23rd January 2022
Watching birds come into the garden is a great pleasure. Providing them with food, water and places to shelter (and later to nest) is rewarding. Birds are vulnerable to viruses so it is important to keep clean the places where they are fed.
Caring for creation with every meal – Use your LOAF!
What we eat impacts the world around us – the welfare of animals, the welfare of wildlife, the fair sharing of water, the fertility of the soil, the well being of those who grow and produce food. It also contributes to the climate crisis. Making step by step changes, we can better care for creation.
The organisation Green Christian has produced the nemonic LOAF – Local, Organic, Animal friendly, fairly traded – to help us buy and eat sustainably with care for the world. https://greenchristian.org.uk/gc-campaigns/loaf/
L locally grown, locally produced.
Local reduces the carbon miles attached to our food. Local keeps us in touch with those who grow, make and sell our food. Growing our own keeps us in touch with the soil itself!
O organic.
Food, whether that is crops grown or animals raised, that is produced organically removes chemical fertilisers and pesticides from the environment where they cause damage to water supplies, wild life and human health. Instead organic farming works in harmony with the environment boosting its well being and biodiversity.
A animal friendly.
Animals including birds and fish, should always be treated with care and respect. Factory farming for example, treats animals as profit-making commodities. Arable farming also has a responsibility to be animal friendly, including the wellbeing of birds and insects.
F fairly traded.
Throughout the supply chain from farm labourer to shelf stacker, lorry driver to barista, each person deserves to be treated fairly.
In a previous issue of the Green Tau – https://greentau.org/2021/08/14/green-tau-issue-12/ –
I have written about food and our carbon footprint. The Ethical Consumer’s Climate Gap Report notes that to be on track for net zero we need to reduce the carbon footprint of our food by 15% by 2030. So far (ie since 2019) reductions have not even risen above 0%. It is imperative that we do look at and adjust what we eat, to reduce waste, to reduce our carbon footprint and to reduce the negative impact we have on the environment. Eating sustainably we can safeguard our own futures and improve that of the world in which we live.
3rd January 2022
The National Fruit Collection is held at Brogdale in Kent. Of all their collections, the apple is the largest – 2131 varieties that come from across the UK and from across the world too. There is here a rich diversity in size, taste, texture, colour and use. Diversity is good both for the pleasure it gives us as eaters of apples but also as a means of protecting apple trees against viruses and other calamities.
Why not contact your local supermarket and ask them to stock a greater range of varieties of British grown apples? (And ideally not in plastic packaging!!)
1st January 2022
A day to give thanks for the charities and activist movements that we are counting on to make our lives more sustainable and the earth a happier place.
For Friends of the Earth, the WWF, the National Trust, the Woodlands Trust, A Rocha, the RSPB , Green Christians, Practical Action, the UN, Traid Craft, the Climate Coalition, the Wildlife Trust, Christian Climate Action, Cafod, Christian Aid, the Wetlands Trust, Extinction Rebellion and more.
We can count on our corporate efforts as individuals to bring about change!
Green Peace reported: “28 December 2021: Today the Grahamstown High Court in Makhanda ordered Shell to immediately cease its seismic blasting along South Africa’s Wild Coast, while ordering Shell and the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy to pay the costs of the application for the interim interdict.”
This is good news for the local people and for the whales and other marine life. And it demonstrates that people can work together against international businesses for the common good.
27th December 2021
The January sales: retailers and manufacturers may wish to count on our appetite to buy more things to clear back stock or just simply to sell more things, but the well-being of the world may be counting on us consuming less so that we do not deplete limited resources nor take more than our fair share. Green Christians have coined the apt phrase “Joy in Enough”. The season of Christmas lasts 12 days, may they be days of joy not depletion.
24th December 2021
A word for whales. Whales are important as tiller of the oceans. They circulate nutrients that are essential parts of the food chain and in particular nutrients needed by phytoplankton. These serve the same function as leaves, absorbing carbon dioxide and sunlight to create oxygen. As we count on whales doing their bit to maintain the global ecosystem, so they should be able to count on us not to harm them.
However as has been widely reported, various groups are launching a last-chance bid to stop Shell using shockwaves in the Wild Coast of South Africa – a fragile ecosystem that is a vital whale breeding ground. The applicants, which included Greenpeace Africa and fishing groups, had been seeking to stop the survey on the basis it could cause “irreparable harm” to the marine environment, especially to migrating humpback whales in the area. (Yahoo News)
Do check out this Green Peace petition: https://pages.greenpeaceafrica.org/shell-wild-coast?_ga=2.165965239.820789156.1640103673-781902025.1640103673
23rd December 2021
Keep a look out when you are outside – there is lots of wild life to see: starlings and blue tits on the bird feeders, robins in the trees and even bumble bees. These bees don’t hibernate but rely on winter flowering plants.
