RECORDS: EMAIL JAN 6 – JAN 19

Note: This is our email discussion from the beginning of the committee to the present. It is in order, more or less, from first post until the present (so they read in order). The list of links is not here – they are up under “blogroll”

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Just a reminder that the first meeting of the Environmental Protection study group will be on Sunday, January 6, at 1:00 p.m. in the UUCC chapel. (I’ve actually reserved the room beginning at 12:45 p.m., so feel free to come early if you’d like. I wanted to give everyone a chance to grab some lunch following the second service and before we get started.)

I’ve invited Chris Paradise, who heads the UUCC Social Justice Team, to offer some perspective on our topic as we get under way. In addition to hearing from Chris, we’ll review our group’s goals and framework, talk about resources and logistics, and discuss how we can make the most of our time together over the next couple of months.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity to work with all of you as we focus on this critical issue through the lens of our shared UU faith.

Thanks, and see you on Sunday!

Pete

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All,

Thank you for today¹s energetic and thought-provoking kickoff to our work together as the Environmental Protection Study Group! I’m grateful we had the opportunity to engage in some substantive face-to-face discussion, and I’m amazed and excited by the quality of thinking we have on the team. Special thanks to Chris for taking the time to offer his perspective and insights (and some good leads!), and to Roger for bringing refreshments.

As a reminder, we agreed that as a next step, each of us would consider a particular environmental issue to research and summarize in one page, using the study group framework as a general guide for defining the nature of the problem and why/how addressing the issue integrates with our UU principles (including the linkage between the environment and social justice). When completed, we¹ll each share our 1-page summary with the group via email.

The biggies, with a few parenthetical examples:

- Air (e.g., pollution, global warming)
- Land (overdevelopment, deforestation, solid waste)
- Water (drought, pollution, overconsumption)
- Energy (consumption/conservation, alternative sources)
- Ecology (biodiversity, habitat destruction)

Don, I know you were jotting down some others (food: production, security, health issues?), so please chime in. And of course, most of these issues are interrelated. Also, Kym has already expressed a particular interest in recycling and will address that topic.

Our respective 1-page summaries aren¹t intended to be exhaustive treatises ­ nor are they part of the actual presentation we¹ll ultimately deliver to the congregation. The idea is to learn and share some initial baseline information about the primary environmental issues we face in our community and which we expect could eventually offer promising opportunities for congregational engagement. This is an educational opportunity for us, and I think there¹s enough basic information out there to meet this initial need for knowledge.

As a start, at the end of this email, I¹ve included some links that may help each of us get started. If you find others on your own, please share them with the group. Later in our process, we¹ll tap additional expertise (e.g., Donna Lisenby, June Blotnick, others), as well as our own investigative skills and creativity to ensure that the long-term program we envision is based on a solid, factual foundation and offers realistic opportunities for involvement and measurable results.

IMPORTANT: When you¹ve decided on the specific issue you¹d like to summarize, please email the group to let everyone know. If more than one person is interested in the same topic, I¹m sure we can be flexible and divvy up the work accordingly to ensure we cover them all. Ideally, we¹d complete this initial task by next week¹s meeting. Realistically, I understand that we may not. But let¹s give it a try!

In the meantime, some administrative stuff:

- Next week¹s meeting is on Sunday, Jan. 13, at 1 p.m. in the Priestley Room. Our guest is Donna Lisenby, caretaker of the Catawba River. I will be in touch with Donna this week to help ensure that we keep her presentation focused and that we have time for other business at the meeting.

- I am unavailable to meet on Sunday, Jan. 20 because of a prior commitment to participate in another meeting at the church (and because I¹ll be a single dad that weekend with my wife out of town). If you think it¹s desirable and practical to meet as a group without me, I encourage you to do so. Roger, if this works out and you are amenable, I will ask you to lead.

- On Sunday, Jan. 27, June Blotnick will be our guest to provide an overview of air quality and global warming issues that affect us locally, and potential opportunities for meaningful congregational involvement in those issues. We¹ll discuss other business as well.

