The King's Green Pad

The issue of climate change is receiving widespread attention in Canadian society and the churches. Many churches are starting to develop their thinking and theology on this critical cultural question. One church that has long supported the King’s University College, the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRC), commissioned a “Creation Stewardship Task Force” to study climate change and write a report and recommendations to the CRC Synod. This report will be debated at the CRC Synod, in Spring 2012, and Synod will determine whether to adopt it or not. The report is available at http://www.crcna.org/site_uploads/uploads/resources/synodical/CreationStewardship.pdf. The following article, by King’s Professor John Hiemstra, is an appreciative but critical engagement with that Report. The article aims to sharpen and deepen our Christian understandings of the issue of climate change and the larger “ecological question” of our time.

Economic Origins of Climate Change: A Response to the ‘Creation Stewardship Report’

Dr. John Hiemstra is Professor of Political Studies at The King’s University College in Edmonton. He can be reached at john.hiemstra@kingsu.ca.

Introduction: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’

My first reading of the CRC “Creation Stewardship Task Force” Report produced two quick, gut-level responses: (1) “Synod should definitely adopt this excellent report,” and (2) “It’s the economy, stupid!” I hasten to clarify. I meant no disrespect to the Taskforce by this second thought. It was simply a spontaneous recall of Bill Clinton’s famous electoral phrase designed to oppose the popular incumbent President George H. W. Bush in 1992.

Clinton coined the term “It’s the economy, stupid!” to focus voters’ attention on what he thought was the sitting President’s weak spot, namely the recessionary economy.

In this article, I explain why this phrase popped to mind while reading the Christian Reformed Church’s “Creation Stewardship Task Force” Report. First, I show how the “Creation Stewardship” Report, while a very strong document, fails to focus sufficient attention on the key role of the economy in climate change. Second, the article argues that if Christians are going to help tackle today’s environmental problems, we need a much stronger grasp of the radically distinctive character of our times, namely, we face an overwhelming ‘ecological question.’ Third, it shows how the interrelated environmental issues within the ‘ecological question’ are primarily generated and expressed through the economic side of society. Finally, the economy generates ecological problems, I argue, because it is miss-shaped and miss-directed by the ideology of economic growth. Exposing and countering the false and deforming idolatry of endless economic growth should be a key dimension of the Church’s calling to publicly proclaim the Gospel.

The Creation Stewardship Report

The “Creation Stewardship Task Force” was created by the CRC Synod when “public engagement” of climate change by several CRC denominational leaders became controversial. Synod mandated the Task Force to “identify a biblical and Reformed perspective of our position on creation stewardship, including climate change” and to issue a report. It aimed to help the CRC denomination, its agencies, members, as well as partner denominations to develop a deeper biblical understanding of climate change. The Report makes a very helpful and thought-provoking contribution to this aim. It will significantly deepen and broaden the Churches’ understanding of creation stewardship and climate change.
The Report correctly argues that environmental problems, and certainly climate change, are at their deepest levels spiritual and moral issues. It identifies a number of key religious themes running through the climate change debate, and does a great job of sketching out an alternative, biblically-rooted, spirituality of creation care. The Report identifies and elaborates sound ethical principles and does a strong job of explaining the science behind climate change. It proposes a host of useful activities for churches to undertake. I strongly encourage readers to set aside an hour next Sunday and read the online Report! The CRC Synod will debate and decide whether to adopt the recommendation of this Report in June 2012.

Failing to ‘name’ the economy

The Report strongly supports the claim that climate change is “likely due to human activity.” This “likelihood,” the vast majority of scientists say, is “a greater than 90 percent probability” that climate change is happening (p. 52). In everyday life, the Report continues, if we know there is “a greater than 90 percent probability” that we will suffer a very destructive event or process, we would definitely act now. But what ‘actions’ should we undertake, according to the Report? It rightfully, and helpfully, identifies “human-induced climate change” as a “moral, ethical, and religious issue,” thus requiring acts of these types. But oddly, the Report stops short of explicitly naming climate change also as an economic issue. If climate change occurs largely in the realm of “human activities” we call economic life, then the Report should have clearly named this and explained how this works.

