Rich Heffern's blog

Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida offers a series of Lenten commentaries on farmworkers and their Campaign for Fair Food in the context of each week's lectionary. The commentaries are written by Florida clergy and offer the opportunity to reflect on each Sunday's readings and how they relate to efforts for dignity and justice in the fields. These are ideal for sermon preparation or individual devotional reading: www.interfaithact.org/lentencommentaries2010

Where I live in the Midwest, the red cardinals begin singing in mid-February, no matter what the weather. That’s when my spring hunger begins. The redbirds’ sweetly hopeful songs bring it on. Migrant robins return. My yearning cranks up. By March, garden seeds are on display in the hardware store while hoes, rakes and spades are up front. That gets me salivating.

When I lived in the country I would take lots of March and April walks. Each day I would find some new evidence of spring’s approach and arrival. I kept careful records of its progress in my journal.

Entries looked like this: “March 22: Warm night, first spring peepers heard. March 24: First hepaticas blooming in the ravine. April 2: Balmy evening. Whippoorwills back and beginning to call. April 9: Some sunshine. Trillium and bloodroot flowering; behind the house, first morel mushrooms. April 14: Sunny day. Saw first indigo bunting in the pasture. May 10: Cool, wet day. Chestnut-sided warblers stranded in the midst of their migration, feeding in cedars. May 16: Wild pink azaleas blooming in Mad Dog Hollow.”

There are probably hundreds and hundreds of thousands around the country now who make some deliberate effort to live simply.

-- Myra and John live in the suburbs of Chicago and keep plastic bins in their garage for recyclables. They spend a few minutes each day sorting and separating, then an hour a month taking the bins to drop-off centers. Both also choose to ride public transportation to their jobs weekdays rather than driving. When they recently bought a new car, they opted for a hybrid. The whole family chooses to eat a bit lower on the food chain than is widely done, limiting their meat consumption. They also limit the amount of time they watch tv, choosing to read to and talk with their children most evenings.

-- In rural New Mexico, Cyril and Ed card the wool and spin yarn from a dozen sheep they raise in their four-acre back yard. They also keep goats for milk and make their own cheese when they have time. Both are self-employed computer programmers and work as consultants out of their home, a sprawling adobe structure they built themselves. When they must travel to faraway cities on business, they take the train.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 27 percent of all food (by weight) produced for people in the United States is either thrown away or used for a lower-value purpose, such as feeding animals.

According to a recent study, the average American household wastes 14 percent of its food purchases. But it's not just the food that is being wasted -- all of the water and energy that went into producing, packaging and transporting the discarded food also goes to waste.

Most of this food waste ends up in landfills, where it releases methane pollution as it decomposes, further contributing to global warming.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Purchase only the amount of food that you are able to consume before it expires.
Compost your food waste. Get tips from Natural Resource Defense Council's OnEarth magazine.

Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry formulated these principles for a sustainable economy, one which focuses on community and the common good. A community economy is not an economy in which well-placed persons can make a "killing." It is an economy whose aim is generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance.

Wendell Berry is a strong defender of family, rural communities, and traditional family farms. These underlying principles could be described as "the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

The Washington Post reported recently that the United States has significantly reduced human-sourced pollutants over the last 40 years that once left rivers and lakes dead, discolored and occasionally flammable, but now has "managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world."

A March 1 feature story by David Fahrenthold pointed out that animal manure, a byproduct of the new breed of megafarms, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, according to scientists and environmentalists. Livestock now produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled for nearby fields.

That excess manure gives off air pollutants and "it is this country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas."

What's more, it washes down stream then down river with rains, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived "dead zones" that have spread along the U. S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to "the back end of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys."

As we look ahead to March and a new growing season, start to plan now for locally grown foods: 1) Look for locally grown vegetables in your grocery stores. 2) Find out when your local farmers market will open -- and plan to walk or bike there if you can. 3) Consider joining a "CSA" (community supported agriculture) that will deliver local produce from early Spring to late Fall.