- I will go ahead and schedule rooms for Feb. 3 and Feb 10, with the understanding that as we approach mid-February, we may be able to forego in-person meetings for a few weeks. As Roger said today, that may be naïve, but we¹ll see — part of this process is learning as we go.

That¹s all for now. Thank you again for your commitment and contributions!

In faith, Pete

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- – - I enjoyed meeting with all of you yesterday and I look forward to working with you over the next few weeks. I am to focusing myself on the energy issue.

I should have said the following when I introduced myself, but I did not find the words.

I am interested in this process partly because of something I think I heard Jay say last year. When this process is finished, and I tell someone I attend the UUCC, they will say “oh that’s the church that’s doing [something significant]“. I like that image. We are starting to define [something significant].

I am also interested in this process because I believe in the “hundredth monkey” effect. I believe that the 600 of us in the UUCC can have more impact than the sum of our individual efforts. If we are properly engaged, and critically massed, we can have the impact of maybe 600,000.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_Monkey

Ed
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*** Yesterday I suggested that we might want to start a weblog or “blog” to have a centralized location for all of our information. If properly done, a blog is simpler and easier than using individual e-mails, and easier to use than you might imagine. When I looked, I found that a number of churches are using this tool. Here is an example blog from a UU church tracking their “green sanctuary” planning activities.

http://www.uureading.org/cblog/

It would be fairly simple to set up something like this for us if the group thinks it’s a good idea. In any case, consensus rules.

Ed
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Thank you, Pete, for the various links. I found the UUA links particularly helpful. They made me start thinking about our need to set some goals and parameters which I think would help focus our exploration of issues.

On Sunday there was an assumption that our proposed program would have a local emphasis, with “local” undefined. Perhaps a tiered approach involving our congregation, our community and maybe our region would work. The definition of our congregation is fairly straigtforward: our church members, but what about ODS?. In terms of the congregation, I believe we need to look very closely at our willingness/ability to become a Green Sanctuary because, if we can’t do that, everything else will look hypocritical.

We need to define what we mean by our community because we have members from Fort Mill to Huntersville, and from Monroe to Shelby so if we focus narrowly on programs within Charlotte, we might lose commitment from some church members. If we want to expand to a regional focus, again we’ll need to define it.

I feel the need for further face-to-face discussion of the scope of our potential environmental program before I try to ressearch any of the identified issues because each of the topics is huge. To reduce any of the topics to one page means that we know what we are focusing on. In looking at the Framework for Study Group Research and Presentation, I believe it would be helpful to have some preliminary discussions about 3.a. (Envisioning a program–what appear to be the best opportunities for UUCC to make a positive impact on this issue locally….?) The main issue is “impact” and, further, how to engage the congregation. When we make our presentation to the congregation, we should probably have an Environmental Program Mission Statement which would presumably incorporate the engagement and the impact, and it would be helpful to me to be thinking about that now.

Sorry this may sound like a chicken-and-egg thing, but those are my thoughts–Gwynne

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Gwynne,

Thanks for your thoughtful message. I understand the chicken-and-egg aspect of this, and I am certainly open to some more face-to-face discussion on aspects of program scope if it will inspire and focus our efforts on issue analysis. After Donna Lisenby completes her presentation/discussion with us on Sunday, why don’t we allocate some of our remaining time together to this discussion?

In the meantime, here are my initial responses to some of the questions/issues you’ve raised:

- Defining “local” and/or “our community” — you’re absolutely right that we can’t limit the scope of any program we envision to just Charlotte and Mecklenburg county. I think it’s fair to say that the “big” issues — air quality and global warming impacts, water pollution and scarcity, overdevelopment and land (ab)use, to name a few — apply everywhere around us, no matter how far we stretch the definition of local, community, or regional. And of course, there are some issues of environmental justice that can directly affect people as far away as the other side of the world but which we can engage in locally through changed behavior, education, awareness, etc. It’s for this reason that I think it can be useful to start by researching issues; doing so can help identify opportunities for hands-on engagement and even guide how and to what extent we eventually “tier” the program we envision.

- Green Sanctuary program. I concur that we need to show the congregation how this denominational accreditation can be a powerful (and perhaps necessary) component of any environmental program we envision. As I mentioned to Roger, I believe that UU congregations becoming certified under this program will eventually be the most important effort of its kind since the concept of “Welcoming Congregations.”