To be fair, the 125 page Report does include a fair amount of helpful economic material. It contains, for example, a couple of paragraphs on the common etymological roots of ecology and economics. It shows how they share the root word, oikos. This word is also the root of the word used for the human “task and privilege of caring for creation,” namely, oikonomia, which translators often render with the word “stewardship” (p. 28). The seeds are present in this brief discussion alone, to develop a deeper understanding of how present-day economy, its structures, institutions and practices, are centrally implicated in the unstewardly practices that are destroying the creation’s ecology, including climate change. The Report also deals with a variety of principles and concerns that have clear economic components or implications. Under “Mitigation and adaptation” (p. 46), for example, the Report tackles issues and problems that are, at least in part, economic. But much more is needed.

The Report’s lengthy list of recommendations also stops short of explicitly tackling climate change as an economic issue. They underline that “urgent action is required to address climate change,” and properly make this appeal broad by arguing that “action is needed at the personal, community, and political levels…” (p. 77). But then, the Report’s recommendations focus too heavily on the institutional church, especially on “congregations, denominational staff, leaders, and members” and on “major CRC agencies and institutions.” While several recommendations address economic activities, the Reformed approach to life that the Report is clearly following, should have produced far more recommendations on what Christians—as ‘believers in all areas of life’—ought to do. The recommendations should have directly addressed Christians in their economic vocations, that is, as people called by God to be business entrepreneurs, workers, investors, bankers, consumers, producers, advertisers, pension and mutual fund managers, union leaders, and so forth. It should have recommended that Christian Colleges, Universities and Christian professors study how our economic offices, economic institutions, and national and global economic systems are directly implicated in causing climate change.

Understanding our times: the ‘ecological question’

Why should the Report focus greater attention on the economy as a cause of climate change? My answer is rooted in the fact that today we face a dramatically novel context, something radically new, that is the ‘ecological question.’ Let me explain.

Since the early 20th century, society became aware of disappearing wilderness and natural resources, and consequently we moved to conserve and protect, e.g. National Parks. Since the 1960’s, we identified pollution threats to air, water and soil, and society and state rallied to implement significant environmental practices and policies to control and prevent some of these threats. In the 1970s, we detected serious threats to the earth’s ozone layer, and government, industry and society adopted measures and policies to stop emitting the disruptive chemicals causing this and allow the ozone layer to recover. These and other actions were distinctly ‘environmental policies,’ some were successful, and in our current situation we can learn much from how society and government accomplished these actions.

When we examine the overall environmental pattern of the 20th century, however, J. R. McNeill observes that there is Something New Under the Sun: “This is the first time in human history that we have altered ecosystems with such intensity, on such scale and with such speed. It is one of the few times in the earth’s history to see changes of this scope and pace.” We are now in a new context, in which these trends can no longer be appropriately identified and tackled as ‘environmental issues.’ Although this had been true all along, the nature and scale of the ecological challenges today no longer allow us to think about, and act on, them as discrete environmental ‘issues’ and ‘interests’. They can no longer be separated from many other economic, social, cultural issues and interests and can no longer be solved independently.
In the current context, furthermore, scientific studies indicate convincingly enough that we are increasingly and rapidly approaching a variety of tipping points in many ecological systems. We see it in climate change, ballooning human population, declining populations of animal species and threatening extinctions, and resource-depletion, resource-competition and resource-conflict. This continued ecological ruin of the finely tuned balance on our planet is compounding and amplifying other interrelated issues such as hunger and poverty across the globe, our unsustainable industrial food production system, peak oil with looming fossil-fuel shortages and transitions, increasing worldwide human migrations with conflict and war, and growth-oriented lifestyles that are based on hyper consumption driven by media systems that willfully generate wasteful, ‘artificial needs.’

