We intend this page to serve faith communities as they cooperate in the concern about climate change and other environmental issues. It is intended to share ideas and inspirations – if your congregation (etc.) is doing something which you think is a good idea and other congregations could be doing it too, let us know about it. Please send it to Roger Conant (roger[at]sconant.net) with [IENet] in the subject line.
Index (most recent on top):
Mount Toby personal eco-tips
Eating Locally Proposal
Mount Toby Friends put up a bulletin board and invited people to write post-it notes about ways they had found in their homes or lives to save energy and care for the environment. Other congregations might try this out. One consequence is that now there is a regular listing, in our monthly newsletter, of people offering carpool rides to Meeting. Here is the unsorted list of eco-tips that came:
- We flush less…
- On demand water heater and turn off shower water when soaping up.
- Buy items with recyclable packaging, or bring a container.
- I dry my clothes on an outdoor clothesline.
- I buy most of my clothes from The Salvation Army.
- Sometimes I bike to the store. (But only sometimes.)
- I buy local food and have a share in Community Sustained Agriculture (CSA) summer and winter.
- Bought a smaller more fuel efficient car.
- I have thermostat set at 68 and wear sweaters or jackets indoors.
- We dry clothes on a rack near the wood stove in the winter.
- We have a hybrid car.
- We combine errands so as to reduce the number of car trips.
- We converted our car to run on vegetable oil! GreaseCar.com
- We turn off the furnace except when we want hot water for showers.
- I buy all the clothes I can at the thrift store and donate there in equal measure.
- Thanks to those who bike to meeting!
- We paid more to have a really energy efficient refrigerator.
- When making tea, heat just exactly one cup of water – shortens heating time and minimizes energy.
- We heat the house with wood only – a renewable resource.
- I ride a scooter instead of my car (in good weather.)
- I use a clothesline instead of a dryer.
- In winter, most of our hot water gets heated from a pot on the wood stove.
- I have no dryer. I air dry laundry outside the house on lines or inside on clothes racks.
- Plant a tree in your yard, if you have a yard.
- Let dishes air-dry.
- I replace some of my car travel with bicycle travel. Each year I set a goal of 1000 bike miles.
- I have a solar water heater and a hybrid car.
- Change your lawn into a wildflower garden.
- Eat more veggies and less meat.
- We never throw hot water down the drain. Let it cool first.
- We shop with cloth bags, mostly…
- We have friends over instead of sitting in a movie theatre or going to a restaurant.
- Locally-grown food is a significant part of my diet.
- We use our wood stove as much as possible.
- Outside clothes line!
- Car pool to Meeting.
Eating Locally Proposal, by the Green Sanctuary Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, and approved at a congregational meeting
September 25, 2011
Our concern
Current methods of food production in this country and around the globe are unsustainable, with consequences that are environmentally harmful as well as socially and ethically unjust.
Environmental, social, and ethical context
Large-scale food production today pollutes the environment, depletes precious resources, contributes significantly to climate change, is cruel to animals, and fails to adequately feed the world. Industrial agriculture, the source of too much of our food today, is heavily focused on these unsustainable practices.
Our UU principles of respect for the interdependent web of all existence, and justice and compassion for others, are inconsistent with today’s unjust and unsustainable food production system.
Goals, strategies, tactics
We propose to focus on one solution/approach to these problems: eating locally.
By choosing local foods, we reduce the high environmental costs of transporting food long distances, even around the world, which consumes fuel and produces greenhouse gases. But even more important, by eating locally we support small local farms that more often raise food organically and sustainably and treat animals and workers humanely. This builds resilient communities while decreasing support for industrial factory farming.
Clearly, it isn’t feasible to always eat locally produced food, and some people are less able to do so than others. What we’re proposing is, as a congregation, to heighten our awareness of and commitment to eating locally whenever we can, and our awareness of the larger environmental and social issues.
Some ideas for specific, measureable, achievable projects
- Serving local food at coffee hours
- Serving local food as RE snacks
- Encouraging people to buy farm shares and use farmers’ markets
- Encouraging people to plant gardens
- Showing movies
- Providing an annotated booklist
- Selecting a book for the congregation to read during the year
- Having a local food potluck at the UUSA
- Creating a shopping guide for buying local food in typical stores
- Making a list of local restaurants that serve local food
These are some of our ideas. But we hope and expect that interested members of the congregation will add their own ideas to the list, and together we’ll choose which projects to work on.