1) Organize. If a presidential candidate is coming your way, ask him or her: How are we going to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050? What's your plan?
2) Organize.
Environment
Administrator 3-26-2007
I took my day off yesterday and completed an annual pilgrimage of mine, a pilgrimage that began when I was a boy. I used to walk hand-in-hand with my dad to a pond near our home in upstate New York, and my dad would scoop out a mass of frog eggs with a big plastic bucket. Surrounded by the trills and calls [...]
Administrator 3-05-2007
I am sitting in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I just read Jim Wallis' recent post about global warming, responding to the [...]
Rose Marie Berger, Jonathan Mendez 2-01-2007
More than 1,500 young evangelicals from across the U.S.
Rose Marie Berger, Jonathan Mendez 2-01-2007
Climate change activists carried out what they called an “art attack” in November by screening political messages on the sides of several London landmarks.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 1-12-2007
Sojourners magazine readers may remember an article in our special issue on food last May in which I wrote about my adventures in dumpster diving.
Since then, I've received a somewhat steady stream [...]
Joseph Wakelee-Lynch 12-01-2006
There may be no more basic lesson in persuasive writing than the futility of creating a straw man: Sketch a loose summary of an opponent’s argument in order to dismiss it with ease.
Rose Marie Berger 9-01-2006
Stately Action. After much work by its Catholic majority, the Philippines officially banned the death penalty in June, winning the thanks of Pope Benedict XVI.
Rose Marie Berger 8-01-2006
Damu Smith, 54, founder of Black Voices for Peace and executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network, died of colon cancer on May 6, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
Cathleen Hockman-Wert 5-01-2006
When global food shortages loomed 30 years ago, the Mennonite Central Committee asked its constituents to eat and spend 10 percent less on food. To help with that, the international relief and development organization produced More-with-Less Cookbook, which connects Christian faith with eating rice and beans. Eating more simply, cookbook author Doris Janzen Longacre argued, was not about “cutting back.” Rather, it meant “living joyfully, richly, creatively.”
[In] summer [2005], MCC released another cookbook that calls people of faith to connect values and eating habits. Simply in Season, which I co-wrote with Mary Beth Lind, promotes local, fairly traded, and sustainably grown foods, even if choosing them means spending more.
I approach these choices with no special expertise—I’m just an interested Christian consumer who wants to make decisions in line with my faith. And I confess that paying more for food goes against my North American sense of entitlement to cheap food and my inbred Mennonite frugality. My people believe thriftiness could give cleanliness some solid competition for that place next to godliness.
But what’s not to like about cheap food? Here’s the journey one devout penny-pincher made from spending less to spending for a better world.
Bethany Spicher Schonberg 5-01-2006
“Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.”
—Latin American prayer
I love grocery shopping. The tidy rows of boxes and cans, the perfect mounds of fruit, the wheeling of carts, the checking of lists, the whoosh of the automatic mister that leaves the leafy greens sparkling. I even like the Muzak.
So last summer, to celebrate the grand opening of a Super Giant grocery store in Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, I walked five blocks to buy flour for my fiancé’s birthday cake. Behind the renovated Tivoli Square complex, which now houses the Sojourners office, I found a gala underway: red, white, and blue bunting, a live salsa band, and shoppers scrambling for the opening-day sales.
I was impressed by the row of gleaming registers (no more long lines at the dingy Safeway on Columbia Road), the piles of fresh produce (no more wilted lettuce from the tiny SuperSave on Mount Pleasant Street, though it did have homemade tamales and a cashier who knew my name), and an entire aisle of organic options (no more car trips to Glut food co-op in Mount Rainier, Maryland). Also, I’d heard talk in the neighborhood about all the new jobs, and sure enough, there was an army of green-aproned cashiers and stockers.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 5-01-2006
Tero Hakala / Shutterstock
“WHAT IS THIS—some kind of school project? You guys aren’t homeless, are you?” asked the clean-cut young policeman with well-gelled hair. His confusion was understandable. Actually, the first thing he said was, “You’re eating out of the garbage? That’s disgusting.”
Indeed, why would four middle-class guys be pawing through garbage bags looking for food? Officer Hair Gel vainly tried to fit us into a category that made sense to him. “Is this for some kind of frat thing?”
His squad car was soon joined by another, and then another. Soon five cruisers surrounded us, making blue and red disco effects on the strip mall alley walls. Must have been a slow night in Fairfax County. We suppressed giggles as we sat on the rear bumper of my station wagon and had our IDs checked.
We must’ve looked pretty shady prowling behind the bakery with our flashlights and bags of loot. But all we were looking for was the bounty of discarded bagels, breads, and pastries we’d come to expect there. We offered the officer a choice muffin. He declined with a smirk. “I can’t stop you from doing this, but a bunch of guys sneaking around behind these stores looks pretty suspicious. Next time you might get shot.”
Thanks for the advice, officer, but at these prices it’s worth the risk.
Dumpster diving has always been a respectable way for penniless students and group houses to acquire furniture and appliances. But why run the risk of harassment, embarrassment—and yes, illness—to scavenge food?
Reason number one—you get a lot of really, really good food really, really free. I often come away with a decent segment of the food pyramid: vegetables, meat, milk, eggs, and almost always lots of bread. And we’re not talking Wonder Bread—we’re talking sprouted wheat berry, pita, ciabatta, foccacia, and any number of Mediterranean-themed baked goods.
Though I’ll occasionally supplement my dumpster bounty with a trip to the natural foods co-op for some local produce or organic oats for homemade granola (bring on the stereotypes), I’ve come to rely mostly on society’s waste for my provision. As Jesus taught, “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’...Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Matthew 6:32). In this spirit, dumpstering’s spontaneity is both liberating and satisfying. Instead of the anxiety of bargain-hunting among the throngs at corporate übermarkets, I enjoy the surprises of late-night expeditions and never worry about finding enough to eat.
Jim Wallis 5-01-2006
For more than a decade, a series of environmental initiatives have been coming from an unexpected source—a new generation of young evangelical activists. Mostly under the public radar screen, there were new and creative projects like the Evangelical Environmental Network and Creation Care magazine. In November 2002, one of these initiatives got some national attention—a campaign called “What Would Jesus Drive?” complete with fact sheets, church resources, and bumper stickers.
Recently, more-establishment evangelical groups, particularly the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), also began to speak up on the issue of “creation care.” Leading the way was NAE Vice President for Governmental Affairs Rich Cizik who, on issues including environmental concern and global poverty reduction, began to sound like a biblical prophet. Cizik and NAE President Ted Haggard, a mega-church pastor in Colorado Springs, were attending critical seminars on the environment, and climate change in particular, and describing their experiences of “epiphany” and “conversion” on the issue. In 2004, the NAE adopted a policy statement “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility,” which included a principle titled “We labor to protect God’s creation.” In March 2005, Cizik told The New York Times, “I don’t think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created.”