- Environmental Program Mission Statement (incorporating engagement and impact as part of the presentation to the congregation — let’s discuss. We need to make sure we don’t cross the line between envisioning what a program could entail and trying to design the actual program itself. Roger, some input from the Social Justice Team on the nuances between the two might be helpful.

Other members of the group, please feel free chime in on any of this.

In faith, Pete
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*** Hello all,

Just checking in to give everyone an opportunity to update the group on progress, ask questions, etc. before our next meeting.

As of Wednesday evening (Jan. 9), we have commitments from the following group members to prepare 1-page research summaries on these topics:

* Kym ­ Recycling
* Ed ­ Energy
* Betty – Food
* Janet ­ Undecided, but one possibility may be some aspect of overdevelopment, e.g. the impact on habitat and wildlife (I’m paraphrasing!)

Two of the biggest issues ­ air and water ­ have not been claimed as of tonight. We do have Donna Lisenby coming in on Sunday, and that may go a long way to providing a basis for someone to do the 1-pager on water. June Blotnick is scheduled for our Jan. 27 meeting to discuss air issues, but we may want to do our own preliminary 1-pager before then. If no one claims air, I’ll be happy to do it.

Don, if your offer to set up the blog is still good, let Roger or me know if there’s anything we can do to help.

All, I hope you had an opportunity to read Gwynne’s excellent email and my response. Let’s continue the discussion on Sunday.

If you get a chance – check out audio archives of two environmentally themed “Charlotte Talks” programs on WFAE this week:

http://www.wfae.org/wfae/nav1024.cfm?cat=18&subcat=93

Monday’s topic was “Power Generation and the Electrical Grid,” Tuesday’s was “Barred Owl Study in Charlotte,” about the surprising discovery that urban Charlotte has become a habitat for a large number of Barred Owls.

Reminder – we meet in the Priestley Room at 1 p.m. on Sunday. The Charlotte Observer’s “A Cry for the Catawba” series (http://www.catawbariverkeeper.org/a-cry-for-the-catawba) is a good prelude to hearing Donna Lisenby speak.

Thanks, everyone!

In faith, Pete

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*** All,

I think we had a very productive meeting today, and I thank each of you for your thoughtful contributions. Donna Lisenby’s review of critical water scarcity issues in our region was, I think, a helpful introduction to a very large topic — and a great example of the kind of expertise the UUCC congregation has to draw on as we envision (and hopefully pursue) an environmentally focused social justice program.

We also made a lot of progress in clarifying how we can get the most out of the 1-pagers we’ve been discussing for the past two weeks. As promised, below I summarize the general format/scope we agreed to today, and list who’s agreed to cover what. (I’m using David’s notes and mine here; if I’ve missed anything, please chime in!)

Each 1-pager should be a high-level outline that bullets key points addressing the following three areas:

1. Define the specific problem. What is it? Include the scope and severity with a few basic facts and figures as appropriate, but don’t spend too much time delving into details. We just need a baseline picture.

2. How is this problem a “social justice” issue? Link it as specifically as you can to social justice concepts and ideals as expressed in the UU principles, our UUCC end statements and UUCC Call to Social Action (copies of which I emailed to you in December and distributed at our kickoff meeting on Jan. 6), and the like. To the extent that you can show how the problem has a disproportionate negative impact on at-risk groups (the poor, the homeless, etc.), that is also an important linkage. As you’ll recall, Chris Paradise spoke to this point at our kickoff meeting when he explained the concept of “environmental justice.” I’m also forwarding a link at the end of this email to a sermon by UU Minister Fred Small, which covers this aspect of our work beautifully (the closing words for today’s meeting were taken from this sermon).

