This is part 2 of a three part report on a major Earth Day conference held in Madison WI on April 20-21, 2010.  I am using that conference as  an eavesdropping opportunity:  What is the larger environmental movement discussing today?  Rather than go talk-by-talk, I’ve pulled out four major themes from my pages of notes.  Here are the first two:

[Bios from the speakers referred to below are available here.]

1.  Think local. Act global.

Yes, it’s the familiar bumper sticker saying turned on its head.   An estimated 10 million people celebrated the first Earth Day but this was not an organized campaign.  There was no internet to coordinate events.  There was a small office in Washington DC with a miniscule budget – but the 1500 colleges and 10,000 plus schools essentially organized themselves.

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“Old Literature” is an occasional feature that highlights long-forgotten books, articles, speeches or poems that still speak to us today.  As it happens, there’s some new material that also deserves our attention.  Today, Tending to Eden by Scott Sabin, Director of Plant with Purpose (formerly Floresta).

Scott Sabin and I met about 7 years ago at a conference in Kenya.  He tells about that conference in his new book,Tending to Eden that was just released two weeks ago:

Edith and I took several pastors to a conference on creation care in Kenya.  I was one of the presenters, and in the course of my presentation I showed a slide of the devasted forests around Mt Kilimanjaro National Park.  Pastor Lyamuya approached me later and, with an embarassed smile, explained how convicting it was to see the photo from his own community.  “God entrusted it to us to take care of, and we aren’t doing our job.” Read more »

I had just finished giving a talk for Blackhawk Church’s Metro3040 adult fellowship group, and had included a short video from Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth in which one expert says, “I think we’re facing the loss of half the world’s frogs.’

On the way out, one of the participants asked me:  “So, exactly what is killing the frogs?”

It happens that I had just run across an article on this very topic two or three days ago.  Richard Black, BBC Environment Correspondent, was commenting on a world-wide precipitous decline in amphibians of all kinds (think frogs, salamanders, etc) in a post he called ‘The Attack of the Killer Everything“: Read more »

Maybe not the best way to start off a conversation with your seat partner on a plane.  But I could hardly help myself.  (If you have been following my musings for a while you will know that I tend to get into some interesting conversational situations on planes!)

I was on my way back from a week of meetings in Plainview, Texas.  Now, I realize that bringing an environmental seminar to the high plains of east Texas is not the normal thing to do.  People there are warm, friendly – but pretty convinced that “environment” means “liberal” and “government” and that sort of thing, and they’re not interested.  But things are changing.  For one thing, these folks are running out of water, and they know it.  Read more »

James Krenov (NY Times photo)

James Krenov died recently.

No, you don’t remember him.  It would be quite surprising if you’d ever heard of him, unless you are one of the dwindling number of genuine ‘cabinet makers’ in the world today.  I hadn’t heard of him either – but his obituary in the New York Times this week makes me wish I had known him. Read more »

Here’s a fun hint if you find you missed the Farmer’s Market this week and would like to know what produce might be from local suppliers.

I just found this out from the Produce manager at Woodmans West, my “local” supermarket:  Explaining to me that it would be really difficult to put signs up telling us what produce might be from a local farm – the main reason being that this week lettuce be local, next week it might have come from California (because nearby farms didn’t have enough supply) – but, he said, you can tell what we’ve bought from local farms: Read more »