Members of Charleswood Mennonite Church and professors and students at Canadian Mennonite University were among those in Winnipeg, MB, urging strong action at the Copenhagen talks in December. Temperatures of -35 did not stop a sizable group from meeting outside the Manitoba Provincial Legislature building. Many churches rang their church bells 350 times on December 13 to correspond with the World Council of Churches service happening in Denmark.

John Brubacher, a biology professor at CMU, spoke about how science works and how science and faith connect. Stuart Clark, a senior policy advisor at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, spoke about balancing economics and the environment. Reported by Joanne Moyer

Overview

Caring for God’s creation has been a part of the Mennonite Church’s official agenda since 1977, when it passed a resolution on Christian Stewardship of Energy Resources.
In 2005, MC Canada and MC USA appointed representatives to the Mennonite Creation Care Network.

The vision statement of MCCN is as follows: Christ, who created the world in peace and sustains all things, calls us to be stewards of the earth and to bring rest and renewal to the land and everything that lives on it. In response to this call, we will equip lay people and leaders with tools, resources and models that will educate, encourage, and inspire the church to care for creation, which is an expression of God’s love.

MCCN is a network for Mennonite people and agencies actively engaged in the care and restoration of God’s creation. Its goals are to encourage the Church to:

• Claim our biblical and theological foundation regarding the care of God’s Creation.
• Discover the ties that link all created beings to each other and to God.
• Confess the harm we have caused the natural world and our neighbors.
• Act faithfully to restore the earth.

This bi-national council of volunteers meets twice per year. Staff from the Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College and from MMA (Mennonite Mutual Aid) provide continuity between meetings and manage a web-site for MCCN. With its stewardship emphasis, MMA is a natural partner. MC Canada and MCC Canada help defray travel costs of the two Canadian members.

The Mennonite Creation Care Network promotes environmental stewardship activities with regional grassroots groups and institutional agencies as a way of inspiring people to be agents of change at home and in the global context. MCCN’s current activities include: developing communications materials, collecting stories of Mennonite’s who care about the environment, building a network among those in our constituency for whom the environment is an ongoing concern, and recognizing and encouraging faithful stewardship through an annual creation care award.

Canadian members – David Neufeld (Winnipeg, MB), Joanne Moyer (Winnipeg, MB)
USA members – Greg Bowman (Bally, PA), Luke Gascho (Goshen, IN), Jennifer Halteman Schrock (Goshen, IN), Dave Hockman-Wert (Corvallis, OR), Jim Smith (Goshen, IN), Amy Thut (Goshen, IN).

To join the growing network or get more information: www.mennoncreationcare.org.

Activities

• Virtual meeting: For the first couple of years, the Creation Care Council met face-to-face in Goshen twice per year. In recognition of the environmental and monetary costs of travelling for these meetings, for the fall 2008 meeting, we experimented with a virtual meeting, setting aside one day in our respective cities to work on MCCN projects. We connected by conference call, Skype, e-mail and the “Go To Meeting” program.

• Green Guidelines for Conferences: In response to a resolution passed at the Mennonite Church Canada assembly in Abbotsford, July 2007, MCCN prepared a set of green guidelines for conference planners. These were used for the first time at Assembly and People’s Summit in Winnipeg, July 2008. MCCN members served as auditors for the conference planners, evaluating six categories in six areas: Transportation, Shelter, Food, Water, Communications and Worship/Teaching . Go to mennocreationcare.org for a copy of the green guidelines and the results.

• Winnipeg Summit Workshops: MCCN presented four workshops at the Promise and Peril Summit in Winnipeg, July 2008:

1. Anabaptist Creation Care Challenge
• Attendance: 36 participants
• Notes: The workshop began with a brief introduction to MCCN: the group, its history, and its activities. The bulk of the workshop was spent in a group exercise: the participants divided into small groups and were asked to reflect on a series of questions to help guide MCCN’s activities, particularly with respect to our visionary outcome for congregations. See below for results of this exercise.

2. Ecological Prayer Walk (presented twice)
• Attendance: 11 participants (Wednesday); 26 participants (Thursday)
• Prepared and presented in collaboration with Lisa Enns-Bogoya, Associate Pastor of Bethel Mennonite Church, Winnipeg.
• Notes: The workshop began inside with two brief presentations explaining the concept of the ecological footprint and the spiritual practice of the labyrinth. Participants were then taken outside to walk to the Ecological Prayer Walk, a labyrinth mowed into a section of lawn with signs at intervals that repeated some of the ecological footprint information and with prayers and poems to inspire both confession and rejoicing and hope in God’s creation. On the second day, half the participants walked to outer boundary of CMU’s north campus (the size of a North American footprint) before entering the labyrinth.

