yearofplenty

Future Shame: Future Generations Will Condemn Industrial Meat and Abuse of Environment

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, wrote a provocative Washington Post op-ed over the weekend titled, What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? that has reverbererated around the internet. In the article he speculates that there are always things current generations are engaged in that future generations will condemn without reservation. He speculates on what current pracices will be the shame of future generations and I was intrigued to see that two of his four prospects are hot topics on this blog; the industrial system of meat production and the wreckless abuse of the environment.

Regarding industrial meat he says;

People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.

Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own feces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it -- and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture.

Regarding the environment he says;

It's not as though we're unaware of what we're doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions -- the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won't be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.

How Long Does it Take to Change Consumer Habits?

I'm slammed this week with deadlines so I have little time to post. I've been looking over some of the old posts during the year of our consumption experiment and this one from five months in grabbed my attention. The original post with comments is available here.

This week as we sat down to dinner; me comfortably snug in my Value Village Shoes and sweaty from the bike ride home from work, Nancy fashionably dressed in her second hand dress, the girls fresh from a joyful jaunt in the garden maze, all of us eager to dig into some local asparagus, field greens, homemade bread, home churned butter, and meatloaf made from deer meat provided by a hunting friend. About half way through the meal, it dawned on me that I hadn't given any of these things a second thought. All of these practices were normal. We've gone from wondering if it was even possible to follow these rules, to having them be a new, no big deal, normal (at least for one night).

I've read different things about how long it takes to change habits. Anywhere from 21 days to three months. Our experience around consumption is that it takes one day to change habits but it takes almost five months for these new patterns to feel somewhat normal. I guess it also depends on the nature of the changes we seek and how ingrained they are.

We've also learned that it doesn't take a long time of preparation to make the changes. We formulated our rules for consumption on December 27, implemented them on January 1, and have been on a steep but fun learning curve ever since. We allowed ourselves a lot of freedom to fail, and were very open to the possibility that we wouldn't make it. I guess we're still open to that possibility, but with the summer veggies on the way, it feels like we've got some good wind in our sails at this point.

One lesson we're learning is that our previous patterns of consumption seemed so unchangeable. It was just the way the world was. Everybody did it that way. It was hard to imagine that there were other ways of doing things. We're learning as a family that all habits, patterns, and practices of consumption are changeable. It might take 5 months to feel comfortable with them, but nothing need be inevitable or set in stone.

I'm slammed this week with deadlines so I have little time to post. I've been looking over some of the old posts during the year of our consumption experiment and this one from five months in grabbed my attention. The original post with comments is available here.

This week as we sat down to dinner; me comfortably snug in my Value Village Shoes and sweaty from the bike ride home from work, Nancy fashionably dressed in her second hand dress, the girls fresh from a joyful jaunt in the garden maze, all of us eager to dig into some local asparagus, field greens, homemade bread, home churned butter, and meatloaf made from deer meat provided by a hunting friend. About half way through the meal, it dawned on me that I hadn't given any of these things a second thought. All of these practices were normal. We've gone from wondering if it was even possible to follow these rules, to having them be a new, no big deal, normal (at least for one night).

I've read different things about how long it takes to change habits. Anywhere from 21 days to three months. Our experience around consumption is that it takes one day to change habits but it takes almost five months for these new patterns to feel somewhat normal. I guess it also depends on the nature of the changes we seek and how ingrained they are.

We've also learned that it doesn't take a long time of preparation to make the changes. We formulated our rules for consumption on December 27, implemented them on January 1, and have been on a steep but fun learning curve ever since. We allowed ourselves a lot of freedom to fail, and were very open to the possibility that we wouldn't make it. I guess we're still open to that possibility, but with the summer veggies on the way, it feels like we've got some good wind in our sails at this point.

One lesson we're learning is that our previous patterns of consumption seemed so unchangeable. It was just the way the world was. Everybody did it that way. It was hard to imagine that there were other ways of doing things. We're learning as a family that all habits, patterns, and practices of consumption are changeable. It might take 5 months to feel comfortable with them, but nothing need be inevitable or set in stone.

God in the Garden

 

Picture: Dan Hansen helps put in irrigation at the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden.

Here's a promo for the NPR "God in the Garden" radio program that I was interviewed for a couple weeks ago. It will play on Boise NPR tomorrow 91.5 and then probably trickle out to other northwest NPR affiliates. If you're interested I suppose you can email your local NPR affiliate and request that they broadcast it.

GodinGardenPromo(2)

I am discovering in my work with the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden that "Community" is the word of emphasis. It feels less like an experiment in cultivating plants than it does an experiment in forming a community of friends and neighbors. We show up as strangers and after a couple hours of putting together irrigation equipment we leave as friends.