These ideas come from the Lenten Carbon Fast Calendar, a listing of simple actions that may put you in the spirit of caring for Creation and the world-wide community:
http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Lenten-Carbon-Fast-Calendar-2010.pdf

There is high speculation that Senate leaders will make a push on climate change and energy legislation, perhaps soon to avoid political posturing before campaigning for November elections is in full force. The USCCB recently sent out an action alert, reminding us that climate change is at the center of the environmental challenges facing our nation and the world:

"Our response to global climate change raises fundamental questions of morality and justice,fairness andshared sacrifice.People living in poverty - both at home and abroad - contribute least to climatechange but they are likely to suffer its worst consequences with few resources to adapt and respond."

The impacts of climate change -- increased temperatures, rising sea levels,and changes in rainfall that contribute to more frequent and severe floods and droughts -- are making the lives of the world's poorest even more precarious

This Lent, the Franciscan Action Network invites you to experience renewal in your relationships with God's creation. Reflections on Sunday readings and suggestions for the practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving help prepare for the re-commitment to your baptismal calling at Easter. You can sign up to receive the weekly resource via email at www.franciscanaction.org,
or you can directly view resources at www.franciscanaction.org/lent2010.

For the First Sunday of Lent, there are a variety of liturgical resources, including Prayers of the Faithful, a Final Blessing for Mass, and a bulletin insert text at www.franciscanaction.org/first_sunday_of_lent_2010.

Eastern North American songbirds are a very adaptable bunch, says a scientist who discovered some remarkable changes in their wing shapes over the past century.

A close look at museum collections of 851 songbird specimens belonging to 21 species shows that most of the birds evolved wings that are more pointed after their forests were disrupted by logging. Others in re-forested areas evolved less-pointed wings. The drive to procreate forced the changes in wing shape.

More pointed wings can help birds who are long-distance commuters fly more efficiently. Rounded wings however, are better off over short distances.

"I've been studying the effects of (forest) fragmentation," said Andre Desrochers of Quebec's University Laval and the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. "Roads, rivers, clearcuts and other gaps can break up songbird habitats.

"To me, it becomes apparent that fragmentation is really a big problem" he added. "If you (as a songbird) are in a fragmented habitat, you have more chance of being without a mate."

The Archdiocese of Washington's Environmental Outreach Committee produced a calendar listing 40 carbon fasting actions everyone can consider as a part of Lenten preparations.

Each of these actions challenges us to reflect on our consumption habits, reduce our production of climate change pollution and help to preserve God's great gift of Creation. As Pope Benedict reminded us in his World Day of Peace Message: "Our present crises … require us to rethink the path which we are travelling together. Specifically, they call for a lifestyle marked by sobriety and solidarity…"

What better time than Lent to begin practicing such a lifestyle. Download the Carbon Fast Calendar for your parish, school, or individual use.

The suggestion that we might be able to directly experience divine mystery in the midst of our lives, both in our enthusiasms and struggles, that in fact our daily living is the central arena where the encounter with the divine takes place (spirituality) -- these notions were largely unavailable to most of us until recently. We were, in effect, cut off from our most fundamental spiritual nourishment and from the mystical experience that is at the root of all religion.

In Christianity, for example, the accounts of Jesus' birth are telling us, among other things, that the Great Mystery does not visit only the elite, the professional religious, that the divine is found in the most unexpected and unlikely places.

In the Catholic tradition Fr. Andrew Greeley has pointed out that the sacraments -- those bulwarks of our faith -- exist for the purpose of celebrating and hallowing the grace and spirit that have already entered our lives. We encounter divine mystery primarily in our daily living. The sacraments are there to single out and validate those encounters with grace and mystery and enable the whole community to bless and honor them.

Everyday household activities are a major contributor to polluted runoff, which is among the most serious sources of water contamination. When it rains, fertilizer from lawns, oil from driveways, paint and solvent residues from walls and decks and even waste from your pets are all washed into storm sewers or nearby lakes, rivers and streams -- the same lakes, rivers and streams we rely on for drinking, bathing, swimming and fishing. Here are some ways you can help reduce polluted runoff.

