In Wichita and many other communities across Kansas, more than a month of high temperatures and no rain has harmed crops and triggered water conservation efforts. The swimming pool in my Holiday Inn is closed. There’s no drain plug in the bath – a hint to take short showers only, perhaps?

Whether global climate change is behind this is controversial. Yes, says a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research: “When climate change and natural variability happen in the same direction, that’s when records get broken.” Others disagree. On blogs about the weather and human behavior, a lot of name-calling is going around.

In the clamor, I’ve been encountering darker, more pessimistic views about what lies ahead of us. “I am not about despair, but I am leaving hope up to someone else,” one young man told me. A friend who consults with businesses on sustainability no longer believes that her work will have any impact on the near future. She says she is working for people in the far distant future—the small group of humans who will survive whatever comes next.  And responding to a climate question in a lecture on gardening, writer Jamaica Kincaid shrugged her shoulders and said: we are ephemeral. The world lasts. People don’t.

For an optimist who lives by the saying, “hope is the ability to hear the music of the future. Faith is dancing to its tune,” this was hard to take.  But my friends who hear a dirge have a point. Maybe our actions have little immediate impact. Maybe no one cares. Maybe temperatures will rise, rainfall decrease, ocean currents change direction, disasters overwhelm us, and our era on earth draw to a close. We don’t know. Instead of being optimistic or pessimistic, we can let go of the outcome, and strive to make choices now and live in ways today that care for the earth and its future residents.

Weeds are growing in the Little Arkansas River bed. Wells are dry.  The Kansans at this weekend’s Glocal Mission Gathering can only pray for rain. Act on their new-found solidarity with people contending with drought and famine in the Horn of Africa. Remember that God is good, and turn off the tap water.

Thank you for your hopeful music, Kansas. May it rain soon.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Now that the calendar says it’s officially spring, one of God’s most precious gifts should regularly start falling from the heavens – water.  The Bible is full of references to water, and it is through water that we are baptized.  Water is a wonderful gift, but can often be taken for granted, or even become destructive.  This year when the rain comes, I encourage you to manage the water that falls into your yard (or church property!) in an environmentally friendly manner. 

How does rainwater management relate to care of God’s creation?  During a rainstorm, the excess water that isn’t immediately absorbed into the ground runs off your property, carrying any chemicals you may use on your lawn.  It travels across your driveway/sidewalk/street/parking lot gathering chemicals along the way, and into the storm sewer system.   This water ends up in local streams, rivers and lakes – as well as the contaminants it has picked up on the way.   Not only is this contamination harmful to aquatic plants and animals, but also to people who eat the fish from the lake, or take a swim at the beach.  It can also result in higher costs to treat that water if the polluted water happens to be a source of drinking water.  Excess rainwater can also cause erosion and flooding. 

Installing a rain barrel (or two) at your house and/or congregation is both environmentally and financially advantageous.  The rain barrel collects the water from a downspout, and saves it for future use in watering plants, gardens, or grass.  If you are a gardener, or just like to water your grass, using water from your rain barrel will also save you money.  It is also better for your plants as the water hasn’t been chemically treated.

Anything that slows down the flow of water helps recharge the water table by increasing the amount of time the water has to soak into the ground, rather than becoming storm water runoff.  A rain barrel reserves the excess water to future use, but a rain garden is another way to slow down the flow of water.  A rain garden is an area where excess rainwater is diverted after a storm and allowed to pool.  This area is planted with native plants that like “wet feet” and will allow the water to gradually recede. Here in the Midwest, plants like Queen of the Prairie, Blue Flag Iris and Obedient plant will thrive in these seasonally wet conditions and attract wildlife to your yard. 

Instead of allowing God’s precious gift of water to rush through your yard and into the nearest stream, I encourage you to slow that water down and enjoy it.  During the heat of the summer, it is refreshing to take advantage of saved spring rains to revive your thirsty plants. 

Rain barrels can be purchased online, or at local retailers.  You can even build your own –there are many different sites online that provide instructions.  What plants are native where you live?  Check out information about native plants that thrive in your area, as well as nurseries that sell them, at www.plantnative.org.  My neighborhood hosts a native plant business during the growing season (www.EarthWildGardens.com), but if you’re looking for mail order native plants suited to the Midwest, try Prairie Moon Nursery (http://www.prairiemoon.com).  Welcome to spring!

Erin Cummisford

In blizzards like this week’s, basic services matter. When snow fell in Chicago, I was always grateful that my heat, water, and light almost never quit.