The Pumpkin Patch isn't a "church garden" or a "faith-based garden" like some of those described in the radio program. It's a community garden with a church as partner, working alongside others toward a renewed future for our neighborhood.

That being said I do see these things through my lens of faith. Here's a quote from Wendell Berry's essay, "Health is Membership," that echoes some of my thoughts about the "community" in "community gardens."

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist Sr Albert Howard who said, in The Soil and Health, that 'the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man [is] one great subject.'

...I believe that the community - in the fullest sense; a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

Community gardens are about seeds and soil and harvest, but they are also about wholeness and health and yes, even love. They take us isolated individuals and place us in a more proper context of cooperation and sharing. I look forward to seeing how things develop through the summer. (I'm learning that these gardens also reflect some of the unhealth of our community. We're not even up and running yet but the vandals and hooligans have already made their presence known.)

I'll post a link to the whole show once it's posted and post some updates on the progress of the garden throughout the summer.

Invest In New Experiences Not New Gadgets For Happiness Says Cornell Study

A study by psychologists at Cornell offers great wisdom for those of us caught up in hopes of the new and next "thing" to buy. Stephen Messenger at Treehugger describes the study;

It turns out, in this age of consumerism and gadgetry, that all this stuff we buy isn't really making us any happier--in fact, it's kind of bumming us out. According to the latest research, the key to finding happiness is something far more accessible than what product advertisements would like you to believe--simply enough, it's in having new experiences. Whether it be in traveling to new places, taking a hike with some friends, or even participating in some green activism, investing in experiences delivers more bang for your buck than consumer products--which is good news considering that so much of the stuff we buy ends up as waste...

According to the study, experiences are so effective at making us happy because we truly 'own' them in that they become integrated into our characters and help shape our personalities. Material goods, on the other hand, can really only be 'possessed' and rarely become a part of us in any meaningful way. Also, things we buy are subject to material degradation and devaluation, not to mention a gradual lessening in our appreciation for them. In contrast, experiences are transformed into memories, and even bad ones can be appreciated later on down the line.

Our experience going to Thailand two years ago comes to mind as a great example of this in our lives So instead of lusting after the IPad, start planning the next adventure.

Wendell Berry: Nothing Could Be More Absurd - Despise the Body and Yearn For Its Resurrection

It's a busy week of preparations for me with Good Friday and Easter services. It's the season in the church where we turn our attention to the resurrection of Jesus. These comments from Wendell Berry resonate with me as I reflect on the significance of this season and they also intersect with my journey on this blog. 

At some point we began to assume that the life of the body would be the business of grocers and medical doctors, who need take no interest in the spirit, whereas the life of the spirit would be the business of the churches, which would have at best only a negative interest in the body. In the same way we began to see nothing wrong with putting the body - most often somebody else's body, but frequently our own - to a task that insulted the mind and demeaned the spirit...

Divided against each other, body and soul drive each other to extremes of misapprehension and folly. Nothing could be more absurd than to despise the body and yet yearn for its resurrection. In reaction to this supposedly religious attitude, we get, not reverance or respect for the body, but another kind of contempt: the desire to comfort and indulge the body with equal disregard for its health. The "dialogue of body and soul" in our time is being carried on between those who despise the body for the sake of its resurrection and those, diseased by bodily extravagance and lack of exercise, who nevertheless desire longevity above all things. These think that they oppose each other, and yet they could not exist apart. They are locked in a conflict that is really their collaboration in the destruction of soul and body both.

Become a Writer 750 Words at a Time With New Online App

 

Picture: Fritillaria pudica (yellow bell, yellow fritillary) taken two weeks ago in Spokane Valley.

I'm in a season of doing some long form writing, working on a writing project with a publisher. I've been drawn to the idea of being a writer since I was young but translating that into the reality of actual disciplined writing has been a challenge through the years. The blog does help provide a kind of discipline. Part of my life routine is to get at least one post up every day. The best thing about the blog is that when I hit "Publish" it's out there, which tends to really focus my attention (typos etc. not withstanding). But there is another kind of writing that takes a longer view, with time for revisiting and editing and boiling down.

There is a new online App called 750 Words that has the simple premise of providing a venue to get in 750 words of writing every day. Here's how it's described on the site.

I've long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. Unlike many of the other exercises in that book, I found that this one actually worked and was really really useful.

I've used the exercise as a great way to think out loud without having to worry about half-formed ideas, random tangents, private stuff, and all the other things in our heads that we often filter out before ever voicing them or writing about them. It's a daily brain dump. Over time, I've found that it's also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten mood.

