I’ve been pushing hard all summer on a major writing project with the goal of finishing the intial writing by the end of September. This is the main reason you’ve seen less posts on Our Father’s World than usual. Sorry about that – but hopefully the end product will be worth the wait.
In the meantime, enjoy this video clip from Chipotle. You may know that I’m not much of a fast-food advocate – but this company does seem different.
It has been a year of flood and drought. This spring’s floods along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are old news to most of us, as is the ongoing drought in Texas, which is breaking records set as long ago as 1917, long before the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s.
But nowhere in the world are things as bad as what is happening in East Africa, not far from where Craig and Tracy Sorley are serving in Kenya.
The Worst Drought in 60 Years
“Once More Into the Abyss”. That’s how the Economist news magazine described the developing drought in Kenya and other East African countries a week or so ago:
BLOATED bellies with stick arms and legs; huge eyes staring out of skeletal heads; gaunt mothers trying to suckle babies on withered breasts. The world thought it might never see such scenes again. Famine in Africa, absent for many years, appeared to have gone the way of diseases for which we now have cures or vaccines. Read more »
Floods in Kentucky - Photo courtesy Flickr CC License
Care of Creation, my organization, does a lot of work teaching people in Kenya and other East African countries about the dangers of destroying forests. God gave us trees for good reason: In terms of hydrology (water cycles), trees are essential. They are like the columns holding up the roof of a building – lose the trees, the whole system falls apart. It turns out that something very similar is going on in the Mississippi River watershed of middle America. We’re a richer country – but it appears that mere wealth can’t stop a flood. When we human beings carelessly destroy vital parts of the world God gave us to live in, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re living in a village in Kenya or on a farm in Missouri.
Lost in the blizzard of headlines over the last week – tornadoes, weddings, the death of a terrorist – is the developing flood situation in the Mississippi River valley. The few stories that we’ve seen have focused on what one commentator called a solomonic dilemma: Whether to save a small, struggling riverside city (Cairo, Illinois) or hundreds of thousands of acres of the country’s best farmland in Missouri. That case has been all the way to the US Supreme Court in the last 48 hours, with the result that last night the Corps blasted two miles of levees at Bird’s Point, just south of Cairo in order to reduce the pressure on that community’s flood defenses. As of this writing, the river has receded by a foot – the Corps hopes that they’ll see three more feet of decline in the next couple of days. Read more »
["Old Literature" is an occasional series of posts on works from the past (and in some cases, the not-so-long-ago-past) that still speak today. Here are some of the earlier posts.]
Wendell Berry maybe best known for his essays on agrarian (hence environmental and ecological) topics; his greatest work, to my mind, is in his novels, all of which take place in and around and concern the “membership” of Port William, a small river town in Kentucky. My wife Susanna and I recently finished reading (aloud, of course!) Hannah Coulter, and we are now halfway through Jayber Crow. Yes, I know we’re working backwards – that’s how life is sometimes. Anyway – last night’s selection caught my attention and seems worth sharing. Enjoy the selections – but better, get out and read the book!
Jayber, whose religion is real and deep and passionate and mostly of the unorganized variety, is the town’s barber – and gravedigger – and permanent bachelor – and, in this chapter, has just become the Port William’s church janitor. Jayber’s observations on the nature of the preaching (and preachers) in this rural church are important, and reflect Berry’s perception of a fundamental flaw in the Christian faith as practiced at that time and in that place: Read more »
Long-time readers of this blog will remember John and Dorothy Priske of Fountain Prairie Farms in Columbus Wisconsin. We’ve been friends for a couple of years and I’ve watched John and Dorothy’s progress as they have developed Fountain Prairie Farms. John stopped by one of my seminars in Madison a couple of years ago and stole the show, and the Fountain Prairie table at the Dane County (Madison) Farmer’s Market is the first place I stop just before Hook’s Cheese and Pecatonica Farm and the guy who sells me purple potatoes. I’m starting to learn that ‘eating local’ isn’t a principle – it’s participating in a web of relationships.
So when I turn on my television for the evening news, and my favorite farmer is featured – that’s exciting stuff! John and Dorothy were named ‘Wisconsin Conservation Farmer of the Year’ for their work at Fountain Prairie. Here’s the story, and here’s a clip: Read more »
This won’t be a surprise to those who paid attention to some of the serious weather events of 2010: When Russia’s wildfires exploded, we heard that Russia would be banning wheat exports for the immediate future. Then Pakistan lost an entire rice harvest and a good deal of wheat due to the worst flooding in that nation’s history – requiring Pakistan to import more than it normally would have done. And now Australia’s floods are affecting not only coal but wheat and other commodities. Read more »
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