In summary, we face an integrated reality in which social, economic, cultural and environmental issues and interests are so finely interconnected and interrelated that an overarching ‘ecological question’ has emerged. Our current context constitutes a single integral reality. Humans are totally embedded in, and completely co-exist with, all other living beings and other natural systems in creation. This is the place in which God means us to flourish. The ‘ecological question’ concerns this full creational reality, because that is how God gives humans oxygen to breathe, food to eat, cells for our bodies, bacteria for various bodily functions, materials for shelter, clothing, opportunities to work, and places in which to build homes for human community. The ‘ecological question’ of our times, therefore, fundamentally concerns our ecologically taxing and destructive ‘way of life.’ Our society no longer faces a suite of discrete ‘environmental problems, issues, and interests’ which we can technically adjust and solve, but an overarching ‘ecological question’ that concerns our full way of life.

By the way, the fact the church faces an overriding question at a particular moment in history is not new. In the early 19th century, British Evangelicals took leadership on the ‘slavery question.’ In the mid 19th century, both protestant and Catholic churches in Europe and North America, identified a key question of their cultures as the ‘school question,’ by which they meant the question, how do diverse pluralist societies publicly deal with religious freedom in schooling? In the late 19th and early 20th century, protestant, evangelical and Catholic churches identified the ‘social question,’ by which they focused on the societal breakdown, poverty and dislocation in their context, resulting from the deep and rapid changes brought on by the industrial revolution. Today we face an overarching ‘ecological question.’

I should note that the “Creation Stewardship” Report does, in various ways, identify and talk about the integrality of environmental issues and the need for integrated responses to problems (p. 39f). It would be helpful, however, if the Report pushed this further and explained more fully the dramatic novelty of our current context. Helping readers understand the ‘ecological question’ is critical for discovering the leading causes of climate change.

‘It’s the economy!’
How did we get to this point? In a concise overview of trends since the 1960s, the New Scientist shows the spectacular exponential growth patterns in a variety of human activities which intrinsically depend or impact on ecological systems. Among others, these trends include: rapid growth in population, GDP, foreign investment, water use, damming rivers, fertilizer consumption, urbanization, paper consumption, motor vehicles, telecommunications, and tourism. Strikingly, the rate of change for each activity or problem increases so rapidly that humanity will, with increasing likelihood, soon face the prospect of vital ecological systems [of creation] failing or becoming unable to sustain our ever-increasing human activities and impacts.

These contours of the ‘ecological question’ place us face-to-face with our economy. Our society’s ‘way of life’ is based on an economic system that is now hitting the limits of several of earth’s key capacities, and in some cases, approaching them at exponential rates. This is occurring on two fronts simultaneously. First, under the assumption that resources are infinite, our economic system has begun to seriously deplete the key natural resources that are required to fuel the economic growth on which our ‘way of life’ depends. The formerly cheap and easy to secure stream of natural resource inputs is running low, becoming more and more expensive to secure, and requires increasing environmental damage to acquire. Second, under the strain of continuous economic growth, our economy is running out of space in the earth’s ecosystems to dump the every-growing stream of wastes, pollution, and impacts that society generates.
Christian economist Herman Daly concludes:

“The most important change on Earth in recent times has been the enormous growth of the economy, which has taken over an ever greater share of the planet’s resources. In my lifetime, world population has tripled, while the numbers of livestock, cars, houses and refrigerators have increased by vastly more. In fact, our economy is now reaching the point where it is outstripping Earth’s ability to sustain it. Resources are running out and waste sinks are becoming full. The remaining natural world can no longer support the existing economy, much less one that continues to expand.”

He continues,
“…economists have not grasped a simple fact that to scientists is obvious: the size of the Earth as a whole is fixed. Neither the surface nor the mass of the planet is growing or shrinking. The same is true for energy budgets: the amount absorbed by the Earth is equal to the amount it radiates. The overall size of the system – the amount of water, land, air, minerals and other resources present on the planet we live on – is fixed.”