3. Spiritual Significance of Land and Water
• Attendance: 30 participants
• Prepared and presented in collaboration with Neill and Edith von Gunten, co-directors of Native Ministries for Mennonite Church Canada.
• Notes: Norman Meade (a Metis elder originally from Manigotagan, MB, who is currently the Aboriginal Neighbours staff person for MCC Manitoba) provided an introduction. The first presentation was by Metis elder, Mae Louise Campbell, from St. Laurent, MB, who shared an Aboriginal woman’s perspective on the spiritual significance of land and water. She emphasized the importance of relationships. Then Greg McIvor, a First Nation trapper and conservation advocate, originally from Waboden and Cross Lake, MB, shared about the effects of hydro dam diversions on the land and traditional lifestyle.

• Website Redesign: In the fall of 2008, MCCN transferred its web site to new software, requiring a re-design of the site. The new site should be live by mid-December and includes blogging software that enables us to easily archive creation care stories. This is a big step forward for us. Goals for 2009 include a web-searchable resource library by February and a web-searchable member directory by March.

• Art and Jocele Meyer Award: The award program was cancelled because it has not succeeded in generating interest. We now have ways to tell creation care stories on the web that were not available when the award was originally conceived.

• Anabaptist Creation Care Project: MCCN plans to invite Mennonite/Anabaptist authors to contribute articles for our web site on a variety of creation care topics. We are also attempting to catalog all that has already been written in our Creation Care Resource Library.

Dining halls across the country have figured out that students waste less food if they carry their food piecemeal rather than putting it on a tray. Eastern Mennonite University, Bethel College and Goshen College all went trayless in the last two years.

In addition, EcoPax, Goshen College’s environmental group, is implementing a pilot project to compost waste from the dining hall, beginning in January 2010. read more

by Mark Keller On the surface it seems as if the title to this little article is absurd.  How could a tiny group of HMC Christians imagine that they have any impact what-so-ever on the agriculture of Asia ? But, then again, that kind of skepticism has been around from the beginning of the Jesus movement.  Christians hold the Biblical concept that God is honored and calls and transforms others as we live more faithfully to His desires for the world.

What is happening to agriculture in Asia anyway?  It is changing fast.  I first went to the Asian nation of Nepal in 1985.  Because of my Iowa farm background I held interest in and intentionally observed the farming practices there.  I listened to the agriculture workers and farmers.

Nepali agriculture amazed me.  Rocky, steep mountain sides were carefully terraced and coaxed into producing surprising amounts of food.  Farmers who had never been to first grade let alone a Land Grant College knew how to produce food in healthy sustainable ways.  Farmers well understood the amount of compost/manure needed to produce the best crop in a wide variety of conditions.  Nepali farmers, without engineering degrees, knew how to bring the right amount of irrigation water from far away to reach all parts of steep mountainside plots. Read the rest of this entry »

Most mds-ers (Mennonite Disaster Service) have seen it many times. A chaotic pile of sticks, stones, wiring, furniture, dimensional lumber, finish lumber, trim, roofing, rafter trusses and even kitchen utensils that a short time before had been part of a family home. As we pull the pile of debris apart for removal, we begin to notice that there are many individual items, not broken, that could potentially serve a useful purpose given an appropriate place. In this day of scarce and expensive resources it is painful to see perfectly sound building materials removed to the landfill or placed on the burn pile.

This last summer in Eagle, Eagle Village and Stevens Village, Alaska MDS found ways to recycle a significant amount of salvaged materials into new structures, including family homes. If we had the privilege of touring these functional and beautiful homes, built and/or repaired by MDS volunteers, one would have to look closely to pick out the recycled materials. In fact, some of these materials would not be identifiable at all without a construction guide to help locate them. Reclaimed building materials were used to build cupboards, wash stands, tables, out door toilets, wood boxes, and arctic entrances to the homes. In addition, reclaimed materials including interior doors, stiff insulation, exterior doors, rafter trusses, T-111, windows, under the house cribbing, and the metal for entire roofs were used on several houses.

I understand that another disaster response agency in Alaska built an entire home with mostly salvaged materials. This resulted in a family home being built for which there was almost no funding, what a witness!  The use of recycled materials in Alaska was made possible, in part, by “unaffiliated volunteers” volunteers who just showed up and wanted to make a contribution to the recovery effort. I wonder whether they know the value of what they accomplished? The dollar value of these reclaimed materials has not been calculated but is very significant. In addition to the cost of new replacement materials that would have otherwise been required, the cost of transportation has also been saved. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Hockman-Wert on the job in an Oregon stream.

