Breakfast of Local Foods Celebration

Greening Sacred Spaces Hamilton and St James Anglican Church

present

A Celebration of Local Food

Join as for a tasty brunch of locally produced foods. Local food consumption is a vital form of stewardship and creation care. Learn how you can make eating locally a part of your everyday lifestyle from seasoned speakers in the movement. This is an opportunity for members of the Hamilton and area faith groups to network together and to share in the bounty of our community.

Speakers: Don Mclean and Karen Burson of Environment Hamilton; Don will talk about getting to a level of greenhouse gases that provides safety for our planet and how that connects to what we eat. Karen will talk about building effective, equitable local food systems through various forms of institutional purchasing. Also chef Sam Robertson of Tapestry Bistro will speak about resources in Hamilton that allow you to eat locally. Bill Wilcox of West Highland Baptist church will be talking about growing food on church grounds to feed the hungry.

When: The morning of Saturday August 8th 2009

Where: St James Anglican Church, 137 Melville St, Dundas

Time: 10-12am

cost: $12 per person

To order tickets email Beatrice or call Environment Hamilton at 905 549 0900

Worship Without Your Car

BRIEFS TheSpec.com - - BRIEFS

(Jul 18, 2009)

Going to church? Leave the car at home

Prizes are being offered to Hamilton churches with the most congregants who walk, cycle, take the bus or carpool to worship this weekend.

As part of its Greening Sacred Places Hamilton program, Environment Hamilton is partnering with Faith and the Common Good to urge faith communities to participate in the July 17 to 19 Worship Without Your Car: Get to Your Faith Centre A Greener Way initiative, supported by the Trillium Foundation.

For further information, phone Environment Hamilton at 905-549-0900 or e-mail bekoko@faith-commongood.net.

http://thespec.com/article/602302

Worship Without Your Car

Church crowd urged to bike this weekend
Environment Hamilton urges faith communities to leave cars at home

Gord Bowes, News Staff, Hamilton Mountain News, Jul 17, 2009

Everyone heading to their place of worship this weekend is being asked to go green.

Faith groups across the city are being asked to encourage their congregations to pedal, walk, bus or car pool as part of Greening Sacred Spaces, an effort to get faith groups in the city to move toward sustainability.

Prizes will be awarded for the group with the highest percentage of participants during the July 17-19 Worship Without Your Car: Get To Your Faith Centre A Greener Way initiative, a joint project of Faith and the Common Good and Environment Hamilton.

“This is one of the ways we felt would be fun to get faith groups involved,” says Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko, Greening Sacred Spaces project facilitator.

“We’re just trying to find ways to encourage people to leave the car at home.”

Ms. Ekoko says she had heard about the idea being implemented in other cities and thought it could work locally.

It also makes for a good prelude to the Pedal for the Planet initiative, a cross-country environmental awareness tour which will stop at Fifty Point Conservation Area on Aug. 31.

As of Monday, 12 faith communities had signed up, including Church of the Resurrection, Barton Stone Church United and Emmanuel United Church, Meadowlands Fellowship Christian Reformed and Bethany Gospel Chapel.

“I was hoping to just have five, so I’m quite happy people are getting on to this,” says Ms. Ekoko.

She says she already considers the initiative a success by having more than one dozen faith communities signed up, but an even bigger success would be to get 20 per cent of a congregation to use an alternate means of transportation this weekend.

[Caption: Stephen Murray, pastor at Church of the Resurrection, is encouraging his congregation to take part in this weekend’s “Worship without your car” event organized by Environment Hamilton and Faith and the Common Good. Rev. Murray rides about 15 kilometres each day.


http://www.hamiltonmountainnews.com/news/article/182136

Worship Without Your Car

Worship Without Your Car: Get To Your Faith Centre A Greener Way

Traveling green is an important way we can be stewards of our planet.
Over the weekend of July 17th, 18th and 19th, Greening Sacred Spaces Hamilton invites people of all faiths to travel to worship that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on foot, by bike, by public transit or carpool.
Faith groups will be competing against each other for a chance to win a prize for their place of worship.