The enormity of the ‘ecological question’ grows even more significant when we realize that the world’s economies now draw so much from, and dump so much into, creation’s ecological systems that we are starting to destroy some of the ‘capital’ of nature. As we continue on this trajectory, our economies are beginning to deplete earth’s ability to provide resources (e.g. wood, agriculture, fresh water) as well as its ability to absorb refuse and waste (e.g. wetlands cleansing water, atmosphere absorbing GHGs, and the ocean acidifying as it absorbs CO2). The combination of human population growth (from 1 billion in the early 19th century to 7 billion in 2011), decline of the earth’s ecological capacities, rapid growth of new national economies (e.g. India, Brazil, China), and the continued growth orientation of advanced economies all point to a single conclusion: our economies are generating an ever worsening ‘ecological question.’
An economy possessed by idols?

Why are we doing this? Here, I happily rejoin the thrust of the Report in saying “human-induced climate change” is a “moral, ethical, and religious issue.”

In short, the leading groups, and in some cases the majority of citizens, in many nations of the world are convinced our societies need more and more economic growth. Even the most advanced and wealthy economies presume to need constant economic growth – if not to deliver ever more stuff, then at least to keep the current system from collapse. We believe this even though natural resources are running low, we face massive environmental challenges, and many in our societies already have excessive material goods. We brush off these problems, however, with the declaration that we trust in science and technology to solve these problems. Essentially, economic growth, science and technology promise to deliver ever increasing levels of material goods and services, to increase our happiness, to solve our problems, and to give us ‘meaning,’ if only we put our exclusive trust in them. We have made them our ‘gods’ or idols.

The CRC Report also points to idolatry on several occasions (p. 10, 103). What the Report needs to do more of, however, is show how idolatry enters into, shapes, and directs our current ‘way of life,’ including our economy. We need to identify how idolatry has misshapen our economic goals, our forms of organizing and directing economic life (including our economic institutions and professions), and show how these are generating the ‘ecological question.’ Certainly, a key task of the church is to publicly proclaim the Gospel in opposition to the day-to-day manifestations of idolatry and ideology! Happily, the CRC Report is very helpful in illuminating the key biblical ideas and principles by which Christians can expose and oppose economic growth ideology and idolatry. The liberating and redeeming Gospel of Jesus offers a new direction for our ‘way of life’ and for an alternative economy.

Conclusion:
If I am correct that economy and ecology are intimately connected, then Christians need to change how we engage these issues. There’s a lot that we can say on this, but I limit myself to four points.

First, studies such as the CRC’s “Creation Stewardship Task Force” Report need to identify and analyze more adequately the ways economies are causing the key environmental challenges of our time. This includes identifying and countering the ideologies and idolatry that shape so many contemporary economic practices. It is also time to identify which concrete forms of economic practice we need to adopt to move the economy into tune with stewardly existence on earth (including what ‘appropriate entrepreneurship’ ought to mean).

Second, Christians need to recognize that ‘technical adjustment solutions’ will no longer fix most environmental ‘issues,’ and certainly not climate change. The seriousness of the ‘ecological question,’ as I have described it, requires us to think more deeply about problems in our ‘way of life’ and economy. The ‘technical adjustment approach’ to solving environmental problems is failing frequently today, and I would argue, has produced the ‘ecological question.’ Tackling the ‘ecological question,’ including climate change, demands we articulate a biblically-informed analysis of society, the economy, and the driving ideologies. This larger biblical understanding is desperately needed to move beyond technical adjustments to the status quo. It will allow us to devise ‘re-orienting action steps’ to address environmental problems, such as climate change, within the larger society, economy, and to do so while attending to their deeper spiritual roots, as the CRC Report rightly argues.