In Your Home:

1. Correctly dispose of hazardous household products. Keep paints, used oil, cleaning solvents, polishes, pool chemicals, insecticides, and other hazardous household chemicals out of drains, sinks, and toilets. Many of these products contain harmful substances -- such as sodium hypochlorite, petroleum distillates, phenol and cresol, ammonia and formaldehyde -- that can end up in nearby water bodies. Contact your local sanitation, public works, or environmental health department to find out about hazardous waste collection days and sites. If a local program isn't available, request one.

Growing attention is being paid to the connections between economics, environment and faith. The Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns has started a "Faith-Economy-Ecology" project in order to understand the various ways in which these three crucial factors intersect. Learn more at the Faith, Economy, Ecology Web site

You'll find resources and reflections that will help you, and perhaps your community, better understand the connections between care of the Earth and all its life forms, the global economy and our faith. You will also see a sign-on statement, inviting individuals or a representative of an organization to join and seek the change we need in policy and lifestyles.

The Haitian recovery will have to be down to earth, literally. Local food production is invaluable in a country where people struggle to feed themselves. According to an interview on the Wired Web site with Australian permaculture expert Geoff Hanson, the techniques of permaculture can greatly help to rehabilitate the landscape and provide sustainable livelihoods for both urban and rural dwellers there.

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.
Permaculture's practical development in modern times is credited to Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer on his own farm in the early 1960s and then theoretically developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications. The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture. Geoff Hanson is with the Australian Permaculture Research Institute.

Henry David Thoreau was America's most serious student of winter. "Inspector of snowstorms," he jotted down on forms under the "occupation" question. This 19th-century writer and philosopher carefully watched the seasons come and go. He wore out shoe leather rambling through the cold seasons in his native New England. He explored winter at every hour of night and day, always alert to hear what was in the wind, to feel the tang and piquancy of the season and boil down some meaning out of the daily circumstances beyond his doorstep. He painstakingly recorded his observations, impressions and thoughts in his journals.

In one journal entry in 1854 he summarized his winter observations:

"The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it ... We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriments it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit, no doubt, is the more concentrated and nutty ... The seasons were not made in vain."

He maybe took time to warm the tip of his pen in a whale-oil lamp, then added:

Interfaith Power & Light coalitions and partner congregations around the country will be making climate change the subject of their worship services on Valentine Day's weekend, February 12-14.

Your parish or congregation can get involved by sending Valentine postcards to your legislators on "loving our neighbors by caring for creation" -- specifically in terms of passing strong climate legislation. When you sign up for the Valentine Day preach-in, you receive materials to help you educate or prepare a sermon for the second week of February. Visit Interfaith Power & Light

Recent media attention to the new iPad from Apple reminded me of a friend who retired from the Environmental Protection Agency who once said to me: "The earth's life support systems will probably survive the automobile but probably not personal computers and all the other electronic equipment that proliferates now." She based her opinion on a United Nations University study released in 2006 which revealed a new understanding of the impact these necessary tools of the 21st century have on our environment.

According to this report, making the average personal computer requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels. What's more, many of the chemicals used are toxic, while the use of fossil fuels in making computer and electronic components contributes to global climate change. The short life of today's electronic equipment leads to Himalayas of waste, the report says. That waste is then dumped into landfills or recycled, too often in poorly managed facilities in developing countries, leading to significant health risks.

When I mention to people here in the Midwest that I am a fan of the season of winter, they look at me in a puzzled, perplexed way. We winter fans are few, it seems. Here's why I like this unpopular season so much.