The groups with the highest percentage of participants get the prizes.


A joint project of Faith & the Common Good and Environment Hamilton with generous support of the Trillium Foundation.

Worship without your car event is supported by the City of Hamilton Alternative Transportation.

Climate Action For the People of Faith

As noted on the Faith page at 350 website (www.350.org Click on PEOPLE and click on Faith), "350 represents more than just a scientific benchmark for a safe climate – there are also deeply moral and spiritual reasons for getting the world back below 350 ppm CO2. Social justice, creation care, stewardship, earth community, beloved community – there are many ways we can name and express our moral and spiritual perspectives on this issue. We invite people of all faiths and all traditions to join with us action for 350."
All it takes to get started is to attend Environment Hamilton's meeting on Monday July 13. In particular, you'll learn about ideas your faith group can use between now and Oct. 24 to inspire the participation of its members. You may even wish to share a few ideas of your own.

The location of the meeting is the boardroom of Environment Hamilton at 1130 Barton Street East, Suite 207. That's located across the street from the Centre Mall near Ottawa Street (just east of the Beer Store - but on the other side of the street). It's a two storey fairly new red brick building with adjacent parking lot, also accessible by the HSR's Barton 2 service.

We truly look forward to meeting you on Mon., July 13 at 7:00 p.m.

Check out this page at 350.org

The Sound of 350 from 350 Faith on Vimeo.

James Lovelock: Climate change could cut world population to 1 billion.

What is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of unproven carbon-capture and sequestration technology and that China will provide little to no political help in curbing emissions.

On Monday night at Seattle’s Town Hall, British scientist James Lovelock gave a prediction of the effects of climate change that was even more dire. Efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are just fine, he said. They just won’t amount to much.

“Our main task, should the earth continue to heat, is to adapt and learn how to survive,” he said. “We’re unlikely to become extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to one billion people or less.”

That’s approximately a seventh the world’s current population.

Lovelock, who turns 90 next month, made his name in the early 1970s by putting forth the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth’s physical and biological processes are self-regulating and sustaining, not sentient but in some sense a cohesive “being.” I’m not up-to-speed on Gaia’s complex influence on the scientific establishment, but it’s been ridiculed and dismissed as more metaphysics than science, yet also influential among biologists and ecologists.

In more recent books—The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia—Lovelock has turned his attention to “global heating,” his preferred term because “warming” sounds too benign. He alluded to what Gaia has to say about global heating, though he never really spelled it out.

“The Earth does not just accept climate change passively,” he said. “It responds to what we’re doing to it, and that response is far more frightening than what we’re doing.”

Despite the futility of trying to avoid all of the effects of global heating, Lovelock recommended a few measures. He said nuclear and solar thermal power were the only sensible clean energy responses, and that the U.S. might learn from France about safe handling and disposal of nuclear waste. That rankled a number of audience members who pointed out the problem-riddled waste handling project at the Hanford Nuclear Site in eastern Washington.

Lovelock also seemed open to trying a number of geoengineering climate fixes. One man asked him about injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect solar heat away from the Earth.

Lovelock compared such approaches to dialysis for failing kidneys. “It will buy you time, but it’s not a cure,” he said. “Then again, if your kidneys fail, you never refuse dialysis.”

Jonathan Hiskes is a Grist staff writer.

Food and Water for Our Planet

Westdale United Church,May 24th- A small but eager group attended the Food And Water For Our Planet event Sunday evening. We learned how to use faith grounds to feed the hungry and construct our own rain barrels.

Westdale United Church has been running a vegetable garden since 1992. The produce goes directly to Wesley Centre Kitchen to feed the hungry.
Coordinators, Loueen Madill and her son Stephen gave a presentation followed by a tour of the garden (tomatoes and green peppers).
Writer and environmentalist, Sean Burak demonstrated how to construct our own rain barrels. Sean is passionate about water conservation and is generous about donating his time to give workshops on rain barrel making. He donated this one to the Westdale Untied Church community. He also sells excellent ready made rain barrels.