Third, the solutions we propose must be simultaneously shaped by biblical concern for both stewardship and social justice. We cannot allow our legitimate concern for stewardship to negate social justice nor a passion for social justice to push aside stewardship. The Report recognizes this when it warns that climate change affects the poor more negatively than the rich, and that policies enacted to mitigate climate change could do so as well (pp. 74-76)! But we also need to do more than simply add them together. Indeed, the countries of the global south (formerly called the Third World) are owed a massive ecological debt by the global north. We have used disproportionately large shares of the world’s resources, often originally drawn from the global south, while all too often leaving behind new ecological problems and a diminished resource base. Thus, while the global south owes the north a large financial debt, the north owes the global south a large ecological debt. We need eco-justice which works to heal the environment while simultaneously being shaped by social and distributional justice. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important this is.

While pursuing eco-justice and social justice in tandem, however, we must never lose sight of the growing ‘ecological question.’ We are running up ‘ecological debts’ not only to the poor in the global south but also directly to the earth! By overexploiting resources, weakening and destroying the productive capacities of the earth, and overusing its waste-absorbing capabilities, we deplete the earth itself! The consequences of owning this debt to the earth can be summarized as follows: we are building a massive ecological debt to our children and grandchildren, and their children, for they will bear more of the risks, less of the benefits of the resources we use today, and will foot the bill to repair and clean-up our damage! [See the Report’s warning, p. 75.]

Fourth, I have refrained, in this article from dealing directly with the government’s calling in the ecological question. Clearly, the tight intertwinement of our economy, economic growth ideology, and resulting ecological destruction requires decisive leadership from political officials. We leave this concern, however, to a future article.

Notes and Sources
CRC’s “Creation Stewardship Task Force” Report: accessed December 20, 2012, at http://www.crcna.org/site_uploads/uploads/resources/synodical/CreationStewardship.pdf.

J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An environmental history of 20th century, New York: Norton, 2000.

New Scientist reports: “The increasing rates of change in human activity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Significant increases in rates of change occur around the 1950s in each case, and illustrate how the past 50 years have been a period of dramatic and unprecedented change in human history Accessed May 9, 2011 at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14950-special-report-the-facts-about-overconsumption.html.

Herman Daly, Special report: Economics blind spot is a disaster for the planet, New Scientist, October 15, 2008, http://www.newscientist.com/article.

Image from www.thisbluedot.net

This is who He says I am
I am a daughter, one who sins but remains a princess, forgiven always
I am a priestess, a watcher over the seas for the one who has come before me
I am a slave awaiting the master’s return entrusted with the fruits of His labour
Therefore I must protect the endangered and replant what has been lost
I have a confession to make
I have failed my father, my Lord and my master
For neither have I pastured His sheep
Nor have I kept His Air, Land, and Water sacred for the coming of His Son
Please forgive me Father breathe life into me once again
For I remain deaf to your calling

As I was sitting in my Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) class, learning about the process companies must go through in order to show how the benefits of their projects will outweigh the environmental harm of them, a classmate was stuttering over saying “EI-EI-AEI-EIA”, and the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald” got stuck in my head.

This is what results when a tired writer has too many hours of school in one day!

The Oilsands: an EIA nursery rhyme 

Old MacOilman had a mine
EI-EI-A
And on that mine he had some upgraders
EI-EI-A
With an impact here and a pipeline there,
Here a gas, there a spill,
Everywhere a strip-mine
Old MacOilman had a mine,
EI-EI-A

Old MacOilman had a mine
EI-EI-A
And on that mine he had some overburden,
EI-EI-A
With a dozer here and a dead tree there,
Here extinction, there disruption,
Everywhere we see destruction,
Old MacOilman had a mine,
EI-EI-A

Old MacOilman had a mine
EI-EI-A
And on that mine he had an assessment,
EI-EI-A
With an screening here, and a consult there,
Here a scope, there effect,
Everywhere a document.
Old MacOilman had a mine,
EI-EI-A

Old MacOilman had a mine
EI-EI-A
And on that mine he had some workers
EI-EI-A
With a hazard here and a lawsuit there
Here a native, there an illness
Everywhere a health effect.
Old MacOilman had a mine,
EI-EI-A

