional, and societal levels—that Earth can sustain and that build economically just inter-human relations.” [Read Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s ideas in this paper and this paper, and look for her title in the Lutheran Voices series, Public Church: For the Life of the World. Find some really radical ways to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, at home or with others, by clicking here or on the poster below.]

This year, let’s reconsider and redefine our blessings instead of counting them—and take a day to appreciate the world God has given us without using our credit cards. It could be revolutionary!

Anne Basye

“Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal”

I’ve been thinking recently about how important it is to have a place to be. I mean this on several levels. The first is the smallest and most personal –  a physical house. A place to go to after work or school. Shelter versus homelessness. I’ve been thinking about this because I have a friend who has recently taken her child and left a destructive relationship. Thank goodness for that, but because she has been a stay-at-home mom, she doesn’t have a job or income, which is making the move difficult. Fortunately, she has supportive friends, a really great church community, and she is receiving child support. She’s got more options than many women in her position, but her situation is still tenuous. She managed to get a short-term lease on a small apartment, but has little money left over for food. She’s relying on friends and the food pantry to help out. She figures it’s easier to get help with food then shelter, and it seems to me that there’s great comfort in having a place to be.

A second level of having a place to be is in liking where you live, fitting in there, and having a sense of belonging. I’ve been thinking about this as a relative who was recently laid off considers having to move his family to wherever he can find a job. They don’t want to move. They are very connected to their current community. But ultimately, they have to have income. There’s a difference between having a place to be and having a place you want to be, and, I’d guess, a corresponding difference in the degree to which you thrive.

Which is not so different from some of what I heard in Mexico City a little over a month ago when I was there with the ELCA World Hunger Leadership Gathering. For all the controversy immigration causes in this country, it’s not exactly a first choice option for many immigrants, either. But like my laid-off relative, you go where you can make a living. My relative may have to change states, but at least he’ll still be in a familiar culture, he’ll be able to speak the language, and he’ll be able to provide food and shelter for his family legally. How much more difficult for the Mexican whose choices are living in poverty at home, or as an outlaw in the U.S.? Neither is a very good or fulfilling place to be.

And then there’s the Maldives. Anne Basye mentioned the country in her blog last week. They face the possibility of their entire country being submerged by rising sea levels due to climate change. Where can one bein that situation, when your country no longer exists? I read that their president is talking to other countries about buying land onto which they might relocate should theirs go under water. How does that work?! Do they just move the whole country? Do they become part of the country into which they move, or is, say, Australia willing to sell off part of it’s land so they can create a new Maldives? What happens when a whole country of people has no where in the world to legally be?

The causes of hunger and the interconnections of those causes is complex, and it seems to be that this question of where a person can be ties so many of them together. Employment, economics, land rights, land availability, governance, identity. No big insights here today; just respect for the complexity.

-Nancy Michaelis

Last night a winter storm knocked the power out at my home, and I began to think about things…

• As I pulled out my wind-up flashlight I began to think about renewable resources. If I can power my flashlight (and keep reading my book) with the simple turn of my wrist, what else can I power that easily?
• Luckily the outage started in the evening and was fixed by morning, a couple of years ago the area experienced a storm which caused power outages for a week. What if I didn’t have a cold refrigerator to keep food in? How would that change what I ate and how much time I spent getting and making food?
• The rain poured and the wind howled but the water treatment plants were okay. Sometimes, however, in the really bad storms the water systems get tainted and we either have to boil water or use bottled water for a few days. We often have a supply of clean water in the garage for just such instances. What if we always had to boil water? What if we didn’t have any access to clean water storage?
• I did enjoy making cinnamon toast on the wood stove in my living room, I felt a little bit like a pioneer. I began to think, however, about my brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who cook every meal over the fire and also use this as their only form of heat.

In this winter storm I realized how lucky I am to have a roof, central heating, refrigeration and clean water. It also makes me think more about what I can do for others – like giving regularly, learning about renewable energy, being a good steward of creation’s resources and advocating for important justice issues. God works in mysterious ways – even through power outages.

~ Lana

p.s. For those of you who read last week’s Foodball blog, you’ll be happy to know that the competition raised over 989,000 pounds of food this year!

There’s a competition in the small town where I grew up called Foodball. It’s an 11 day all-out contest between two high schools to see who can raise the most food and money for local food banks. The contest however, is not just fueled by goodwill, but largely by the rivalry which surrounds the competition. Steeped in over 100 years of competition on the athletic playing fields, our two neighboring one-high school towns are bathed in school pride. When it comes to Foodball that pride feeds a lot of people. I remember in high school, while out on our one-day door-to-door neighborhood blitz, an old-timer asked me (right before he donated some money) whether or not the Bobcats were going to win this year. In this case, raising the most amount of food is a matter of pride. How much food? Historically, enough to run the local food banks for about nine months of the year – quite a feat in 11 days.