3. How can our members be engaged to address this problem? Identify potential opportunities for meaningful action at the following levels:

a – Individual/family b – Congregation c – The broader community (church outreach) d – Policy-level (advocacy, lobbying)

Here’s a list of which topics will be tackled in a 1-pager by whom:

Ed – Energy Betty – Food Kym – Recycling Gwynne – Water Janet – Water from a habitat perspective (e.g., harvesting rainwater) and a religious education focus David – Land Pete – Air Don – Feel free to tackle an issue as well, but since you are also taking the time to set up our blog (thanks!), please don’t feel pressured to do so.
- Also, Roger indicated he would so some research on the UU Ministry for the Earth website to see what kind of information may be available to help us frame our work, use as models, find resources, etc.

Next week, Jan. 20, we’ll plan to meet between the two services at 10:15 a.m. (rather than 1 p.m.) to exchange and discuss our 1-page summaries. I won’t be able to take part in the meeting myself, but Roger has agreed to facilitate, and he’ll let everyone know which room it will be in.

The following week, Jan. 27 at 1 p.m., we’ll hear from June Blotnick on air quality/global warming issues. I’ll send a meeting notice out in advance.

Thanks again, everyone!

Here’s the link to the Fred Small sermon I quoted from today: http://www.uua.org/visitors/uuperspectives/59580.shtml

In faith, Pete

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We have the chapel lined up for our 10:15 meeting next Sunday. We’ll hope for a timely conclusion to the early service and a good 45+ minutes of discussion of the 1-pagers you’re all preparing on selected environmental topics. We also want to allow a couple of minutes for Don to introduce our SG weblog (to be called EPlog?).

If anyone has found a great reading or quote to put us in the right frame of mind for our meeting, please let me know. Also, pls feel free to bounce questions or drafts off Pete or me before Sunday.

Looking forward to seeing and thinking with you on Sunday.

Roger

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Yesterday I suggested that we might want to start a weblog or “blog” to have a centralized location for all of our information. If properly done, a blog is simpler and easier than using individual e-mails, and easier to use than you might imagine. When I looked, I found that a number of churches are using this tool. Here is an example blog from a UU church tracking their “green sanctuary” planning activities.

http://www.uureading.org/cblog/

It would be fairly simple to set up something like this for us if the group thinks it’s a good idea. In any case, consensus rules.

Ed

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It was gratifying to see our study group membership hopes come to fruition yesterday. A good mix of experience, perspectives, and talents, I think. We should be able to come up with something good—for both the church and our wider community.

And we clearly want to do both. There were a couple of meeting moments when these “inside” and “outside” perspectives seemed to compete for our attention, but of course we have to keep them both in mind. As Betty noted, we can come up with a great EP opportunity and strategy for dealing with it, but if the congregation doesn’t enthuse about it—before or after the vote—there’s no impact anywhere.

Your recommended approach to assembling info about the different elements and media making up our environment seems reasonable to me as a place to start. We need to have a basic knowledge of the features, conditions, and apparent opportunities re: each of these elements if we’re to have an informed discussion of where we want to “aim” the congregation for environmental impacts. The persuasiveness of our case will certainly depend, to a large extent, upon the appeal of the goals we advocate and the apparent soundness of the approach we propose for achieving them.

Part of that soundness, it seems to me, is rooted in the breadth of proposed congregational engagement with the program and the extent to which the skills of church members are seen to fit the tasks ahead. We have some long-time members who can help us all do that generally in the early days. Later on, It wouldn’t be at all inappropriate for a couple of us to meet with Jeter and perhaps Jay over the church members’ skill and interest data, identify natural fits between people and proposed tasks, and perhaps even sign up volunteer project/task leaders in advance of the presentation. In any case, the process probably needs to begin with the “outside” perspective first, working towards a vision of a purposeful program which seems likely to fit our congregation. I’m willing to try to fill one or more gaps that occur after other SG folks have weighed in.

I’ve not used blogs before, but I get too many e-mails already and a blog seems likely to be more efficient.

Janet, you have a great 4th grade resource in your RE program FYI. Ask Graham Weaver about the linkage between polar bears and pollution if you have an opportunity—I’ve got the chart he drew on this topic in school last year. The RE program could be a big resource in whatever EP strategy we come up with.

Enough already! Thanks to all for being part of this group.