Old MacOilman had a mine
EI-EI-A
And on that mine he had some connections
EI-EI-A
With a bureaucrat here and a lawyer there
Here a bribe, there a favour
Everywhere a hand in pocket
Old MacDonald had a mine,
EI-EI-A

Now you, too, can teach your children about corrupt companies in rhyme!
In all seriousness, I’d like to add a HUGE caveat to this poem. There are many very good people with a lot of integrity working in and with the oil sands projects and in the government, and many moves to decrease the damage caused by the oil sands projects are being made. There is also a lot I still have to learn about the issues involved. This poem is intended as lighthearted satire, not as a nuanced discussion about the many complex sides of the pros and cons of oil sands development. All that said, I DO have some big problems with some of the practices, corruption, and lack of care for the environment that I see surrounding the development in Northern Alberta. Please take a moment to think for yourself and look up some of the intelligent discussions available, many of them by members of this blog.

by Julie Paquette

We should all recycle, right? Right! But what I learned this past summer, through my internship with the City of Edmonton’s Waste Management Services, is that even though most of us feel like we’re being environmentally-conscious when we toss something in the recycle bin, it turns out we could very well be doing more harm than good.

How so? Although Edmonton is world-famous and award-winning for its progressive waste management practices, we haven’t yet acquired the technological abilities to recycle every bit of metal, plastic, or cardboard that finds its way into the city’s recycling stream. The fact is that some of the objects that you might think should be recyclable because they are entirely made up of those five magic materials (metal, plastic, cardboard, glass, and paper), realistically won’t be processed at our local sorting facility. This can happen for one of two reasons:

a. They’re made up of mixed materials (ex: metal and plastic, or paper and wax) which are not easily separated (this includes items that are soiled, such as old grease-caked pizza boxes), and/or

b. Their size and/or shape restrict them from safely passing through the stages at the sorting facility and they could also risk harming human workers on site.

Being a representative of the Recycling Street Team for the City’s Waste Management Services this summer taught me that even the most avid recyclers can still use a good reminder of what they can and cannot recycle. I spoke with thousands of new and long-time city residents, of whom many were meticulous about separating out their recyclables from their garbage, but a vast majority realized after a quick recap of the city’s ‘What Goes Where?’ guide that they were frequently putting unwanted materials into their recycling collection.

When you include the wrong materials in your recycle bin or blue bag, you run the risk of the entire batch being re-routed to the nearest trash bin, or worse: damaging machinery and/or risk injuring a worker. This isn’t good for our planet, our people working in Waste Management Services, or for our civic time and budget.

Remember to keep these items out of your blue bag or apartment’s blue bin:
• Computer cables, extension cords, garden hoses, and shredded paper (they get wound up on the shafts and rollers in the sorting facility and can quickly jam up machinery)
• Scrap metal, small appliances, and propane tanks (they are much too bulky for the (human and mechanical) sorters to process)
• Broken kids toys (they are often made up of mixed materials such as metal and plastic, which can’t be separated and so won’t be recycled at the sorting facility)
• Disposable paper drink cups (they’re coated with a waxy liner to contain the liquid – but this liner can’t be separated from the paper, so it goes in the trash)
• Plastic caps and till receipts (unfortunately, they’re too small for local sorting processes to individually recycle them efficiently.  If you really want these items recycled though, separate and collect your receipts in a large envelope and plastic caps in a clear plastic container. The receipts can then be recycled at the sorting facility, and the plastic caps can be returned to the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation to raise proceeds for the Rainbow Society of Alberta! Get more information at http://www.abcrc.com/community-champions/caps-off-program/)

Figuring out which items you can recycle can be confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. The City makes it easy to ‘know what to throw’ by providing a printable guide to ‘What Goes Where?’ in our waste management system on its website (www.edmonton.ca/recycling). On top of this, they provide alternative waste drop-off facilities such as the Eco-Stations for electronic and hazardous wastes, and the ReUse Center in Downtown Edmonton which accepts all kinds of unwanted everyday items and makes them available to groups and individuals who will reuse them.

