Living Life and LOAFing It – Green Christians ask churches to “Use your LOAF !” on sourcing sustainable food

In the run up to Easter, Christian Ecology Link is asking supporters to think and act on how they source food for their church communities, with the aim of reducing the impact of unsustainable agriculture on their local area, and the wider world.

The key LOAF principles are that food should where possible be sourced Locally, grown and reared Organically, be Animal-friendly and Fairly traded.

There is an action letter that can be downloaded from the website, urging church leaders to adopt the LOAF principles at community facilities.

CEL’s Web Editor Judith Allinson said, “We hope that our members and friends will take the opportunity to join in sending a letter to their church leaders asking that their community LOAF during Lent, and then carry on LOAFing throughout the following year.”

Green Christians are being encouraged to order free copies of the new LOAF leaflet to distribute during Fair Trade Fortnight, which runs from 27th February to 11th March 2012, by sending an e-mail to : jill-publications@christian-ecology.org.uk

The new all-colour leaflet can also be downloaded from : http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/use-your-loaf.pdf or http://www.greenchristian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/loafUseYourLoaf.pdf

CEL members and friends are being asked to submit LOAF-themed recipes which will be uploaded to the new website : http://www.greenchristian.org.uk/archives/category/food/recipes

CEL’s Secretary, Barbara Echlin said, “Start the LOAF ball rolling in your own church by serving pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and make them with local free range eggs, organic milk and Fair Trade sugar. Ample food for all !”

Guidance for LOAF campaigners includes the suggestion to send the campaign letter to local church leaders and regional church administrators; and asking cathedrals, conference centres, educational venues and large churches with a refectory or cafe to take part.

CEL’s Information and Analysis Officer, Jo Abbess said “Good food is holy food – and good food comes from well-treated plants, animals and workers too. It’s not enough to choose organic over intensively-farmed – we need to choose co-operative food growers over convenience store profits.”

ENDS

NOTES FOR EDITORS

1. The LOAF principles were developed several years ago by Christian Ecology Link, and the new all-colour leaflet has been produced to accompany the launch of a letter-writing campaign – asking leaders and managers of all Christian venues to “Use their LOAF !”

2. LOAF stands for : Locally produced, Organically grown, Animal friendly, Fairly traded.

3. The full text of the LOAF letter is below. Members and supporters are asked to modify it as they wish, or print it as it is from the website.

Dear

As a supporter of Christian Ecology Link (CEL), I feel that many present aspects of food production imperil the wellbeing of Creation. This is why I am writing to tell you about CEL’s food campaign – LOAF – and to ask you to consider following these guidelines.

CEL is asking churches, cathedrals, districts, diocese offices, and Christian holiday, retreat and conference centres, schools and colleges to try to source food which is :-

* Locally produced

Supporting local and national farmers and producers strengthens local economies and communities, and lowers carbon emissions. We need to combat the nonsensical policy of importing food which could be, and indeed is, grown and produced here only for export.

* Organically grown

Subsidised industrialisation of agriculture leads to severe biodiversity losses, to soil depletion, water pollution and agrochemical resistance. Organic farming is key to the recovery of interdependent ecosystems. Supporting organic production is also central to the struggle against GM biotechnology, which poses threats to other crops (via cross-pollination) and biodiversity.

* Animal friendly

UK animal welfare standards are higher than many countries. But shops still sell produce from hens caged, beak-trimmed and bred for unnaturally fast growth rates; pigs confined to barren sheds, teeth clipped and tails docked, many pregnant sows in farrowing crates; turkeys in dark, dirty sheds where they develop lameness and burns. The wellbeing of animals is entrusted to us. Will you consider sourcing only free-range eggs and free-range, organic or outdoor reared meat ? Also, a shift to a much higher proportion of vegetarian/vegan cooking is also vital as meat and dairy production requires far more land and water and is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.

* Fairly traded

In a world where trade justice seems to recede and trade policies assist large producers rather than small producers, a commitment to serve only Fairtrade tea and coffee, for example, would signal support for the one certification guaranteeing minimum remuneration and community investment.

I feel that we are called to renew, heal and restore God’s creation: an immense commission only to be realised by infinitesimal everyday acts – in His grace.

Please find enclosed CEL’s new LOAF leaflet. More may be downloaded free from : http://www.greenchristian.org.uk/resources/loaf

I look forward to your response.

Yours

There has been an explosion of deployment. The renewable energy policies that are behind this tide of photovoltaics in Flanders seem to be working, or have been until recently.

