IREJN (Connecticut IPL) in the news

The Eco-Justice blogger herself is quoted in this article that appeared in the Sunday Republican-American. Read the story below:

Palm Sunday goes green

BY TRACY SIMMONS REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN
Today innumerable churchgoers will attend Mass and tenderly clasp a green, symbolic palm leaf. Priests will bless them. Parishioners will fold or cut them into crucifixes, pin them to their lapels or display them at home to remind them of Jesus' humble entry into Jerusalem.Each year, about 300 million palm fronds are harvested and sold to U.S. churches for Palm Sunday, according to Lutheran World Relief. For decades, indigenous farmers in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico gathered as many of the palms as they could — the rotting ones, the torn ones, the baby ones — the ones that can't be used and had to be thrown out.This type of harvest produces a waste ratio as high as 50 percent, according to the Presbyterian Church U.S.A."They would just cut everything down and bring them in, then the people who buy them look through them and throw them (the bad ones) away," said the Rev. Denise Clapsaddle of Riverton Congregational Church. "Now the people harvesting do the quality control and that's how they've cut out the middle man."With this new harvesting method, discarded palms account for 5 to 7 percent and allow more money to go to the harvesters and their community, she explained."It's both a justice issue for the people who harvest palm and an environmental issue for more sustainable agriculture so the land isn't destroyed. It's more efficient to do it this way," she said.Clapsaddle, who also serves as an administrator for the Interreligious Eco-Justice Network (an interfaith environmental group) and blogs about religious environmentalism, said the use of eco-palms is becoming a more prevalent custom.In 2007, 1,436 churches in America used 364,000 eco-palm stems. According to the New York Times, Lutheran churches are the biggest buyers of eco-palms, followed by the Presbyterian Church.The eco-palms, Clapsaddle noted, do cost more than regular palms."That's the only disadvantage for a church that's really tight on funds," she said. "It's a long-term verses short-term argument ... but if we destroy the habitat, the price of palms go up for everybody."Lutheran World Relief has partnered with the University of Minnesota to sell eco-palms and is taking orders for 2009. A small case, 200 stems, can be purchased for $47.40 plus shipping. According to Biblical Reporter News, eco-palms cost more than double regular palms.Many churches recycle the palms by burning them for the following year's Ash Wednesday service. Riverton Congregational uses the palms as decoration after the Palm Sunday service. They also rent potted palms as decoration during Holy Week, a practice that Clapsaddle said is not uncommon.The Congregational churches, Clapsaddle said, have not jumped on the eco-palm board as quickly as other denominations, but she said she hopes to have eco-palms in her church by next year."It's not just one thing that's going to help us preserve the environment for the next generations; it's lots of little steps, so any steps people are willing to take that gets people in the congregation to care, is a good thing," she said.She said churches seem to be excited knowing that purchasing eco-palms helps not only the environment, but people as well."They're helping people right now by doing this," she said.

Eco-palms can be purchased through Lutheran World Relief

(phone) 612-624-7418

(fax) 612-625-5212

www.lwr.org/palms

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
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Organic Flowers for Valentine's Day

The Nature Conservancy is offering organic flowers. There is still time to order by Valentine's Day.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.

Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Will Bamboo Save the Earth?

An article in the New York Times covers the oft-praised virtues of bamboo and tells of a new way of overcoming the problems with propagating it. Here is an excerpt:

Bamboo is a workhorse at sequestering carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. It is a tough plant that manufactures its own antibacterial compounds and can thrive without pesticides. And its porous fibers make a cloth that breathes and is as soft as silk. In fact, there is such a stampede of fabric designers to China and Japan, where it is farmed and processed — no such industry exists in the United States — that in its May issue, National Geographic predicted that “this upstart fabric may someday compete with King Cotton.”
Yet as the world clamors for more, bamboo is in short supply. A plant that generally flowers only every 60 to 120 years and then dies is hard to propagate from seed. And growing it by dividing existing plants is notoriously difficult.
So when Jackie Heinricher and Randy Burr figured out how to make bamboo in test tubes — selling their first 2,000 plants in 2004 to local garden centers in the Skagit Valley in Washington — they made waves in the world of horticulture.
“It’s funny, because bamboo has this reputation for taking over the universe, and yet it’s the hardest plant to produce,” Ms. Heinricher, a biologist, said one afternoon in early June at the production center for her company, Boo-Shoot Gardens, here in Mount Vernon, a town about two hours north of Seattle.
Ms. Heinricher, who grew up with bamboo — her father tended golden bamboos all around their house in Olympia, Wash. — first tried to propagate the plant in the late 1990’s in a little greenhouse at her home in nearby Anacortes, where she lives with her husband, Guy Thornburgh, a marine biologist, and where she founded Boo-Shoot Gardens in 1998.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at http://www.irejn.org/.

Think Globally, Eat Locally

Eating organic is soooo 90s. Locavores--those who eat food grown locally (within a 100-mile to 250-mile radius, depending on who is setting the standards) are the standard bearers for the newest green trend, according to an article in the New York Times.