Effective and user-friendly recycling and reuse in Edmonton saves resources and energy from being used to make new products – but only when we do it right!

by  MacKenzie Crawford (fourloves@gmail.com), Joshua Culling (j.e.culling@gmail.com), and Gracia Kasinyabo

The King’s University College is located far from Edmonton’s dense city center, and we have inherited an architectural and commercial zoning legacy that in some ways prevents us from fully engaging in sustainable transportation. Since King’s has committed itself to creation care and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE)’s Sustainability Tracking Assessment & Rating System (STARS), we performed a study of the many factors influencing transportation choices in the ENVS300 course in November 2011. We used a multi-interfaced survey tool to assess the current use of sustainable forms of transportation, and assessed how current King’s policy and allocation of space influences these forms of transportation. 305 staff, faculty, and students responded, and we found several relationships between transportation type, proximity to King’s, and willingness to engage in sustainable transportation options. We also geolocated all of the responses based on postal code and we found both that many King’s members are proximate to the school, and also that there are many commuters travelling surprisingly great distances each day to attend King’s.

We calculated carbon emissions for commuters who drive (Faculty, Staff, and Students) to be 369 tonnes CO₂ every two semesters – and a distance driven of 1.62 million km! We made some further analyses, and recommended possible action items. Action is recommended to build a more accessible and protective bicycle shelter than the curren one, and more education on sustainable transportation. We also discussed some carpool options. Ultimately, we hope this report encourages more commuters in the King’s community to use alternative forms of transportation. Culture change toward a sustainable attitude of creation care is the ultimate goal, and we hope that this report can help to start the conversation and creativity needed.

Without this information, future expansion, policy decisions, and community awareness has the potential to be misinformed. The end result of these issues may be increased energetic cost, higher CO2e emissions leading to a higher community “carbon footprint”, negative impact on climate change contrary to our creation care principles, reduced inter-community relationships, inability to provide adequate parking under current practices with the planned growth of the student body in coming years, and a lost opportunity to lead by example when it comes to sustainable commuter practices within Edmonton.

Click here to view the full report in pdf format .   We hope to engage in dialogue over the ideas presented, so please get in contact with us if you have any questions about the report, any reactions or thoughts, or if even if there’s a glaring spelling error making your eye twitch!

(image from http://www.uk-energy-saving.com/sustainable_transport.html)

by Amber Dobson

If our Earth could speak, what would it say? Would it be a woman or man speaking, the soothing voice of a young girl or one that coughs and wheezes like an old man? Could it be that we will never know and the Earth’s voice remains mute forever? Who decides what a tree is worth, how much pollution is too much and which animals are considered valuable and worth saving? Sometimes to say what is needed to be said takes time and time is what we may not have at this moment. As we mould our world, play god with our atmosphere, an infinite number of souls suffer daily – whether it be the children, the plants, the trees, or the honey bees. We are all in this together. This is ourselves that have a need. This is our calling. The need and the calling is love.

(image from TheCommentfactory.com)

The human history of stewardship of aquatic food sources, especially fisheries, is pretty poor. Now that Arctic ice is melting, opening new fishing grounds, we have a chance to do it better. Yet because much of those waterways are “international property” who is going to regulate?  Check out this article on the growing concern about Arctic fisheries.

Is this an opportunity for the global community to work together to do something wonderful? I encourage you to take a look at this site, developed by the reputable Pew Foundation, and the petition associated with it, and consider whether you too would like to speak on this important topic:

http://oceansnorth.org/thank-you-acting-protect-arctics-international-waters?sid=17138

I also invite comments and insights of other readers of the Greenpad: students, teachers of politics, biology, economics, etc: what do you think?

By Heather Looy with links from King’s staff and faculty

Water.  Life’s most necessary resource.  Fresh, clean water is becoming increasingly scarce, though here in Canada we rarely notice a shortage.  For many, however, both at present and throughout human history, water has been recognized as both essential and precious.