“Oh no, we don’t have “Mary Poppins” on Dutch TV any more at Christmas every year like we used to. We’re going to see the film “The Storm”…” said my host. Curiouser and curiouser. “De Storm” is a film that harks back to an actual historical event, the major North Sea flooding in 1953. “I remember what it was like afterwards,” says an older English relative, “I visited Belgium and Holland with my aunt and uncle just after the flooding – he wanted to visit the family war graves. We stayed in Middelburg. You could see how high the water reached. There were tide marks this high on the side of the houses, and whelks left stuck on the walls.”

The film attempts to nail down the coffin casket lid of bad weather history. By telling the narrative of major, fearful floods of the past, people are distracted from the possibility that it may happen again. History is history, and the story tells the ending, and that’s a finish to it.

However, for some people, those people who know something of the progress of the science of global warming, this film is like a beacon – a flare on a rocky landing strip – lighting the way to the future crash of the climate and the rising of sea levels, which will bring havoc to The Netherlands, Dutch engineers or no Dutch engineers.

We have to be prepared for change, major change. If you or anyone you know has Dutch relatives and friends, think about whether you can invite them to live with you in future if things get really bad. One or two really bad storms combined with excessive tides and a few centimetres of sea level rise could be all it takes to wreck the country’s ability to organise water and destroy a significant amount of agricultural land.

“I’ve been studying Climate Change science”, I told another host. “You believe in Climate Change ?”, he asked, somewhat incredulously. “It’s 200 years of science”, I replied, smiling, “but we probably shouldn’t discuss it. I don’t think it would be very productive.”

The Climate Change talks that have just taken place in Durban, South Africa, were exemplary of a peculiar kind of collective madness that has resulted from trying to navigate and massage endless special interests, national jostling, brinkmanship, unworkable and inappropriate proposals from economists, communications failures and corporate interference in governance.

The right people with real decisionmaking powers are not at the negotiating table. The organisations with most to contribute are still acting in opposition – that’s the energy industry, to be explicit. And the individual national governments are still not concerned enough about climate change, even though it impacts strongly on the things they do consider to be priorities – economic health, trade and political superiority.

Over 20 years ago, the debate on what to do to tackle global warming and still maintain good international relations was already won, by the commonsense approach of Contraction and Convergence – fair shares for all. Each country should count on their fair share of carbon emissions based on their population – and we would get there by starting from where we are now and agreeing mutual cuts. The big emitters would agree to steeper cuts than the lower emitters – and after some time, everybody in the world would have the same, safe emissions rights.

What has prevented this logical approach from being implemented ? Well, we have had the so-called “flexible mechanisms” pushed on us – such as the Clean Development Mechanism which essentially boils down to the idea that the richer high-emitting countries can offset their carbon by paying for poorer low emissions countries to cut their carbon instead. Some have been attempting to make the CDM carbon credits into a commercial product for the Carbon Trading market. Some may contest it, but the CDM and carbon trading haven’t really been working very well, and anyway, the CDM doesn’t aim for emissions reductions, just offsets.

Other carbon trade has been implemented, such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), which doesn’t appear to have caused high emissions industries to diversify out of carbon, or created a viable price for carbon dioxide, so its usefulness is questionable.

Many people have put forward the idea of straight carbon pricing, mostly by taxation. The trouble with this idea should be obvious, but rarely is. Over four-fifths of the world’s energy is fossil fuel based. Taxing carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels would just make everything, everywhere, more expensive. It wouldn’t necessarily create new lower carbon energy resources, as the taxes would probably be put into a giant climate change adaptation fund – a financial institution proposed by several people including Oliver Tickell and Nicholas Stern, although in Stern’s case, he is calling for direct grants from countries to keep the fund topped up.

On the policy front, there has been a continuing, futile attempt to force the historially high-emitting countries to accept very radical carbon cuts, as a sign of accountability. This “grandfathering” of emissions responsibilities is something that no sane person in government in the richer nations could ever agree with, not even when being smothered with ethical guilt. One of the forms of this proposal is “Greenhouse Development Rights“, essentially allowing countries like China to continue growing their emissions in order to grow their economies to guarantee development. The emissions cuts required by countries like the United States of America would be impossible to achieve, not even if their economy completely toppled.

Sadly, a number of charities, aid and development agencies and other non-governmental organisations with concern for the world’s poor, have signed up to Greenhouse Development Rights not realising it is completely untenable.