22nd December 2021
Sugar cane is the source of about 80% of the sugar consumed across the world. It is a plantation crop that goes back centuries and has a history linked with exploitation and slavery. As a plantation crop it has been responsible for the deforestation of tropical landscapes and as demand for sugar continues to increase this is still on going – especially in Brazil where sugar cane is also grown to produce the fuel ethanol: ‘The Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlântica in Portuguese, is found on the Atlantic coast of Brazil. It should be full of life, supporting thousands of species of plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else. It’s different from the Amazon rainforest but equally important. Around 500 years ago it would have covered an area of more than 1.5 million square kilometres. Now, more than 90% of it is gone, cleared mostly for timber, pasture and sugar.’ (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/sugar-a-killer-crop.html)
Sugar cane occupies approximately 2.4 million hectare world wide. 70% of production is for domestic use (which for example would include the production of ethanol in Brazil) but for some countries the production of sugar for export constitutes a significant part of their national income eg Cuba and Belize. Volatile global prices makes for great uncertainty for local growers/ plantation workers who can do little to control their incomes. Whilst the premium paid through the Fair Trade scheme undoubtedly helps, the production of fair trade sugar – 528,000 tonnes – is a fraction of the 200 million tonnes of sugar produced globally (2019).
Sugar cane as a crop, aside from the issue of deforestation, has unwanted adverse affects on people and the environment.
Alternative sugar crops are grown, of which the main one is sugar beet – accounting for about 20% of world production – which is grown mainly in Europe. It too can be reliant on pesticides and fertilisers: organic sugar beet is grown in Europe but not as yet in Britain. Other sugar crops include coconut palms and oil palms where the sap is harvested.
There is a further downside to all sugars: sugar damages our health, causing major problems such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and tooth decay. The WHO urges that sugar consumer should be reduced to between 5 and 10% of a person’s daily calorie intake. The NHS advises sugar consumption be limited to less than 30g per day: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/how-does-sugar-in-our-diet-affect-our-health/ Yet sugar consumption globally is still rising. The USA tops the charts with an average consumption of 126.4g per person per day. Britain comes in at number 7 with 93.2g per day (2019).
As well as being concerned about the damage sugar growing causes to the environment and it’s work force, should we be acting to reduce the demand for this commodity?
“Too often, divisions in civil society can be exploited by powerful commercial interests. ‘Don’t go too hard on health, as it will threaten jobs’ or ‘Don’t raise pollution standards, as they’ll be undercut by another country somewhere’ or ‘Don’t mention labour pay rates, or we’ll drop the preferred status.’ Or ‘Don’t stop sugar beet as it’ll affect tourism brought by geese feeding on sugar beet tops in winter’. Such horse-trading happens in realpolitik, of course, but we think now is the time to take the sugar debate back to ecological public health basics: land, labour, capital, health and culture…We see this future food world as one where less not more sugar is produced and consumed, and land use and labour are liberated from the folly of sugar production. This is hardly a vital product. It has been injected into culinary culture on a scale it does not deserve. Nor should a sugar reduction strategy be compensated for by a growth in use of artificial sweeteners which industry constantly seeks. Artificials, whether relatively ‘old’ such as aspartame or ‘new’ such as stevia, merely normalise the sweetening of diet as well as maintain the processing industries’ option to sweeten a product to sell it.” https://foodresearch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2015/06/Does-Sugar-Pass-the-Environmental-and-Social-Test-23-june.pdf
The wide vast oceans,
tropical balm and arctic chill,
teem with living things
great and small
And here dwells the whale –
God’s tiller of the sea –
formed to frolic in its deeps
and traverse its lengths.
From an infinitesimal nil
to 200 tonnes of mammalian flesh,
its life spans a century full.
A life of daily gorging and expurgating 10,
nay, 20 tonnes of krill
replenishes the seas with iron,
and spins once more
the phytoplankton’s oxygen giving,
carbon absorbing wheel.
From the depths the whale
redistributes food,
sustaining small fry
that dare not dive so deep.
Migrating between distant poles
and warmer summer seas,
the whale spreads the bounty
of each mouthful it digests
and spins once more
the global food chain’s thread.
Under the whale’s ocean watch,
krill and plankton multiply,
and so God’s worker feeds
5000 mouths and more.
Its leviathan frame
a maritime conveyor belt
of sequestered carbon
that gracefully sweeps the seas
till finally at whale fall
it sinks to rest –
a carbon store
for evermore
upon the ocean bed.
