New York Friends on Climate Change

The March issue of New York Year­ly Meet­ing’s Spark now seems to be online, a good dozen arti­cles on the top­ic of “Earth­care Now.” From the intro­duc­tion by guest edi­tor Pamela Boyce Simms:

The NYYM Friends who have shared their sto­ries here­in are farm­ers, chap­lains, hydro­ge­ol­o­gists, shep­herds, mys­tics, home­stead­ers, local gov­ern­ment offi­cials, nat­u­ral­ists, pro­fes­sors, and Mas­ter Gar­den­ers. They till the soil, herd the sheep, insu­late walls, min­is­ter unto many, com­mune with nature, edu­cate, and mod­el resilience in Itha­ca, Brook­lyn, Clin­ton, East Chatham, and Seneca Cas­tle in New York, and in High­land Park and Mont­clair in New Jersey.

I still have to go through them myself. Some that look par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing are Susan­na Mat­ting­ly’s Quak­ers and Cli­mate Change:

This is a spir­i­tu­al call as well as a mate­r­i­al one, to act not out of fear or through accu­sa­tion, but with hope and love. We rec­og­nize sus­tain­abil­i­ty and care for the earth are inte­gral to our faith and our Quak­er tes­ti­monies as we strive to live in right rela­tion­ship with all cre­ation. As a com­mu­ni­ty, we can make a mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to sta­bi­liz­ing the cli­mate and build­ing resilience.

Christo­pher Sam­mond’s “Our Gen­er­a­tion’s ‘Lam­b’s War’ “:

As I have held ques­tions about how to respond to the divi­sive­ness, the fear mon­ger­ing, the racism, and the tsuna­mi of lies and half-truths char­ac­ter­iz­ing our nation’s polit­i­cal life at this time, I have been clear­ly and deeply called to go deep, and to join the many, many peo­ple of faith who are seek­ing to bring about the nec­es­sary shift in cul­ture, a shift in spir­i­tu­al con­scious­ness, which is nec­es­sary if we are to sur­vive as a species. And, like my Quak­er fore­bears, I know that work to begin with­in myself.