Tending to Mother Earth A sermon preached by the Wendy Page At the North Parish of North Andover, MA, Unitarian Universalist Sunday, April 17, 2016 I grew up on a small dairy farm in Upstate New York. We had cows and chickens. I learned how to milk a cow, how to gather eggs without getting pecked by the hens, how to bale hay. We lived close to the earth. My father had gone to agriculture school and used the cutting edge ideas of sustainable agriculture for the mid 20 th century: he plowed his fields in contours around hills so that there would be less erosion. He rotated his crops so that the soil wouldn t get worn out by a single crop. But it was the 1950 s. And, unfortunately, he used DDT as a pesticide. We know today how bad DDT can be for the environment and for human beings. In fact, my father and both his brother and sister all died of different kinds of cancer. In the 1970 s we kept the temperature in our ranch home at 75 and used light blankets in the middle of the winter. It was only during the oil embargo when Jimmy Carter was president that we started turning down our thermostats and thinking about turning lights off as we left a room. We did things in my childhood that we wouldn t dream of doing today. We are aware today of how our changing climate is one of the major threats to our human race. It is easy to get hopeless about the state of our planet and all the things humans have done wrong and are 1
continuing to do wrong. But today I want to talk about what we, here in this sanctuary are doing, and can learn from one another about helping the planet in small and not so small ways. I have been asking staff and some of you a simple question this week: what is your favorite thing to do for the environment? The answer was not easy for many of you because you do many different things to tend to Mother Earth and her creatures. Reverend Lee s favorite thing to do is to buy free range eggs because she imagines all the happy chickens strutting and scratching around Jackie Orent-Nathan tries to avoid buying anything packaged in plastic and looks for things in glass or in paper. Deb Olander always carries a refillable water bottle. Kim Adami and I play a little game every week: we try to make the recycling bin really full and the trash bag that we put out really small. In fact, I don t buy trash bags. I use plastic bags that find their way into my house for my trash. Now not that many bags come into my house because I have a stash of reusable bags. The trick is to remember to actually take them to the store. I have one from the UUA which I am particularly fond of as well as some from Whole Foods. Deb Olander says she always takes a reusable bag with her, not just to the grocery story. I m going to try harder to remember mine. I have a vegetable garden and so does Rebecca Driscoll, our Assistant Administrator. One year, at her daughter Katie s 8 th birthday party, she had the kids go out into the garden to pick vegetables to take home as party favors. It was a big hit with both the kids and their parents. Who here is eight years old? Cool. 2
I also plant flowers and milkweed in my garden that butterflies and bees like. I have a butterfly bush and I love seeing the monarch butterflies stop by to feed on their very long migration down to Mexico. I just heard that it was a great year for Monarch butterflies and they have expanded their feeding ground down in Mexico. That is really encouraging. Terri Reid and Kim Adami love to eat local honey. Kim has a friend with bees that she gets her honey from. Bees are pollinators and are really important for our food supply and they are in trouble because of pesticides. Having flowers they like in our gardens help. Speaking of gardens, I compost my food scraps and yard clippings. It breaks down into really beautiful loam. Some winters when there is a lot of snow, I have a worm bin in my basement. You rip up pieces of newspaper, wet it, add worms and food scraps. The worms eat my garbage and their casings are really great for my vegetable garden. Do you know what worm casings are? Worm casings are worm poop. It is the best compost in the world. Next Sunday, April 24th we will have an opportunity to do some gardening over at the grounds of the Rolling Ridge Conference Center. You can join us for the All Congregation Service project at The Giving Garden which provides fresh food for the hungry. Connie Glore says her family has resisted using pesticides on her lawn for 35 years. She says she realizes they have created a flawn which is a combination of field and lawn. But in the spring when the birds gather dried clippings for nests and robins collect worms for young, she knows their offspring are getting a really good start in life. I have a bumper crop of dandelions in my lawn. I remember my mom picking dandelion greens on the farm in the spring to eat and I think of her every spring when I pick them from my flawn. 3