The only approach that can work, that both high- and low-emitting countries can ever possibly be made to agree on, is a system of population-proportional shares of the global carbon pie. And the way to get there has to be based on relative current emissions, ignoring the emissions of the past – your cuts should be larger if your current emissions are large. And it should be based on the relative size of the population, and their individual emissions rates, rather than taking a country as a whole. Yes, there will be room for a little carbon trade between nations, to enable the transfer of low carbon technologies from wealthy nations to un-resourced nations. Yes, there will be space for enterprise, as corporations have to face regulation to cut emissions, and will need innovation in technology to divest themselves of fossil fuel production and consumption.

This is Contraction and Convergence – and you ignore it at our peril.

A few suggestions for further reading :-

“Contraction and Convergence The Global Solution to Climate Change” by Aubrey Meyer. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, December 2000. ISBN-13: 978-1870098946

The Greenhouse Effect : Science and Policy” by Professor Stephen H. Schneider, Science, Volume 243, Issue 4892, Pages 771 – 781, DOI: 10.1126/science.243.4892.771, 10 February 1989.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/243/4892/771.abstract
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/Publications.html

“Climate Change : Science and Policy“, edited by Stephen H. Schneider, Armin Rosencranz, Michael D. Mastrandea and Kristin Kuntz-Duriseti. Island Press, 10 February 2010. ISBN-13: 978-1597265669

“The Greenhouse Effect : Negotiating Targets” by Professor Michael Grubb, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, 1990.

“Equity, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and Global Common Resources” by Paul Baer, Chapter 15 in “Climate Change Policy : A Survey” by Stephen H. Schneider, Armin Rosencranz and John O. Niles, Island Press, 2002. ISBN-10: 1-55963-881-8 (Paper), ISBN-13: 978-1-55963-881-4 (Paper)

“Kyoto 2 : How to Manage the Global Greenhouse” by Oliver Tickell, ISBN-13: 978-1848130258, Zed Books Ltd, 25 July 2008
http://www.kyoto2.org/
http://www.kyoto2.org/docs/the_land_1.pdf

Dr Roger Bentley, author of a seminal 2002 paper on the subject, research that spawned hundreds of related learned articles, will be speaking.

But the event organisers have also invited one Dr Matt Ridley, the self-styled “rational optimist”, and member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and this, I’m afraid, prevents me from attending.

He has been captured speaking at a TEDx event pouring scorn on “environmental” scare stories of the past, but not bothering to delve or dig into how mankind has actually gone out of its way to act on past crises and prevent catastrophes.

And now he’s thrown in his lot with the shale gas miracle men, writing a report with a foreword by Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most balanced individuals.

How much uncorroborated optimism can one man contain ?

Let’s be clear here – the people in Scotland have a vision for future Renewable Energy, and so do many people in Wales and Ireland, but it appears English governance listens to fuddy duddy landowners too readily, and remains wedded to the fossil fuel industry and major construction projects like nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage.

It really is of no use putting off investment in truly sustainable and renewable power and gas. There are only two paths we can take in the next few decades, and their destination is the same.

Here’s how it goes. Path A will take the United Kingdom into continued dodgy skirmishes in the Middle East and North Africa. Oil production will dance like a man with a stubbed toe, but then show its true gradient of decline. Once everybody gets over the panic of the impending lack of vehicle fuel, and the failure of alternatives like algal biodiesel, and the impacts of a vastly contracted liquid fuel supply on globalised trade, then we shall move on to the second phase – the exploitation of gas. At first, it will be Natural Gas. But that too will decline. And then it will be truly natural gases. As gas is exploited for vehicles, electricity will have to come from coal. But coal, too, is suffering a precipitous decline. So renewable energy will be our salvation. By the year 2100, the world will run on renewable electricity and renewable gas, or not at all.

Meanwhile we will have had wars, rumours of wars, and just plain bomb-dropping, and lots of ancient civilisations will have bit the uranium-laced dust, and Scotland will have long since made a break for economic and political freedom. And we will have locked ourselves into dangerous climate change through our wanton burning of fossil fuels.

Path B – the logical long-term option and where we’re headed anyway – is to bypass climate change, bypass warfare and bypass idiocy and go straight to renewables.

But can the English Government work this out ? Can they see beyond their Cost Benefit Analyses and their short-termism and the calls to cut regulation and targets ? Can they imagine what life will be like in 30 years – and can they be made to be accountable to the future citizens of this country ?

We need to stimulate the development of renewable energy in the United Kingdom. It will take tax breaks, direct funding, subsidies. The Feed-in Tariff for solar power is essential in the current economic environment, to build a long-lasting electricity generation asset. If the British Government truly takes the prosperity of this country seriously, they need to plan for a significant deployment of renewable energy. We don’t know what the price of fossil fuels will be in five years time, ten years time. But we know that sunshine will always be free.