Where those resources came from mattered less. But connecting to services in my new home in Washington State, I’m asking: where does it come from? Where does it go?  And what is its environmental impact?

Electricity was first. In Chicago, my carbon footprint was high even though I had no car, because so much electricity is generated from coal. Naively, I assumed that Puget Sound Energy electricity would come from hydropower in the mountains and the manure-to-power plant down the road. What a surprise to learn that 56 percent of PSE power comes from coal and natural gas. A big chunk comes from the Colstrip plant in Montana—the second-largest coal power plant west of the Mississippi!  On the plus side, by signing up for Green Power, I can help boost the proportion of biomass and wind power in the overall PSE power mix. Consider it done.

Next, cooking gas. For the first time, I have a propane tank. Checking into this, I’ve learned that more than 80 million barrels of this byproduct of natural gas and petroleum processing are stored in giant salt caverns in Texas, Kansas, and Alberta. Factoring in extracting, processing and delivering, propane produces slightly more greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas but much, much less than electricity, which “looks” clean when it is used, but, once you add in emissions released as it is produced, stored, and transported, is the dirtiest of all fuels. (Something to keep in mind if you are excited about owning an electric car.)

Water, supplied by the county, comes from a mountain watershed, is stored in a reservoir, treated, and then piped to homes like mine. But I’m not connected to the sewer system; my waste water goes into the septic system out back. The science of septic tanks is something else I’ll be reading up on.

My landlords take their garbage and recycling to the local transfer station themselves. With no car and no outdoor storage shed, this is not an option for me. But the most recent Skagit County Solid Waste Management Plan recommended that local scavengers support recycling and composting by offering every-other-week pickup of one trash can. Bingo! I signed up for that paradigm-shifting service. When my garbage leaves the transfer station, it will be sent by train to a landfill in Klickitat County, where electricity is generated from methane. My compost will go in the garden and the dry recyclables will be stored until I can join someone else’s recycling run.

What do electricity, gas, water, sewage, and garbage services have to do with hunger? Severing these resources from their context and system makes it easy to waste or denigrate them. Knowing where our resources come from can change our behavior. (Maybe I should rely more on propane and less on electricity that turns out to come from a Montana coal mine!) Understanding who delivers these services also builds respect in a climate marked by griping about taxes. (Thanks, Skagit County, for designing a system that will treat everything from construction waste to agricultural waste to the cans and bottles of people like me. Thanks, Skagit PUD, for the clean water.)

Wherever we work on hunger issues, it makes sense to identify and understand existing systems before pursuing individual projects. How many of us well-building Lutherans know about the context of Water Supply and Sanitation in Tanzania?  A little due diligence might persuade us to invest water funds in strengthening an existing water delivery system instead of building “our own” well from scratch.

We live out our days inside systems. Most of them are transparent. Can you see yours?!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

I love the voices on this blog: Lana eating snow and shopping for a GMO-free meal; David probing our call to social justice; ELCA camp directors talking about the carrots and lettuce their campers are growing, eating, and giving away.

And then there’s me, carrying on about public transportation, old socks and shoes, and how, while we profess our belief in God, we act as if The Market is at the center of our lives.

“Maybe,” Nancy suggested gently the other day, “it’s time to remind blog readers what your topics have to do with World Hunger.”

What a good idea! Even I forget, sometimes, when I get carried away. So, here goes.

Most of my 33 posts since April 2009 focus on stuff: buying and selling stuff, storing stuff, having too much stuff, recycling stuff, giving stuff away, disposing of stuff, and transporting ourselves and our stuff. Recently I’ve looked at our notions about our economy—the role it plays in our lives; the assumptions we make about it; the possibility that the Market, not God, is the deity we really serve.

Figuring out how to reuse or recycle several hundred unmatched socks at Holden Village was my September stuff preoccupation.

My corner of the hunger discussion is our North American lifestyle. It’s about how our overstuffed lives keep us from walking our anti-hunger talk—and sometimes completely contradict the beliefs we profess to hold.

Consider this: Statistics show under our present system, a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries. This good-sized tendril of the root causes of hunger starts in our own backyard.

We Lutherans love to cooperate in starting and supporting water projects in other countries. We rejoice that in Chiapas, Mexico, our support is helping an indigenous community irrigate its fields. Meanwhile, speaking of consuming 50 times more than everybody else, at home we treat our water with little respect. We run our faucets while we brush our teeth, take 10-minute showers, and insist on bright green lawns no matter what the climate. It took three liters of water to make our 1-liter plastic water bottle? 70.5 pounds of water to manufacture (in Asia, probably) a 2-gram, 32-megabyte memory chip and its plastic package? Not our problem!