Roger

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Just a couple of suggestions for some of you as you wrestle with your respective env topics:

* Don’t overlook the US EPA site as you search for useful info about your topics. There are some clearly visible tabs on the home page for such relatively straightforward topics as energy and recycling that open up multiple documents on the subject. The site also accepts key words as avenues to additional material. Much of the agency’s programming, FYI, is now grouped into 5 major areas: air (incl climate change), water, land, human health, and ecological condition. Some of the old env “media”—solid waste, drinking water, pesticides, etc—are grouped into these major categories.

* I tend to agree with Gwynne that the Green Sanctuary program—as described in the UU Ministry for Earth web site—would seem to be a natural for us to study and build upon. It provides a clear program framework for a comprehensive congregational effort that seems focussed, practical, yet flexible enough to engage many different interests and skill sets in our church (and community). The certification (as a green sanctuary) should probably be viewed as a milestone rather than an ultimate goal of our program concept/proposal—but it would be great to have some UU-approved structure and examples to help ramp up the larger program we envision.

* Speaking of which: there are a couple of mildly interesting examples of UU congregations doing interesting things in the UU Newsletters at the Ministry for Earth web site. The best one I saw, Ed, was the Green Power piece on church use of power from renewables in NY and WI. Cool.

* Others of you may have seen reference to a UU Env Justice Conference “this spring”. No details have been published yet, to my knowledge. Could be a nice tie-in for our presentation if its real.

Thanks for being part of this important group!

Roger

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I’ve got the blog up, but still don’t have it where I want it (the interface isn’t what I want, yet). If you want to see it developing, go to http://uuenviroblog.wordpress.com. Note – don’t put “www” first, just http://. Please “check in” by leaving a comment.

Everyone will be able to leave comments, but I’d also be glad to set up everyone as a “contributor” or “author”. To do that, I think you’ll need to “join” wordpress, which doesn’t cost anything, and requires minimum personal info. More details soon. It’s pretty much the same for blogspace (google makes you sign up with them) or Yahoo discussion groups.

Once I get the blog up, I think I’ll start by researching the “big picture” outside of the UU framework (Roger and I should have some interesting points to share), rather than a given subheading, and generating what our Quaker friends call “queries” – questions to think about. It is hard to explain this in a few words, so let me get something tangible up based on the notes I brought yesterday. (I’m very sorry I missed our meeting – isn’t there a way to leave a note at the main desk at the church? When I asked, a helpful guy insisted there was no environmental meeting, directed me to look in Chris Paradise’s box, then took me in to bother Kathleen Carpenter’s group, meeting in the library. When I walked around the church, including behind the fellowship room, no doors were open, seemed very still.)

Clearly, you all found it, so I’m the one who needs to adapt. I guess, coming from a much smaller and less formal UU congregation where I was very active, I still (after coming up on 15 years) have to get used to the dynamics and layout of a much bigger church. Anyway, I’ll find you all next time.

Feel free to critique the blog’s layout, when it is up and running. If you don’t feel comfortable joining wordpress but want to post something as a new page rather than simply as a comment, just send it to me as an email and I’ll post it for you. Also, send helpful links, and I’ll add them.

For now, I’m not limiting the blog only to us, but allowing open input. I don’t think this will be an issue, since we’re the only ones likely to go to the site. But maybe we’ll pick up some additional valuable ideas, who knows?

Don

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The trouble is that this whole thing is so big we aren’t going to be able to come to any conclusions to make in selling this. I would like to suggest that we choose to make our church green – take at least a couple of years. Then we will know a lot about environment and we will have something to take outside the church. I started thinking about organization just about food and found that it would take loads of people. We can’t handle this whole thing. We are going to have to narrow it down. Just a thought.

Betty

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Hi Betty,

I agree that becoming accredited through the Green Sanctuary program can certainly be a milestone, and that embarking on that process may well be a necessary starting point to the overall long-term effort. But I also think that we can present a menu of options based on the issues we’ve identified and the opportunities for engagement we find as we examine them. It’s true that, taken as a whole, environmental protection is a daunting challenge. We clearly can’t address every topic, but we can identify critical, “bite-sized” sub-topics that will appeal to various constituents of the congregation and result in real engagement with real impact.