In Mennonite circles, he is more likely to be known as the moderator of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Mennonite Church USA or as a member of the Creation Care Council of Mennonite Creation Care Network. But on the job, Dave Hockman-Wert, Corvalis, OR, is a scientist who finds meaning in seeking the truth about…fish.

Working for the federal government was not necessarily Dave Hockman-Wert’s dream job after graduate school, but, ten years ago, his roots sank into the Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center (FRESC) of Corvallis, OR, and he has remained ever since.

“We’re not setting the world on fire,” says Hockman-Wert. “But it’s a good group to work with as we try to understand just a little bit more about this corner of the Earth where we live.”

The FRESC is part of the Biological Resources division of the federal science agency known as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). FRESC focuses specifically on vegetation, wildlife and fish research in the western portion of the nation with special attention to threatened and endangered species such as sage grouse, Northern spotted owl and oystercatchers, a family of wading birds. The organization is one of twenty USGS science centers nationwide.

Though his job title is “biologist,” Hockman-Wert’s daily endeavors include working on the geographic information systems (GIS), spatial analysis and data management for the aquatic ecology group.

“Federal science centers are important for the research and learning that occurs there,” says Hockman-Wert. “This research helps increase our knowledge about the natural world, which is the necessary precursor to creation care and stewardship.”

In the past, Hockman-Wert worked on a forest management project, using forest landscape modeling software to study the effects of various land management strategies.

For the past seven years, his attention has turned to fish. Hockman-Wert and team members place tags in cutthroat trout in order to track population, distribution and growth over time. This study will help FRESC understand the impacts of industrial forestry on fish in headwater streams.

Another study involving fish is zooming in on the fish community in the Elwha River where two large dams have blocked access to miles of stream for several years. Plans are in place to remove the dams within the next two years. Hockman-Wert will track the changes that occur in brook trout and bull trout as this process takes place.

“Sometimes a particular research project may seem obscure and incremental,” says Hockman-Wert, “but the goal is always to learn more about this wonderful, mysterious world we live in and the creatures with whom we share it.”

Though working with fish may be categorized as “obscure,” Hockman-Wert has become attached to them.

“I do enjoy learning about how these little fish live,” says Hockman-Wert. “We see a wide range of behaviors in the fish we study, and we do start to wonder whether fish are as hard to generalize about as humans are.”

Another joy of his job is creating clear and helpful maps so field crews can enter and access data quickly and accurately.

There are challenges in research and in government work in general. One particular challenge for Hockman-Wert is that his focus has changed from that of human societies to animal life. In graduate school, Hockman-Wert studied human behavior and beliefs, observing how religious views may, or may not, influence the value of creation care.

“I miss not being able to work full-time in these realms,” he says, “so I appreciate the opportunity to be involved with the Mennonite Creation Care Network, which does provide an outlet for these interests.”

Still, Hockman-Wert knows that his work with FRESC is extremely meaningful and that he is doing his part to care for the earth. This is one of many reasons why he is allowing his roots to sink even deeper in this field of study.

“Science centers support land management agencies with good, up-to-date information (hopefully) and improved methods of monitoring ecosystems and species,” he says. “These agencies have the official responsibility to conserve, use, and protect federally-owned land for the good of the whole. Given the number of people in the world and the amount of resources we require for sustenance, the more we know about how to fill our needs with the least amount of impact on the rest of the world, the better.”

- by Heidi Martin

Who takes the temperature of the planet? If you’ve never visited the web site of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sorted out their working groups or read their summary reports, there’s no time like the present.

A web site
On October 24, 2009, author Bill McKibben and the nonprofit, 350.org sponsored an international day of climate change action, inviting people from all over the world to create an action around the number 350—the safe threshold of ppm CO2 required for a healthy planet. Visit 350.org to view thousands of pictures from 182 countries.

A book by Andrew Farley and Katherine Hayhoe.

This book is written by a husband-wife team from Lubbock, Texas. She’s a scientist; he’s an Evangelical pastor. They were inspired to write about climate change together after fielding questions from friends who wanted to hear from fellow Christians.

“Love God, love your neighbors and remember the poor,” Farley says. “This was the unwavering mandate of the early church more than 2,000 years ago. And this is our solidly biblical motivation for caring about climate change today and how it already affects real people.”

“It’s not about blue or red or any kind of politics. It’s about thermometer readings and history. It’s about facts, figures and reality,” Hayhoe says.