It’s odd to me that our passion for water in Chiapas doesn’t inspire us to connect the dots between green lawns and the fact that, for example, the United States consumes 95 percent of the Colorado River’s water.  The paltry 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado water we give to Mexico is about what farmers in Sonora used in 1922. They can’t farm; the indigenous living along the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado once emptied, can’t fish. And how are the farmers down the road from that thirsty computer microchip plant faring? All we know is that we can get a computer for a song at Best Buy, and when it wears out, we can recycle it. We don’t want to know streams, groundwater, and children will be poisoned when an offshore e-waste recycler sends it back to Guiyu, China—increasing the very poverty, hunger and environmental degradation we claim to oppose.

My little blog posts fall under the World Hunger program objective, “to encourage members of this church to practice responsible stewardship of their lives and their financial resources toward the prevention and alleviation of hunger.” To me, responsible stewardship means making sure our left hand knows how the plastic water bottle it plunks  down at the cash register aggravates a situation the World Hunger dollars in our right hand hope to alleviate.

As consumers we are discouraged from connecting the dots between our stuff and its consequences. As Christians, we’re obliged to. Convenience and personal comfort at the expense of others are not gospel values. The opposite is true: the gospel exhorts us always to act with our brothers and sisters in mind.

See? My blogs are not stuff and nonsense, but stuff and challenge. Thank you, Hunger Rumblings. I’m grateful for this space and everyone blogging along with it.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

This started as a thought, turned into a blog idea and ended as a poem. These were my Saturday afternoon thoughts as I interacted with one of our most precious resources…

It’s raining all around me. I can hear it on the windows and I felt it as I walked through the streets of town this afternoon.

It seems as though water abounds.

The ocean is near, a creek runs behind my house and the river is not a half mile away.

It seems as though water abounds.

I washed my hands, dirty from building a fire for Autumn warmth. The tap provided an unending stream.

It seems as though water abounds.

A memory returns. A colleague suggesting that we often are not truthful with ourselves as we try to conserve and accompany and aid.

It reminds me that for many, clean water does not abound.

~Lana Lile

This is the fourth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities happening at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Lake Wapo Lutheran Camp in Wisconsin.

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The new opportunities that our ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant has provided have been extremely beneficial to Ox Lake’s program this summer.  We have been able to use these resources to further Ox’s commitment to being thoughtful of how we live in and care for our world and its resources.  One of our projects has been focused on water.

We purchased two rain barrels and constructed a rainwater collection system on one of our dining halls.  After the first rainstorm we were amazed to see how much water can be collected!  We installed the second barrel closer to the garden, and connected it to the first barrel with a 100-foot hose. Water drains from the first barrel into the second, which we use to water the garden. When the second barrel is full, the first barrel then fills. We use water from the first barrel in the kitchen.  Because of the rainy summer we’ve had at camp and because the system works really well, we’ve been able to water our garden entirely from our rainwater collection system.  We’ve also been able to challenge campers to think about the resource of water and how – and how much – they use it.  Activities designed to illustrate the difficulties many people face distributing and transporting water have further challenged our campers to think about access to clean water.

We also wanted to show the cycle of food, and to discuss the problem of waste and pollution.  We were able to purchase materials to build two different types of compost systems.  Each system shows kids the benefits of composting.  We built a barrel-compost for organic waste from meal preparation and table scraps.  It’s been neat showing kids how organic material breaks down over time.  We empty the broken down material back into the garden.  Explaining to kids that the nutrients from the broken down compost helps our garden grow brings them full circle.  We also constructed a fenced-in, pile-compost used primarily for lawn clippings, garden material, weeds and vegetation etc.  We’ve been able to ask kids about where their waste goes.  We’ve been able to challenge them to think about alternatives to discarding their waste (esp. organic material) in trash cans.

Overall, these additions to the Ox Lake Village Program have challenged campers and staff alike to see that how we live affects our neighbors that live next door and people across the world.  As we seek to love our neighbors as ourselves, we believe that it is essential to think about how we can be better stewards of all that God has given us, and these projects have helped us do that.