Take a walk on a winter afternoon. The nip in the wind wakes a quiet exultation that is peculiar to this season. Winter is streamlined and elementary. Its purposes are honest and straighforward. Nothing is hidden or obstructed with green as in summer. The anatomy of places is plainly visible. In the countryside the colors of its short days are mostly solemn grays, silvers, blacks and warm, homespun shades of brown, russet and tan. All these colors are muted and understated. The sillhouettes of tree branches against a sullen grey clouded sky look like a revelation.

Winter contains the divine. It is no accident that the season richest in liturgy is the winter time. Advent, Christmas, Lent are full of devotions, practices, pageantry and rich and meaningful prayer, as we celebrate outer and inner mysteries. Winter is vital to our spiritual lives, to the richness and wholeness of being human.

Mark Twain wrote that his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn was a hymn set down in prose to give it a more worldly air. Besides being a wonderfully entertaining tale of a boy's odyssey down the Mississippi River in the pre-Civil War era in America, the book is also an illumination, a wise vision with a depth and mysteriousness that adds greatly to its appeal.

A few pages into the story and we realize we're in the middle of masterfully interwoven texture of character and event. Taken as a whole the book is like a hymn -- a celebration of life's comedy and tragedy and of the natural world. It easily infects us with reserves of enthusiasm.

No one fails so pitifully to live up to the expectations of respectable society as Huck Finn. Yet there beats within him a heart filled with compassion. Huck sends help back to two would-be murderers who are stranded on a wrecked steamboat. He feels pity for two swindlers who have been caught and punished by an outraged town. His love for his companion on the river, Jim, knows no bounds.

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once said: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” He was convinced there was a link between a carnivorous diet and peace. He told this story:

“Once, when walking from Moscow, I was offered a lift by some carters who were going to a neighboring forest to fetch wood. I was seated in the first cart with a strong, red, coarse cartman, who evidently drank. On entering a village we saw a naked, pink pig being dragged out of the yard to be slaughtered. It squealed in a dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man. Just as we were passing they began to kill it, gashing its throat with a knife.

“The pig squealed still more piercingly, broke away from the men, and ran off covered with blood. I did not see all the details, only the human-looking pink body of the pig and heard its desperate squeal, but the carter watched closely. They caught the pig and finished cutting its throat. When its squeals ceased the carter sighed heavily. ‘Do men really not have to answer for such things?’ he said.

The following is from Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope's blog Taking the Initiative:

Washington, DC -- The world is still reeling from the magnitude of the disaster in Haiti. Many Sierra Club members and staffers, particularly from our Florida and Puerto Rico Chapters, are close to members of the Haitian expatriate community. All of us want to help the people experiencing this almost unimaginable human catastrophe however we can.

Seeing the terrible images of suffering from Port-au-Prince, our grief forces us to ask ourselves "Was such a disaster truly inevitable?" Of course we cannot control -- or even truly predict -- earthquakes. But in some places earthquakes kill tens of thousands, while in others there are only a handful of casualties. Why? I see two closely related factors that make a difference: forests and poverty.

Just after World War II, a new branch of science was born – ethology, the study of animal behavior. The first ethologist to come to prominence in the scientific community was Austrian Konrad Lorenz.

In 1973 Lorenz won the Nobel Prize, along with colleagues Karl von Frisch and Niko Tinbergen, for their discoveries concerning animal behavioral patterns. They discovered the phenomenon of imprinting, in which young animals socially bond to the first moving object they encounter.

Some of Lorenz’ views were expressed in his popular book On Aggression (1966), wherein he asserted that human aggressive impulses are to a degree inborn, and drew analogies between the aggression demonstrated in both human and animal territorial behavior. These assertions made decades ago have engendered considerable controversy. Some saw Lorenz’ views as an attempt to whitewash human atrocities like the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

We hear a lot about “tipping points,” those places at which momentum becomes irreversible, in connection with looming environmental challenges such as climate change. The Earth now spins toward many points of no return, reputable scientists say. Opinions vary as to how long it will take or whether indeed we have already passed through them.

“The tipping points are falling like dominoes,” said Albert Bates, founder of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology. “We are losing. We need to sprint.”

