by Laura Lehman Amstutz

Akerson educated beach clean-up crews about local wildlife, making sure that the oil clean-up did not disturb nesting birds and sea turtles.

HARRISONBURG, Va. – Eastern Mennonite Seminary student James Åkerson found
the two weeks he spent this summer helping with clean up from the oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico a “natural extension” of his Christian faith.

Åkerson, who is about half way through his program of study at EMS, is a
forest ecologist and program director for the National Park Service.
Normally he works in insect and disease control and invasive plant
management. When he heard about the oil spill and follow-up efforts, he
made sure that his disaster response form was up to date. He was asked to
leave immediately for Pensacola Beach, Fla. (more…)

How do you get people to care about the environment? How do you get them to change their behavior? How do you change a society?

These are the kinds of questions that intrigue Joanne Moyer, who has served on the MCCN Creation Care Council since its inception. Moyer lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is currently a Ph.D. student in Natural Resources in Environment and Environmental Management at the University of Manitoba.

“I get fired up thinking about what drives people to care and to act,” Moyer says. “This touches on philosophy and religion and culture and psychology and education and lots of other things as well.” (more…)

The article below is by Mark Keller, pastor of Harrisonburg Mennonite Church. It appeared in the congregation’s newsletter.

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. (more…)

Four red oaks, three swamp white oaks and a hackberry tree are wrapped in burlap and waiting for new homes along streets in low income areas of Goshen, IN. They will be planted in early November, thanks to Goshen’s first Voluntary Gas Tax Group.

Members of the Voluntary Gas Tax Group tax themselves fifty or more cents per dollar on every gallon of gas they buy. Three times a year, they meet to pool resources and decide what to do with the revenue. The voluntary tax is an acknowledgement that current gas prices do not accurately represent the environmental or foreign policy costs of dependence on fossil fuels. (more…)

GOSHEN — Amid the familiar political refrain to cut taxes, one local group is doing just the opposite. They are voluntarily imposing a fifty cent per gallon gasoline tax on themselves.
“As much as we complain about rising fuel prices,” says Karl Shelly, local gas tax organizer, “they don’t come close to covering the environmental and foreign policy cost of our addiction to oil.”

(more…)