The ancient Hebrews lived in a dry land.  No wonder scripture is filled with images of water: water as life-giving, God as the fountain, the source of water that will quench the thirst of all.   Yet the call is not only for ‘spiritual’ water, but for real water–water for the thirsty stranger, water to wash dusty feet, water as the foundation for wine.

How are Christians called to live in a world where the supply of safe, fresh water is increasingly scarce?  We can work to ensure that we stop contaminating the water we already have.  We can strive to use it wisely, setting priorities among industrial, agricultural, and personal uses.  And we can consider seriously refusing to turn water into a commodity, something for sale.

Buying bottled water turns water into such a commodity.  Bottled water also creates all kinds of other negative ripples on our environment.

Nova Scotia school boards, universities, and municipalities have banned the sale of bottled water; in 2010 the provincial government made the ban province-wide,  in all public locations.  Should the other provinces follow suit?  Should King’s become a bottled-water-free campus?  This January, thanks to the generosity of the 2010 and 2011 graduating classes,  King’s installed a drinking fountain with a water-bottle refilling station in our new academic building.

Can we go further to become a bottled-water-free-zone?  Should we?  What is wrong with our love affair with bottled water?

Here are three links that outline the reasons.  The first, forwarded from King’s Building Manager Rob Van Weerden, tells the story in words.  The second, forwarded from King’s environmental sociologist Randy Haluza-Delay, tells a piece of the story in vivid pictures.  The third is an animation/lecture that outlines the issues for visual learners!

Read, view, and I think you’ll have your answer.

The Facts About Bottled Water:  http://nb.cupe.ca/privatization/the-facts-about-bottled-water

Single-Use Plastic Bottles:  http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Polyethylene/PET-Plastic-Photographs1jan07.htm

The Story of Bottled Water Animation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPL0GQVVyBQ

By Dr. Randolph Haluza-DeLay

It is unusual for an academic book to be attacked by a newspaper columnist. But that happened to a recent book called Rethinking the Great White North. Remembering Pierre Berton’s line that having sex in a canoe is what makes one Canadian, The Globe & Mail’s Margaret Wente had suggested that maybe new immigrants should be taught to canoe – so they could be more like real Canadians.

The editors of Rethinking the Great White North took her to. The perception that “Canada = Canoeing” they said, was just one of the ways a European colonial mentality permeates both our sense of nation and our sense of nature. Wente lashed back in the pages of The Globe & Mail. Yet nature reflects race – read the book!

When I came to Canada as an immigrant, I quickly learned how much the North matters to the Canadian imagination. Nature and the boreal forest are also huge parts of the typical history and sense of identity for the country. But I first lived in northern Saskatchewan and quickly learned there isn’t one “Canadian” way of thinking about the land and often these ways of thinking split on ethnic lines. This book clearly shows how race and nature intermingle.

For example, that view of the North as wilderness is a way of thinking that often absents native peoples. The national narrative refers to, and then brushes over, the native present/presence. It is part of why the oil sands development proceeds as rapaciously as it does – “there’s [sort of] no one there” they say, and Canadians believe it, so can sacrifice the empty land.

For Christians, there is no way that creation can be seen as simply raw material for industrialization. It is a “gift of good land” as Wendell Berry put it. The Earth is the Lord’s (Psalm 24), and we are tenants. But even thinking about property ownership of land (or water, see http://parklandinstitute.ca/media/comments/new_report_says_markets_are_a_poor_solution_to_albertas_water_woes/) is a Eurocentric approach. Christians are heavily influenced by the cultures in which we live.

Rethinking the Great White North is an academic book with some of the complicated language that make people avoid reading such books. But that would be a mistake. An even worse mistake would be to ignore the entwining of race, nature, ethnicity and colonization that still permeate Canadian society. We need to trouble the narratives of nature too often used in environmental action.

Baldwin, Andrew, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi, eds. 2011. Rethinking the great white north: Race, nature and the historical geographies of whiteness in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Paperback: $37.95. ISBN 9780774820141.