Tony Schaden and Sam Pertz

While I know that we often speak of reducing our need for “things” at ELCA World Hunger, I can’t help but get inspired by people and companies who are creating cool, socially conscious products. For me, it’s very hopeful to see businesses take the initiative to produce items with a positive purpose. So I am going to briefly highlight a few products that I’ve come across in recent months that have caught my attention. I hope that you find them inspiring as well, but as always, please only buy something if you need it!

Eco Design Bicycle – Trek:

While I already think that the idea of commuting via bike is very eco-&-health-friendly as reduced emissions, fattened wallets and physical health are all by-products, this bike goes one step further. It features sustainably harvested rubber tires and can be disassembled for your recycling bin.

Recycled Clothes – Patagonia:

The outdoor clothing company Patagonia produces recycled clothing through their Common Threads Recycling Program. Customers can drop-off worn out clothing items in a store or through the mail, these then get recycled into new clothes to be bought later! What a fabulous circle. Check out their site to learn which types of fabrics are currently being accepted for recycling.

Self-filtering “Water Bobble”:

This fresh twist on a reusable water bottle has a built-in carbon filter. Fill up its recycled plastic bottle with tap water and squeeze filtered water into your mouth! This is a great option for the person who is still leery of accepting the challenge of quitting their bottled water habits.

111 Navy Chair – Coca-Cola/Emeco/DWR:

How do you feel about sitting on Coke bottles? This plastic version of the classic 1006 Navy Chair is made with 111 recycled Coca-Cola bottles. If you’re an avid soda pop drinker, make sure to recycle those bottles, and consider these design chairs should your dining set head for the free-cycle.

Power of the Invisible Sun coffee table book:

When you buy this book – featuring photography from philanthropist Bobby Sager – you’re also giving life lessons and hope to children around the world. The book funds the Hope is a Game-Changer Project, which provides indestructible soccer balls to children in war-torn countries. There, sport is used to teach life skills while the balls provide a sense of hope for the future because no one can deflate them, they will always be there.

So why write about these products here on the hunger blog? Hunger’s root causes involve poverty, war, access to clean drinking water and climate change. Each of these products in one way or another addresses these issues. Also, they are a great example of the recycling circle: Reduce (Water Bobble, Eco Design Bicycle), Reuse (indestructible soccer balls) and Recycle (111 Navy Chair, Common Threads Recycling Program). When we make the choice to purchase an item it will have environmental and social consequences…so I think it’s very cool when I see people and companies aspiring to make those consequences a little more positive. Perhaps none of these examples are perfect, but I’m a firm believer that they are a step in the right direction.

Do you have any favorite eco-friendly or socially conscious examples of products that inspire or interest you? Please share!

~Lana Lile

~ Lana

Sources:

• FAO – www.fao.org
• WHO – www.who.int; www.wssinfo.org
• USDA – www.usda.gov
• World Food Program – www.wfp.org

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

In 2008 American’s spent $40 billion on bottled water. One-fourth of which was simply repackaged tap water. Why do we spend so much money on water that we could just as easily get from our own faucet?

The documentary FLOW: How did a handful of corporations steal our water? takes viewers through a journey that ultimately asks the question, “Is access to drinkable water a basic human right?” From the riots of water privatization in Bolivia to low-cost-clean-water supporting jobs in rural India this film looks at the question from multiple sides, but with one major theme: justice. Justice for those who can’t pay, who walk long distances to water sources, who drink from dirty rivers, who are having their aquifers pumped out from underneath them.

Most of us have heard about the detrimental effects that water bottle waste has on the environment. From polluted oceans to filling up landfills at your local dump. What I didn’t know was how just pumping that water has even more direct effects, because according to the Pacific Institute, it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water. It enlightened me to the true realities of pumping such vast quantities of water out of our ground’s resources.

My reaction to the documentary was intrigue and surprise. I knew that water was a huge issue, that bottled water posed environmental problems and that privatization had caused major riots in other parts of the world – but what I didn’t know was how it all flowed together.

This film is opinionated, hard-hitting, and at times hard to imagine. What would you do if your local river was literally bloody? Can you imagine being thrilled at having 10 liters of clean water per day? Do we realize that preventing disease is as easy as drinking clean water? It may seem like water issues belong to developing countries, to areas with poor sanitation or a desert climate, but in fact they are experienced in our own American backyard, in States as far apart as California and Michigan.

Get ready to be energized and learn the little things you can do to keep water from becoming a privilege, to keep rivers flowing and to prevent disease around the world.

Prepare to never look at a bottle of water the same way again.

Post by Lana Lile
FLOW trailer
Plastic in the Ocean