750 Words is the online, future-ified, fun-ified translation of this exercise.

Your writing on the site is private to you, so it's not a blog. It's more personal, intended for personal nurture and development. The site will track how many words you've written and has a point system for your progress. I'm not using the site but I am running with the concept of 750 words or three pages a day.

The other best advice in writing that I've heard, and something that I will keep dear to my heart as I tackle my three pages a day, is Anne Lamott's motto; "sh%$#ty first drafts."

Wendell Berry: A Cows Contentment Flavors the Steak

Berry's comments from the Art of the Commonplace, are helpful in describing the benefits of growing your own vegetables and knowing the origins of the meat we eat.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and known that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater.

The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think this bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

I hear people getting into debates about whether organic vegetables are, from the perspective of chemistry, more nutritious. Others debate the financial advantage of growing your own vegetables. Some take a pragmatic view of the politics and say things like, "the corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent." And of course we love to debate the mathematics of carbon footprints.

While these perspectives are all important and need to be debated and discussed, none are quite as compelling to me as the one Berry makes in the quote above. Instead of breaking things down to their component parts, which is what our scientific approaches do, Berry is putting the food we eat in context, using words like beauty, memory and contentment. He says that simply knowing the source and conditions of the land and animals that provide our food makes the food taste better (and I would add, in many cases worse.) I can't prove it with a scientific study but I know it to be true from my experience.

What Would You Do If You Had One Year to Live? - A Sunday Reflection

I have the morning off from my usual worship leading responsibilities. I'm grateful for the breather. I presided yesterday over a beautiful but draining memorial service for a 45 year old member of the church I pastor. It's put me in a bit of a reflective mood and in honor of her I want to offer some thoughts.

I do around 20 memorial services a year. I've done as many as three in one week. In 12 years of being a pastor I have grown accustomed to the awkward rhythms of walking through the days and weeks that follow someone's death. I've learned that when you die no one is going to talk about how successful you were or how much money you made. They will talk about your passions, and the volume of your laugh and the things that brought you joy. They will mostly talk about the generosity of your love, or struggle with the lack thereof. They will rejoice in the miracle of reconciled relationships and/or carry a wound of unresolved resentments. 

This most recent memorial service stands out as unique in my experience. My friend was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor only to have the cancer inexplicably disappear. For almost a year she lived in the grace moment of a miracle and she lived it so well. She served and loved and seized life in the most wonderful ways. Her gift to me is the way she has got me thinking about how I would live my life if I only had one year to live. What would I do if I was given the miracle of another year? And I guess that's the way it is, isn't it. We've all been given the miracle of another year, probably more but then again, maybe not. We all live in that grace moment of a miracle every day, more often than not, unaware.

This is not altogether unrelated to our Year of Plenty experience. Part of the gift of our year of constraints is the way it led us to live with more passion and awareness of the miracle of everyday. Theologians call these constraints "askesis" from which we get the work asceticism. While this word has mostly negative connotations in our contemporary life it's a word worth recovering and redeeming. I like the way Eugene Peterson describes it in his book "Under the Unpredictable Plant."

“We are familiar with the frequently beneficial consequences of involuntary askesis. How many times have we heard as we have visited a parishioner in the days following a heart attack, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me – I’ll never be the same again. It woke me up to the reality of my life, to God, to what is important.” Suddenly instead of mindlessly and compulsively pursuing an abstraction – success, or money, or happiness – the person is reduced to what is actually there, to the immediately personal – family, geography, body – and begins to live freshly in love and appreciation. The change is a direct consequence of a forced realization of human limits. Pulled out of the fantasy of a god condition and confined to the reality of the human condition, the person is surprised to be living not a diminished life but a deepened life, not a crippled life but a zestful life.”

These comments about unintentional askesis remind me of Andrew Sullivan’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates wherein he shares about how HIV has changed his life. He said of contracting the disease.

My own sense is that it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me in my life…It certainly helped me realize that careerism is idiotic. I had worked really hard and gotten to this place and then “Boom!” In one day I was told, ‘You’re going to die, you can’t stay in America and you’ll probably have to quit your job…’

Andrew then said with a little glisten of a tear in his eye and a wistful voice;

At that point you either go into denial and carry on as if it isn’t happening, or you absorb it and have a life changing moment. I mean who cares, I could be dead…And then also the knowledge that God can strip you of everything, and what do you have left -- it’s a very useful moment in one’s life to realize, what do I have if this is all taken away? What’s left? What am I really living for? What are my values?...It strips away a lot of stuff – if you let it. It’s a place I came to die that taught me in a strange kind of way how to live. And I think that means letting go of a lot of stuff most of us are afraid to let go of.”

