Author: quakersandclimate

 

A copy of the minute on living sustainably and sustaining life on Earth – drafted at the FWCC World Plenary in Pisac, Peru in January 2016.

IRM 16-20. Sustainability. The Consultation on Sustainability, facilitated by Jonathan Woolley (Mexico City MM/Pacific YM; Staff, QUNO-Geneva), Rachel Madenyika (Staff, QUNO-NY), and Charlotte Gordon (Aotearoa/New Zealand YM) have presented a minute for our consideration:

Living Sustainably and Sustaining Life on Earth

The Light of Christ has inspired Quakers throughout the generations. As we gather together in Pisac, Peru in 2016, we feel this light stronger than ever in our calling to care for the Earth on which we live. It is calling us from all traditions: programmed, unprogrammed, liberal, and evangelical. It calls us to preserve this Earth for our children, our grandchildren and all future generations to come, working as though life were to continue for 10,000 years to come. Be ready for action with your robes hitched up and your lamps alight. (Luke 12:35, Revised English Bible)

Read the whole text below. Continue reading “FWCC Sustainability Minute” →

The Kabarak Call for Peace and Ecojustice  was approved on 24 April 2012 at the Sixth World Conference Friends, held at Kabarak University near Nakuru, Kenya. It is the culmination of the FWCC World Consultation on Global Change which was held in 2010 and 2011. It is being circulated with the Conference Epistle.

Read the full document by clicking the link below.

Kabarak Call for Peace and Ecojustice

A “Quaker Statement on Climate Change” has been signed by a large number of Quaker organizations, having been distributed to all Yearly Meetings across the world. The Statement recognizes the personal and collective responsibility to respond to anthropogenic climate change and calls for fair, sufficient and effective international action.

Read the document here: Quaker Statement on Climate Change – March 2016

The following extract is from the document Responding to IYM 2016: Living sustainably and fairly on this earth, a booklet put together to help Meetings develop sustainability plans.

The full text is accessible below.

Responding to IYM 2016 final pdf for web

The 2016 FWCC World Quaker Gathering in Peru called on Yearly Meetings around the world to initiate at least two concrete actions on sustainability by January 2017. Ireland Yearly Meeting responded by agreeing to the following two actions:

1. To commit to making all the Meetings within Ireland Yearly Meeting as sustainable as possible, considering such factors as accessibility by public transport, energy efficiency, use of Fairtrade tea and coffee and use of organic and locally sourced food when possible. We ask Meetings to develop a sustainability plan, no matter how simple, before January 2017. We ask IYM to take its sustainability plan into consideration when planning for its next Yearly Meeting.
2. To follow in the steps of FWCC by developing an investment strategy, by January 2017, to ethically invest all the funds within the Yearly Meeting in sustainable and peaceful companies, and divest from destructive industries, including fossil fuels.

The following text is from Quaker friend John Kintree’s piece, Limits and Innovation, published on globalreferendum2020.org.

For more information on the Global Citizens Database Project, which John is involved with, follow this link.

‘We live on a finite planet.  There are limits to the resources we can extract from the planet, and to the pollution we can release into it. Limits can be altered through innovation.  For instance, the number of bushels of corn that can be grown per acre has increased dramatically in the last 100 years. Still, there is an ultimate limit to the amount of corn that can be grown per acre because there is only so much sunlight per acre, and it is the energy from the sun that causes corn to grow.

Innovative technologies can sometimes be double-edged swords.  Industrial-chemical agriculture is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.  The increase in crop production in some locations has required massive amounts of irrigation, which is causing water tables to fall.  What will happen to food production in those areas when the wells run dry?

Continue reading “Limits and Innovation” →