Needed for that sprint are eco-tipping points, levers that dramatically reverse environmental decline and set in motion restoration and sustainability.

There are indeed many pioneering projects and efforts around the world that are not technological fixes so much as returns to ways humans have employed for hundreds of thousands of years or to ways and means that nature herself uses.Here’s one involving the new/old science of permaculture.

Many pscyhologists and others in the health professions have recognized the vital contribution spirituality makes to mental and physical well-being. Fran Ferder, a Catholic sister with a long and active practice in psychotherapy, points out that the Genesis accounts in the Bible describe God as Energizer, Breath-Sharer, one who hovers, who breathes life into and wants to relate to all of creation. Those same qualities, Ferder notes, also describe people who are psychologically healthy and robust.

Such people behave in ways that give life to others. They attend to and want to relate with others in productive and meaningful ways. "When our lives most reflect the sacred pattern that brought us into being," Ferder writes, "perhaps then we are closest to the holy, and therefore the most whole and healthy." The longing for holiness and wholeness is also good mental hygiene, she concludes. Good spirituality is good mental health.

The Catholic church calls us to be responsible stewards of this planet and to put into action Catholic social teaching. The National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) has developed a web-based study guide to introduce you to a structured approach to help move through the steps of understanding and applying Catholic teachings as these relate to climate change.

Climate Change: A Catholic Response Study Guide is designed to help you apply Catholic social teaching to climate change and prudent energy use. Visit the Rural Life Conference website and use the guide for a self-guided study session.

"There is nothing wrong with the human species today," wrote Fr. Matthew Fox, "except one thing, that we have lost the sense of the sacred." What does a society or world look like that has misplaced its radar for the sacred? Just look around, read the newspapers.

Astronomer Edwin HubbleToday is the Feast of the Epiphany. Another epiphany that occurred in January -- January 1, 1925 -- is celebrated and explored in a recently published book I'm reading now. Until that date, we humans didn't know exactly where we were. That day astronomers learned conclusively that the universe extends at least a million light years or more and faint clouds of light observed by the world’s largest telescope at the time twinkled from distant galaxies. Essentially, the date marked the universe’s discovery, science writer Marcia Bartusiak argues in her newly published history of early 20th century astronomy, The Day We Found the Universe, published by Pantheon Books.

I wrote a column last month about the important night sky light -- that of the Andromeda galaxy -- that enabled Edwin Hubble to make his important discovery that was formally announced on Jan. 1 in 1925, that our Milky Way home galaxy is just one of billions.

The sisters prepared us well. On the day of days we dressed all in white – shoes, socks, underwear, pants, shirt, even a white belt. “Don’t let it touch your teeth,” Sr. Agatha Irene warned, “and if, God forbid, you get sick, vomit, the priests know what to do. And remember only he can touch the host with his consecrated hands!”

Just before the priest’s fingers deposited the wafer on my outstretched tongue, I recall I trembled. How could I accommodate this presence in the same mouth that filled with sugary grape Kool-Aid in the summer, spongy Twinkies on school day afternoons? Into that familiar orifice came the same bread that dwelt in the silent, golden tabernacle with the ornate candle perpetually burning before it. That object of adoration, somehow transmuted into the substance of the very shaper and crafter of the seas and skies, the Love that moves the sun and stars, melted on my fluttering tongue.

It has always impressed me how different workplaces, communities, parishes and organizations look depending on whether one is on "top" looking "down," or seeing from the "bottom up."

In the mid-1990s we did a two day-long discernment process here, faciliated from outside and designed to improve the ways in which we worked together. First, we workers met for a day, then the next day we met with management. Our two perspectives were alike as Bugs Bunny and his carrot. For one thing, workers agreed that gossip, so disparaged from the "top," was essential to the health, vitality and information transfer of the company. Gossip can sometimes be caring creativity seething out from under "top down" efforts to manage a bubbling cauldron of life. Put another way, from the "top," gossip looks like chaos; from the "bottom," a nutrient.