Detecting that I was speaking with a native French-speaker, I slipped into my rather unpracticed second language to explain that I could not countenance working with the militaries, because I disagree with their strategy of repeated aggression.

Whoops, there goes another great opportunity to make a huge pile of cash, contracting for warmongers ! Sometimes you just have to kiss a career goodbye. IT consultancy has many ethical pitfalls. Time to reinvent myself.

I’ve been “back to school” for the second university degree, and now I’m supposed to submit myself to the “third degree” – go out and get me a job. The paucity of available positions due to the poor economic climate notwithstanding, the possibility of ending up in an unsuitable role fills me with dread. One of these days I might try to write about my experiences of having to endure several kinds of abuse whilst engaged in paid employment : suffice it to say, workplace inhumanity can be unbearable, some people don’t know what ethical behaviour means, and Human Resources departments always take sides, especially with vindictive, manipulative, micro-managers. I know what it’s like to be powerless.

I’m an open, honest, well-meaning person, and I’m quite sociable, unless I’m trying to focus on something complicated, when I need to be left alone. I like informality and equality, enjoy being able to offer pragmatic solutions, good advice and insight; am capable of managing difficult situations and negotiating progress in a spirit of co-operation. I can work under some stress, as long as it isn’t every day, or in a hostile environment; and I can do good research and detailed work, for example in computer systems programming. I can work with a wide variety of people, as long as they’re minded to be constructive. I like to train people to do the best they can, and do better than before, and I like to build teams that are mutually supportive. Simple is good. Direct is best. I try to create efficiency, I can facilitate business process, manage change and I’m always trying to work myself out of a job.

Unfortunately, there are some people out there who do not understand me, who somehow see me as a threat, and who actively campaign against my aims and methods, sometimes by attempting to isolate me. It slowly dawns on me – a look here, a word there, a conversation I’m not party to. I get the sensation of alienation. I can look in a person’s face and see the antipathy. I don’t know why, but I know what. People can be cruel and ruthless. You cannot expect easy co-operation, especially in a hierarchy, where my competencies always seem to challenge the power base. I really don’t want to put myself through that again. I shouldn’t have to undergo torture in order to earn a living. Rejection, I can handle – what I fear is dejection.

“What you need to do”, says my relative, “is take a job for another ten years or so. A good solid career. You should take a role in the field you have studied.” I reply with, “The trouble is, I now know enough about a great number of organisations I couldn’t possibly bring myself to work for.” My assessment, of course, puts me in the category of judgmental, and makes me fairly unemployable. I’m pretty certain that even those organisations who have a similar approach to mine wouldn’t want to work with me.

Another relative suggests I need to do something practical, says that I can’t spend all my life thinking. There’s only so many roles for thinkers. There’s only so much space for intellectual inquiry. Yes, that’s true. We’ve had enough thinking. The economists told us to price carbon. Everybody else is resisting a price on carbon. High carbon emitters continually lobby against being penalised. It will never work. The economists told us to trade carbon. That has been spectacularly unsuccessful in a number of ways, including the failure to create verifiable, sustainable carbon credits; and the fraud and theft of carbon credits.

The economists told us to price pollution, to make the polluters pay. And the polluters end up passing the costs along the value chain to the end consumers. They don’t stop polluting, they just make their consumers forfeit.

The technologists from the oil and gas industry told us to do things like Carbon Capture and Storage, and other geoengineering. Watch how the number of carbon capture projects grows ! The pace is slower than a drugged snail’s. Why ? Entropy, man. It’s always going to be cheaper to prevent carbon emissions in the first place than re-capture the carbon from the air. And the price of re-capture can be expected to be stellar – it’s all in the chemistry. The only thing that got captured was your intelligence. You were captured by the idea and it failed you.

The policymakers keep blaming the consumer, and telling us all we will enjoy lowering our energy use. The citizens are fighting back, by paying no attention at all to the messaging of restraint; and campaigning against high energy prices.

Nope, I can’t make a career working for an environmental organisation, as life would be defined completely by negatives : antagonism is not an attitude I can keep up. Environmentalists keep making unreasonable, unfeasible demands. They demand change, but don’t offer a pathway to a positive future. It seems that, for the most part, environmentalists can achieve nothing of note. I’m inclined to think that those who control the purse strings control the changes that have to be made – the insurers, the investors, the highly capitalised companies.