Well, it’s Foodball time again and every time I walk into a local store there are high school kids asking for donations and little donation bins on every coffee shop and ice cream store counter. Yesterday, however, I got a glimpse of why we really do this and who it helps.

After a nice lunch with my brother at a downtown cafe we decided to go on an afternoon walk. My brother is a designer and up in the older neighborhoods of my one-high school town, both tucked in corners and standing resolute on the side of the main street, are beautiful old homes. As reminders of our past, I often refer to a group of them as the timber mansions – built by wealthy timber barons in our earlier glory days. Around them are brilliant little craftsman homes and once noble tudors. On our way out of the neighborhoods we passed the local Lutheran church and the high school, right before we reached the museum. On the other side of the road from the museum sits a local food bank. No doubt a recipient of the funds raised by the high school kids just blocks away. Outside of the food bank during the mid-afternoon I saw people stopping by to pick up their nourishments; a mother with a little girl who was holding a doll, parents with a baby seat, older men in logging attire chatting next to their vehicles and a nice-looking young man who drove up in a newer foreign car. On my little architectural walk I was blessed to see the faces of Foodball – the people all of that rivalry and friendly competition actually benefits. Normal people, just trying to make ends meet. I hope my Alma Mater wins this year, but I know that either way it’s those faces that I saw yesterday who really matter.

~ Lana

To run a country, a seat of government has to have a permanent address.

Back in 1862, a flood transformed Sacramento into what papers called “a sort of a frontier Venice.” Early in January, said reporters, “Water in Sacramento was at such a depth that no one attempted to move about the city except by boat.” Governor Leland Stanford arrived at his inauguration in a rowboat. Ten days later, the State Treasurer’s office was under three feet of water, and “a piano in the parlor of the Chief Justice, though perched upon chairs, was soaked, and the pictures in the parlor were spoiled.”

On January 24, 1862, the government packed up and moved to San Francisco to finish out the legislature’s session. In the fall, everyone got back to work in a dried-out Sacramento, which has been the capital city ever since.

I’m not sure if Gov. Schwarzenegger has a flood contingency plan, but other governments are getting ready! Last month, the Prime Minister and cabinet of the Maldives donned scuba gear and met underwater. This month, Nepal’s cabinet will meet at the Mt. Everest base camp. Both governments are taking to the road to emphasize the perils they face from flooding caused by global warming—the Maldives, by sinking under the sea; Nepal, by melting glaciers.

These people are seriously worried. Me, too. While northern California’s reservoirs are dangerously low, Sacramento—still at sea level, still surrounded by levees, though they’ve gotten sturdier since 1862—is as vulnerable as New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, my nephew asked my parents to put an ax in a second-floor closet so they could chop through their roof if they had to. If hundred-year rains and an early snow melt inundate Sacramento and send my parents to their roof, where will they send California’s government?

It’s astonishing to hear that the number of people who think that global warming is caused by humans is declining. Even though humans—and mostly humans living in North America—generate about 4 billion more tons of greenhouse gases than the earth can absorb! I’m hoping the big climate change conference happening in Copenhagen in December will turn that trend around.

Meanwhile, I’ll ride my bike, take the bus, and get that ax upstairs.

The cabinet of Maldives meets underwater

Anne Basye

“Sustaining Simplicity”

As I watched the TED talk “A Third Way to Think About Aid” by Jacqueline Novogratz I began to think about ELCA World Hunger’s work with Companion Synods and partner organizations. According to the “talk” it seems that our work is heading in the right direction. We support microcredit lending opportunities and value relationships with the Lutheran World Federation and ELCA Global Mission as we work as partners with churches around the world to address solutions to hunger and poverty. The key to these partnerships is that we are able to address the real issues – those voiced straight from the communities in which we work.

As the video goes on it looks further into how the idea of a “partnership” can continue to be tuned in the 21^st century. It begins to look toward increasing the use and spread of technologies in places where their abilities would be incredibly beneficial, yet are currently little known. I like the idea of moving forward with an eye toward smarter irrigation, farming, energy systems and clean water supplies. Perhaps we should continue to innovate even our tagline…as “God’s Work. Our Hands.” looks at the gifts we have received – ideas, creativity and hope – and the ways that technology can transform them – solar power, drip irrigation in the desert and all those ideas that are just waiting to be uncovered.

Enjoy the video!

~Lana