Hello, fellow EPPN-ers. In the spirit of this Lenten series, I am taking on a discipline during lent – only using cloth shopping bags. I’ll tell the truth – I have cloth bags; I’ve had cloth bags for some time. But we all know – it is easy to forget them in the car or the kitchen or whatever fabulous storage spot I find for them. So, during Lent, I am making the commitment to just use my cloth bags – no plastic shopping bags for me. If I leave my sacks in the trunk, I’ll have to abandon my cart and run back out to the car (I hope it’s not raining!). I’ll take pictures and share with you my adventures and some of the reactions that I get from cashiers and other folks in line. Stay Tuned!
Mary Getz – Episcopal Church Office of Government Relations

Update: So, Lent was pretty early this year, and I ended up traveling quite a bit. That means not very much grocery shopping. I did to one real shop and discovered that while the store was totally cool with the cloth bags, their “packaging specialists” were not quite used to fitting groceries in them. I also stopped into the grocery one afternoon when I was tired and not feeling on my game. Of course, I forgot to bring in my bags. I was only purchasing a few things though, so I decided that I would just pay and carry them out sans bags. Suffice to say I got more than a few strange looks, but it worked! Did anyone else have a “green discipline” for Lent? We’d love to hear about it and share your story here – email eppn@episcopalchurch.org

I received this message from Nancy in Oklahoma:

This Christmas season, I took a cloth bag with me to the mall.  I asked store clerks not to bag my purchases. 

I intended to put them in the bag I had.  Since I would have a receipt, it didn’t seem like a security problem to me. 

Without exception they told me I needed to have the item in their bag to prove I wasn’t shoplifting. 

Has anyone else had this experience? Have ideas about how to change these store minds? Shoot me and email and we’ll post comments and ideas here. Email eppn@episocpalchurch.org

At St Peter's, a group of us has formed an "eco-team."  For our first year, we are considering our relationship to food through the lenses of sustainability and social justice.  Many of us have committed to eating more local foods, composting our food waste (at home, at church, and in some of our workplaces), and learning about the global and local context of hunger.  We have come to a deeper appreciation for how interrelated our local actions are with the environmental health of this earth.    We are planning for a community garden in spring, and are working on ideas to help programs that feed food-insecure members of our community access local organic produce. 

Another exciting aspect of the program is transmitting nearly-forgotten skills in food selection, preparation, and storage from more experienced parishioners to young people.  We take turns preparing simple and delicious meals for the meetings from local ingredients.  In the process, we have created positive peer norms that support environmentally-friendly lifestyle changes and focus on a grace-filled transformation of our attitudes toward our individual impact upon the environment.  There is a walking gratitude living into respectful use of God's creation.  

Tamara – St. Peter's, Bennington (VT)

Just a bit of an update on a project we did for our Diocesan Convention this past weekend. Working with the Environmental Commission, Social Justice Commission, Christian Ed, and ERD...we invited the parishes to participate in our Water Project...that is, to collect spare change in plastic individual water bottles to fund the building of wells in India, Latin America, and Africa. Those filled water bottles were to be taken to the parish churches All Saints Sunday to be blessed and then to be presented at the opening Eucharist of the Diocesan Convention November 8th. You should have seen the baskets and baskets of water bottles!

We literally broke the bank! That is...the change counting machine at the local bank broke counting all our spare change! The change machine will be repaired tomorrow and we will have the final count by the end of this week. We are quite certain that we have collected well over $20,000.00. The participation was awesome...something that children, teens, as well as the adults... all took part in this project.

When our group first met, we projected collecting enough to fund three wells...one in each of the above named countries. I was confident that we would do much more and WE DID! I keep telling folks in each talk I give...What can one person do? And then emphasize that when we have many ONE PERSONS
Submitted by a Friend of ER-D from the Diocese of Oregon

I took the survey [from the first week of the For the Beauty of the Earth series] and our 3 person family scored 26 tons of CO2 out of the average of 80 tons. We recently remodel our kitchen and went with bamboo cabinets and some very energy efficient lighting. We also hired a contractor, GreenBuilt of Sacramento, that uses an environmental approach to construction and recycling. We tried to buy as many of the materials from local sources to reduce travel from manufacturing point to our home. We were lucky to find a concrete counter fabricator just a couple miles from our house.

We live in a society that accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population, yet consumes over 25 percent of the world’s natural resources. You don’t have to be a financial professional to see that this situation is not in balance—it is unsustainable.

As faithful Christians, we have some powerful tools to help us find ways to bring this situation into balance: our tradition, including the Bible and the sacraments.

Let’s look at an example. Water is prized for its unique life-giving properties and its ability to cleanse. The physical and spiritual properties of water are closely related.

The sacraments of baptism and communion both rely on water. Where does the water for these sacraments come from—some special pool of living water out behind the church? Or from the church’s tap or supply of bottled water?

We have reverence for the water we use in our sacraments. Do we have the same reverence for the water we use for drinking, bathing, watering the lawn, and other daily activities?

The human body needs one gallon of water a day to survive, so how is it that the average American uses one hundred gallons of water per day? That’s a mystery we can solve by accounting for the water use of our own households, workplaces, and congregations. We can be the change that we hope to see in our beloved country.

Would you like to help accomplish the Millennium Development Goals without leaving home or writing a check? Use less water than the average American. People and other living creatures all over the world will directly benefit from your judicious use of water.

Would you like to see more people in their twenties and thirties come to church? Offer spiritual leadership grounded in the living stream of our tradition and guided by the wisdom of science.

Our society is yearning for spiritual leadership that can help people appreciate the presence of God in the natural world and create a sustainable spirit in our use of natural resources, a spirit that expresses the great spiritual values of our tradition: hope, love, joy, and faithful action.

Love and joy are never far apart.

I’ve noticed in this election year that the presidential candidates on both sides have had little to say about the environment. Does anyone remember the presidential election of 1992, when President George H. W. Bush lost his bid for reelection in large part because of the “vision thing”?

My hope is that some day we will hear people in our society say that “so and so won the presidential election because of the Green Thing—s/he got it.” And people in our church will say that “so and so won the election as bishop because of the Green Thing—s/he got it.”

When will that day come? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Sometimes the mystery is solved before our eyes, as it was for Simeon in Luke 2:25–35, and sometimes it is not.

But I believe that is where we are headed, and that is where God’s reconciling love is hard at work in today’s world.

--Excerpted from a Reflection by Phyllis Strupp, “The Green Thing” for a CREDO Faculty Convocation

Greetings!! In the March 13 POLICY ALERT a reference is made to "an EPPN or ONE Episcopalian cloth bag!"  Are these available?

Our GRACE ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDS group is making this one of our priorities and this alert will be put to good use. Thanks!

Our first step a month or so ago was to do away with paper and styrofoam cups at coffee hours and other parish hall events.  That is working beautifully!

Thanks very much!!

John – for Grace Episcopal Church Environmental Stewards, Traverse City

John (and anyone else interested) ONE and EPPN cloth bags are available for sale here: http://cafepress.com/eppn

Am touched by the way our world is changing. I will start mobilizing the Youth of my country Malawi to start acting now. Continue sending me these info.

Goodwin – EPPN Member, Malawi