But I don’t want to work for a multinational, transnational corporation. Their prime directive is to make a profit to satisfy the demands of their shareholders. They don’t care about carbon unless it is to take care of their bottom line. I could never work for a fossil fuel oil and gas company, even if they have an “alternative energy” section, because they are outright compromised, and are carrying huge carbon liabilities. I’m not sure if there are any ethical finance or banking outfits that I could fit into. I don’t know if there are any renewable energy technology corporations that would be prepared to hire me.

I am an awkward one. Don’t hire me. You’ll only want to fire me. Don’t give me any money to perform a function – there’s nothing I can achieve if people aren’t prepared to work with me. Am I playing hard to get ? Giving the wrong impression ? Once again, I have to strike out on my own. I rather get the idea I will need to create my own job. What is worthwhile doing ?

I’ve been studying the management of climate change, a sort of hybrid discipline between business management studies and climate change policy – taking in climate change science and developments in energy. We’ve learned about carbon management, carbon pricing in all its forms, and the rocky seas of energy policy. We’ve heard that technology and innovation can solve the problem. We’ve heard that renewable energy can save the day. We’ve been exposed to the diversity of proposals for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the institutions, organisations and government departments that are tasked with handling climate change.

There are things that need to be done : the full weight of the world’s production capability and purchasing power needs to be directed towards sustainable and renewable energy, energy conservation, universal building insulation, joined up systems of low carbon transportation, low carbon agriculture, low carbon economic development… All new investment should be directed towards creating low carbon energy assets, energy efficiency and energy conservation.

There are ways to make things happen. You do something yourself. You ask somebody else to do it. You pay somebody to perform a function. You create obligations, and a system of accountability. If you’re the Governor of Texas and you’re desperate for rainfall to break the long, hot drought, you beseech the heavens for divine intervention. You wait for the passage of time and the unfolding of events to whisper the suggestion of change…

And then there’s the power of influence. It’s a constant surprise – the genuinely influential don’t realise how hard it is for others to emulate their role. There are in fact very few people who can influence for the better.

I don’t want to have influence. I don’t want to be famous for bending minds. I don’t want to be admired for being seductively convincing. What I offer is the truth as I see it – flat and un-adorned. However, honesty is not lucrative; and pragmatism doesn’t sell. People don’t seem to like straight talking or plain speaking.

I don’t have influence, but I don’t want influence. I don’t want to be someone that other people revere and follow. I don’t want to be a leader. I just want to put the facts and figures and methods out there for others to recognise – to witness to inevitable changes, and our changing responsibilities and accountabilities.

I don’t have power. I don’t want power. I am without artifice. I don’t want to be a sales person or be forced to fabricate with public relations. I’m not trying to prove anything – I’m just trying to show it.

People say I should take employment in order to pursue my goals and aims. I don’t know if there is any form of employment, currently, that would allow me to pursue my goals and aims. I cannot think of any role that anyone would want filled that would grant me the kind of authority I would need to pursue my goals and aims. And anyway, I don’t want to offer a service of labour to a paternalistic organisation in exchange for some kind of accredited authority; permission to get done what needs to be done.

I cannot do anything about the appallingly bad media coverage of climate change science, the crisis in energy and policy. There are not enough hours in the day to effectively counter their poorly-constructed and often unfactual narratives. I don’t have the energy to go against all this stupidity and propaganda. The channels of mass communication lack the necessary staff with the skillsets to relate the full scale of climate change to their communities of audiences. I disagree with almost all economists and many of the industrial corporations about how to handle climate change. I cannot completely align myself with any single political party or grouping – the Members of Parliament and many civil servants struggle with science and technology. They are mostly non-scientists, non-engineers.

I often find myself considering a company or an organisation and thinking, “I can’t work for these people. They’ll have me doing something useless”, or “I can’t work with these people. Their pitch is all blather. Their intellectual framework is tilted, on weak foundations, and liable to fracture.” I cannot live a lie. I cannot live with a lie.

I have adopted a position of powerlessness, but it is problematic. My communication skills are constrained by my repudiation of power.

I cannot produce anything much by communicating, as I don’t want you to believe without evidence and knowledge, and I don’t need you to agree with me just because I say something. You will probably dismiss my thoughts on the basis of my position, and I can’t make the message stick; but then, in a democracy of thought, I shouldn’t force you to accept anything I say.

I don’t want to convert you, recruit you, make you change your mind. But somebody has to say these things – give us all the opportunity to reflect and maybe come to our senses.

What should be said. What has to happen.

All I can do is keep saying what needs to be said and keep saying what has to happen, what will happen; whilst critiquing all the confusion, distortion and disinformation. That’s all I can do. I’m not very successful at communicating these things, but it’s still all I can do. All I can do is not enough. But it’s all I can do.

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