Peterson goes from talking about this unintentional askesis to talk about intentional askesis. He says,

Askesis is voluntary disaster…Why wait? Why wait for an accident, an illness, a failure? Why not take deliberate steps now to rid myself of the illusions of being a god, study the limits of my mortality, and sink myself into the quite marvelous but sin-obscured realities of creation and salvation?

In many ways our Year of Plenty was a voluntary disaster. It was a year of wonderful constraints. "Why not?" is a question we grew very familiar with and it's a question my friend has reminded me to keep front and center. Why wait? Why not? What would you do if you had the miracle of another year to live? These are the questions I'm reflecting on today.

While I didn't get a chance to preach in the pulpit this morning I sort of stumbled into giving a sermon here on the blog. Oh well.

Grace and peace to you in the midst of these questions.

Why it's hard for Americans to seek the common good

We've learned on our journey that issues of food and consumption are caught up in webs of meaning and relationships. We've recognized in ourselves and others a desire for more connection in community and more intentional shared commitments, but we've also recognized the powerful forces at work thwarting our ability to connect and share commitments. There's a new study out that explains part of what we are dealing with as North Americans.

The study compares the way Japanese and Americans perceive the emotions of others in a set of pictures, and tracks the eye motions of each.

When asked to interpret the emotion of the person in the center, the Japanese looked at the person for about one second before moving on to the people in the background. They needed to know how the group was feeling before understanding the emotion of the individual. The Americans (and Canadians in subsequent studies) focused 95% of their attention on the person in the center. Only 5% of their attention was focused on the background, and this, Dr. Masuda points out, didn’t influence their interpretation of the central figure’s emotion. For North Americans the foreground is all-important.

Dr. Masuda is quick to point out that Americans and Japanese are physiologically the same. The difference in eye movement is tied to the roots of our respective cultures. When trying to explain the natural world, the Ancient Greeks – the founders of Western civilization – tended to focus on central objects and sought to explain their rules of behavior. Funnily enough, Aristotle thought a rock had the property of “gravity.” It didn’t occur to him that a system was working its powers on the rock. The Chinese on the other hand took a more holistic approach. They believed that everything occurred within a context, or a field of forces, and thus they unraveled the relationship between the moon and the tides.

I think having an awareness of these issues is important for us to sort through as we seek the common good of our communities. We have great strengths to draw on in our western ways of seeing things but with that also come some challenges.

I was talking to a friend last week who spoke with great respect about the Hutterites who live a very different kind of life among us. They live in North America but their commitment to community is the priority. My friend and I agreed that we'd probably never go as far as the Hutterites but it's worth experimenting with shared commitments. It looks like we're going to go in with a bunch of folks to raise some pigs this summer as one of those experiments.

Millwood Farmers' Market and Year of Plenty in the New York Times Today

The Millwood Farmers' Market and the church I pastor are included in a New York Times article today, Pastors in the Northwest Find Focus in 'Green.' My favorite part of the article is that it starts, "MILLWOOD, Wash. - " It's great to see the little city of Millwood in the national press. The blog get's a minor mention.

The article is about a variety of mainline churches that are engaging environmental issues. The implicit subtext of the article is shaped around the question of whether or not this interest in caring for creation leads to, or could potentially lead to, growth in mainline churches that have declined so rapidly in the last 50 years.

For my recent reflections on how I see the intersections of faith, church and issues of the environment go here. Here's the short version from that post.

And so my work with local food, our year long experiment, tearing out the lawn, raising chickens, etc. is, at least in part, an experiment in re-weaving faith and soil, food and spirit, earthy reality and divine truth, backyard and baptismal font.

It also relates to my experience as a pastor. I'm thinking of a friend who no longer attends church because she says she experiences God in nature. I'm thinking of the growing crowds of people who say they are spiritual but not religious. I see this as more a rejection of the false divide of the "holy and the world" than it is a rejection of God. And in some ways the church has itself to blame for this exodus. The church signed a long-term endorsement deal with modernity that looked like the deal of the century for awhile but has taken a tragic turn where people feel like they have to choose between nature and sanctuary, spirituality and a community of faith. As a pastor I am experimenting with what it looks like to lead a church that rejects this false divide and witnesses to a holistic faith. So I do the normal stuff like preach and visit the hospital and write newsletter articles, but I also manage a farmers' market and help distribute food with Second Harvest and work to establish community gardens in West Valley, and write a blog about local food.

And let me be as clear as I can, my interest in food and consumption is not some bait and switch effort to slip Jesus into people's lives, as if local food were some carrot on a stick to lead people along into the holy. The whole point is that I am learning to pay attention to real carrots, preferably local and organic, and see them as in some way holy. If I am seeking to convert people here it is a conversion to a whole life where truth and holiness are wedded to earthiness. At least that's the ongoing conversion I'm seeking in my own life.