Not long after my return from my long walk — more accurately, my long walk-hobble-and-drive — some of the members of my local Friends meeting here in Omaha began saying that we needed to do some grappling of our own with environmental issues.
I suppose this was, in part, a bit of unexpected fallout from the walk. After all, the members of my meeting could hardly endorse my leading as genuine, while refusing to grapple with it themselves. And they said as much.
But there’s also the fact that environmental degradation of one sort or another is more and more in the news as the crisis accelerates, and the news troubles us all.
And we do have an environmental query in our Iowa (Conservative) discipline, which every meeting in Iowa (Conservative) considers once a year, usually in October. And that advice and query helps us to remember that environmental responsibility is indeed one part of the Quaker path.
So we would have felt called to grapple with these issues sooner or later regardless. My walk across the country just hurried things up a little.
We held our special session on environmental issues on Sunday, October 8, which was the Sunday after we considered the environmental advice and query. This, in essence, turned our special session into a deeper look at the query, and a more concrete consideration of our duties in response.
I made no attempt to control the direction of the discussion. My sense was that the members and attenders of our meeting needed to talk out their ideas and feelings and work out their answers without being pressured or forced.
What emerged from the discussion were five lines of inquiry, each of which interested a different subset of our circle:
Some of us — and one in particular — were interested in some sort of intentional “green community”, preferably in the city so as not to divorce us from the things we are already involved with. This would be a compact arrangement in which we would all live close to one another, and which could be made resource-efficient and nature-friendly in all sorts of ways.
Public transit was a major interest. We talked about the need for more bike trails and bike racks in the community, and the possibility of working with the city to develop better public transit options.
Conservation was another interest. We discussed home energy audits and winterizing projects (such as those discussed at the Energy Star web site).
Pollution issues interested many of us. We discussed an “under the sink project” to dispose of toxic substances in our homes that we no longer needed. We also talked about pesticides used on our lawns. Some of us raised the subject of xeriscaping, by which I suspect they meant “zero-scaping”, i.e. leaving the land unlandscaped.
Several of us stressed environmental education as a starting point, before we tried to do anything. We discussed creating a “how-to” list, and maybe posting the list on our meeting’s web site where our members and attenders could refer to it.
As our discussion progressed, I became concerned that we were not talking directly about any of the big serious public policy issues — e.g., global warming, wilderness destruction, and extinctions of species — or asking how appropriate this list of projects would be in addressing such issues. But when I spoke that concern out loud, Friends responded that they wanted and needed to “start small”.
One person said, maybe later we’d be ready to look at global warming — next year, or the year after, or the year after that — when the current pressures on our members’ lives let up a bit. (Without going into details, I will say that some of our members have quite a few complications and difficulties to struggle with just now.)
It was agreed that the group would forward anything it found out about any of these projects to a central coördinator (we named a specific person), and that she would then bring whatever she received to a small continuing committee (which I will be a member of), which will then prepare proposals to bring back to the meeting as a whole.
It’s interesting to me, and more than a little sobering, to compare what came out of this discussion at my meeting, with what came out of a similar discussion at Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting, in Berkeley, California, a month later.
Strawberry Creek zeroed in on the most visible of the great world crises; but there is relatively little attention given in its minute to the hard questions of how much its members can actually do, and what concrete steps they will begin with in order to implement their “corporate witness”. (Did they appoint further meetings? Name people to committees or task forces? Choose specific ways to intervene supportively in one another’s lives?)
My own meeting preferred to zero in on “what little, concrete steps can we take in our own lives?”, without talking about which big issues these steps would actually help to mitigate or how meaningful the mitigation might be.
The difference between these two approaches not only underscores what is missing from each, it is also a reminder that each is only a first step toward a very big goal, and that it is unfair to expect too much from any first step. And that of course is what I find sobering.
I think of something that Karen Street recently said on her blog — that “…we as a society have been dawdling too long. We have fewer choices available today than we had last month, less time to make up our mind today than a week ago.”
I shall be hoping and praying that my own meeting, and Strawberry Creek Meeting too, will have the commitment and the faithfulness to keep moving forward.