When I start feeling overwhelmed by the process we’re going through, I remember that our task as a Study Group is not to prescribe a specific program with detailed initiatives and ask the congregation to say yea or nay, but rather to ask the congregation to imagine the possibilities: “If we choose environmental protection as the focus of our Social Justice program, just look at the potential ways we can engage in meaningful work that embodies our UU ideals and makes a difference to our community and the world at large.”

So in an important sense, I think that what we are being asked to do is inspire. The research that we’re doing now provides the factual basis and context for the inspiration we hope to provide, and it’s important for us to have that baseline understanding so that the possibilities we suggest represent genuine opportunities. But ultimately, it will be up to the Social Justice action team(s) that will be formed after the vote, and the congregation as a whole, to translate our group’s inspiration and vision into the specific components of the program.

That’s how I see it. To repeat the opening words that Roger offered at our kickoff meeting on January 6:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince)

My fervent hope is that when we make our presentation to the congregation, we do just what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recommends. And I‘m more than confident that we’ll succeed.

In faith, Pete

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- – - The blog is already up though still missing some things I have in text, but not up yet. If you’d like to visit and watch it develop, or leave a comment:

http://uuenviroblog.wordpress.com

Betty, I like your idea of staying practical and “grounded”, and that we begin close to home with our own impacts on the Earth, rather than indicting others far away. I also greatly welcome interest in making our grounds truly sustainable and ecologically sound – though I’m afraid that has potential for conflict.

However, I’d also second Pete’s suggestion that we do not rush to narrow but instead reach out to open possibilities, at least for another few days. There are many interesting possibilities and examples out there. I especially like No Car Day, Thich Naht Hahn’s idea:

http://esangha.squarespace.com/recent-news/2006/9/25/support-thich-nhat-hanhs-proposal-for-a-global-no-car-day.html

http://www.plumvillage.org/HTML/news/letterfromThay.html

Now, that would get Charlotte’s attention!

There are many possibilities. I agree that we need to throw open the windows, if only for a little while, and let some fresh air in.

Looking at our challenge from a different perspective, in thinking about the structure of the blog and after reading Pete’s notes, I could see 3 purposes for our project, all of them centrally important:

1. To protect and restore the health of the Earth’s natural environment, for all people and all living creatures, and for the interwoven web of life

2. To engage with and transform the neighborhoods, city and region where we live, bringing our resources, example and leadership to bear on a problem that cries out for action (especially where that problem is being neglected or denied)

3. To engage and transform ourselves within the church, both as individuals and by building and deepening our shared sense of community, through common commitment, respectful but free discussion, learning from one another, and working together, boldly and with tangible results, to make the world a better place.

Don

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Hi folks,

I’ve tried to fit the format proposed last week. Since every topic is huge (as mentioned), I focused on the Mecklenburg County report (because you’ve got to start somewhere) and I summarized what I thought were Donna’s main points.

In terms of social justice “justification”, I urge everyone to review the UUA web sites that Pete shared after the first meeting. I’d like to know more about how congregations are supposed to react to the 1994 General Resolution about Environmental Justice and the 2006 Social Justice Statement on Global Warming. It seems to me that the UUA has already made our case for the environment as a social justice issue although we’ll need to edit and highlight certain aspects.

My rough draft doesn’t involve much research, but, if we can compare the various one-pagers, we might get ideas about which items merit further exploration.

See you Sunday, Gwynne

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Jan 18

Thanks, Gwynne.

My one-pager is running late, I’m afraid. I’ve had a wild and rather exhausting week at the office, and I’m a single dad this weekend (all of which is a thinly veiled version of “the dog ate my homework”).

However, I should have something ready over the weekend. I’ll email it to all if I finish before Sunday. Roger, if I’m cutting it close, perhaps I can send it you so you can print it out and bring it to the meeting you’re facilitating between services on Sunday?

I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate everyone’s commitment to this work.

Thanks again, Pete

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Jan 19

Don’t get too carried away about going to church Sun. All the weather people are saying we will get quite a bit of rain and snow on Sat and it will freeze on the roads and it will not melt for a long time on Sun. I am not afraid to drive. I am afraid of other people who do not know how to drive in such weather. Anyhow – I just wanted to give you a heads up.

Betty