I use brown paper towels that are from recycled paper. I can compost them in my compost bin when I am done with them. Karen Martin uses cloth napkins and has gotten down to one roll of paper towels a year. But Alexis Capen, our DRE doesn t use any paper towels: she has rags from old towels and clothes that she has cut up and she uses them for wipes and spills and for cleaning. I use handkerchiefs instead of Kleenex, but I draw the line when I have a cold. Kim Tracy, our Office Administrator, gets very excited about her visits to the transfer station in Winchester where she lives. There is a place for recycling and for trash. There is a place for books too. AND there is a place for old fabric and cloth that can t be used any more so Alexis old rags would have a final place to be recycled. What gets Kim really excited is the Swap Shop at the transfer station. You can take things you no longer need that other people can use. And then you can pick up things that you can use. Her biggest score, and she got really excited about this, was getting several cases of brand new Ball canning jars so she and her friend in New Hampshire with a huge garden could can vegetables and fruit. My town Arlington, is now starting to recycle Styrofoam once a month in a special drop off recycling day. But even better is a project that Andrew Buchannan is doing. He is lobbying to end the use of disposable Styrofoam trays in his school lunch room. He has even calculated how many square inches of Styrofoam that could be saved if his project is successful. I have a box on my front porch where I put clothes I no longer wear and other items I want to donate to the church mega yard sale. 4
Another thing that many people do is eat lower on the food chain. That means eating plant based food that takes less energy and water to grow. If it feels daunting to become vegetarian or vegan, a good start is going meatless one day a week. We have an opportunity to share in a meatless meal at the Vegetarian Potluck which is going to be held here on April 22 at 6pm with a bonus Film at 7:00 pm. I reuse the paper I print my sermons on. I take the paper home and put it in a pile to print drafts and school work on. The best part about asking people what they do was seeing how passionate they are about helping the environment. They are embodying our seventh UU principle in their day to day lives: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Now some decisions are harder to make and take longer and are more expensive. Our church is trying to put solar panels on our roofs, but are meeting resistance because we are in the historic district. But our leaders keep pushing to try to get it to happen. We have permission now to put solar panels on the new wing of the building. And at least one of our families, the Guilbealt family, have solar panels. Does anybody else, yet? I replaced my big old noisy, inefficient oil furnace last summer. I was sure that I was going to switch to some other energy source but when I had an energy audit from Mass Save, they said that since I had steam heat, a new oil furnace would be more efficient than a gas furnace. Who knew? I didn t. And the added bonus was that Mass Save had a rebate for replacing the furnace. They also told me the next big things to do to save energy in my house. Replacing the windows is number one, and then getting solar panels. I need to talk to the person who owns 5
the downstairs condo before I can do either of those, but I can use a caulking gun to close any gaps in the windows before next winter. During the energy audit, Mass Save also replaced all my incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs. We also show love for Mother Earth by picking up litter. Our Coming of Age Class of 2016 is going to participate in the Groundwork Lawrence Earth Day Clean-Up which is a city-wide event on Saturday April 30 th and we are invited to join them. We Unitarian Universalists also let our voices be heard by organizing and rallying together. My friend Ann, has become a passionate advocate for climate justice because she wants the earth to be a healthy safe place for her grandchildren. Ann is very quiet and shy but last week she went to the State House with other UUs to lobby State Reps on climate issues. We have an opportunity to raise our voices too. Saturday, April 23 rd there will be a Boston area Rally for a Livable Climate/ UU s Resisting the West Roxbury Lateral which is protesting the construction of a new fracked gas pipeline through a Boston neighborhood. Karen Martin from our NP Climate Justice Task Force has information about that. These are just a few ideas about things to do to help the Earth. I thank those who sent me their ideas and for the work you do for the Earth every day. I can get overwhelmed about how much damage we humans have done to the Earth. But I get more hopeful when I talk to people and hear how much they care and what they are doing. I learn to do more things that are less impactful and I change my ways. 6
What about you? What is your favorite thing that you do for the earth? I would love to hear, and I bet your neighbor would too. In fact, I urge each of you to share what you do with someone else and ask what they are doing in coffee hour today and in the coming week. We can help each other each make a smaller footprint and help the earth. This is a communal effort. We need one another to inspire us, to be role models. I am grateful for those leading the way on Climate Justice work. They inspire me to do more. We need to continue to question our purchasing habits, our eating habits, our throwing away habits. Every action we do impacts the Earth. As we change our habits over time, tending to Mother Earth becomes a spiritual practice. We sing the song of the soul of the Earth together. It becomes a body prayer as you take out the recycling, pick up trash, till the soil, plant the vegetables. We can embody change and love for Mother Earth every day as we tend to her needs. Blessed Be and Amen. 7