Many drawn to the movement say they have been eating that way for years and had never thought about the implications beyond the flavor. “Initially it was the taste thing for me,” said Robin McDermott, who lives in Waitsfield, Vt., where locavores call themselves localvores. “But now when I think about what it takes to get lettuce across the country so I can eat it in the middle of winter, between the fuel costs and the contribution all the transportation is making to global warming and climate change, I just can’t do it. It’s not sustainable and I don’t want to contribute to it.”
Those who think this is another harebrained scheme of the food fringe may be surprised to learn that locavores are poised to move into the mainstream. Barbara Kingsolver, the best-selling novelist, has written one of three books out this spring about eating locally.
“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (HarperCollins) recounts her family’s adventures during the year they spent eating food raised in their corner of southwest Virginia. Her book and others are successors to several earlier books including “Coming Home to Eat” by Gary Paul Nabhan and “Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection” by Jessica Prentice, who coined the word locavore and founded the Web site locavores.com.
Ms. Prentice’s group claims to have started the grass-roots locavore challenges that sprang up in California in 2005. Participants exchange recipes and advice.
Some locavores follow the 100 Mile Diet, created by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of the just-released “Plenty” (Harmony). They spent a year in British Columbia eating only food grown within a 100-mile radius.
It wasn’t easy. Faced with potatoes, once again, for lunch, Ms. Smith recounts her feeling that “I’d kill for a sandwich.” When Mr. MacKinnon said he would make her one, she couldn’t imagine what he had in mind because they had no local flour for bread. But soon enough he produced greenhouse-grown red peppers and fried mushrooms with goat cheese between two golden brown slices of something. Something turned out to be turnips.
The authors held so strictly to their plan that when they eventually found locally grown wheat they took it even though it was filled with mouse droppings. Mr. MacKinnon painstakingly separated the droppings from the wheat with the edge of a credit card.
The plan outlined in Ms. Kingsolver’s book is much less strict than the one in “Plenty.” The author said that in her attitude toward food she is something between a Puritan (“I’m going to be holy right now”) and a toddler (“I want absolutely everything every minute and the idea of not having fresh peaches in January is sort of horrifying”).
Each member of her family was allowed one luxury item that came from far away. Her husband chose coffee, her children hot chocolate and dried fruit. Spices were Ms. Kingsolver’s indulgence.
“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” gives no sense of privation or even boredom. Ms. Kingsolver spent a fair amount of time putting foods by when they were in season so that the larder was stocked.
But most readers would have trouble following her program, which included raising much of what the family ate on their farm, including chickens and turkeys.
“We undertook this project because it brings together so many compelling issues of the moment: carbon footprint, global warming, the local economy, the nutritional crisis and community,” said Ms. Kingsolver. “Community is very important to me and every book I’ve ever written is on this subject: what is the debt of the individual to the community?”

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Red, White, and Green

We're talking wine, of course. The New York Times has a feature about increasing interest in green wines.

Green has not yet replaced red or white or even pink as the most important color in deciding which wines to buy, but people have started to think about it. Words like organic, biodynamic, natural and sustainable are increasingly resonating with consumers, not just because they are concerned about health and the environment, but because they are beginning to associate them with great wine, the way organic has become a synonym for high-quality produce.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

A Green Prince (and he's not a frog)

The New York Times has a story about an unlikely hero of some green-leaning Americans--Prince Charles of England.

Prince Charles, whose hobbies have included both polo and the peculiarly English rural craft called hedge laying, cherishes tradition. In his world, it seems, not much good can come of change. He has waged war against modernity, both in faceless urban architecture and in the erosion of the rural British way of life.
At home, the royal perspective has been criticized as conservative, stodgy and elitist. But to some of the generals of the American food revolution, the prince qualifies as downright progressive.
Alice Waters, who drove the organic movement in the United States, is smitten. “He is, in private, really one of the most forward-thinking, radical humanitarians I have ever talked to,” she said.
The left-leaning food elite of the United States has prince fever, and it has nothing to do with an underlying fascination with the monarchy, Diana and Helen Mirren notwithstanding. To Ms. Waters and her troops, no one else of the prince’s stature has spoken out on the issues they hold dear: responsible stewardship of the land, preservation of rural life and the need for good food grown without chemicals or worker exploitation.
“Can you think of any American political figure who has spoken eloquently or bravely about these issues?” asked Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation,” who has become a friend of the prince.
Ms. Waters agreed. “Al Gore doesn’t even talk about food,” she said.
(That’s not to say Mr. Gore doesn’t have prince fever, too. He has visited Highgrove to discuss the environment with the prince, and the two happily trade shout-outs to each other in speeches.)

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

'Locavores' Take Eating Locally Seriously

Eating food produced within a 100-mile radius is the focus of this story. Folks are hosting eat local dinner parties/potulucks. Find some helpful how-tos and links in Wired. Listen to a story about how eating locally may be better for your health from NPR's Talk of the Nation.