Sunday Eucharist | 10:30 (Choral)
April 22 was designated Earth Day in 1970 by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, a life-long environmental activist. Subsequently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Smithsonian Institution have celebrated Earth Month with environmental awareness activities during April.
The Christ Church Greening Parish Ministry opened Earth Month with a “Small Planet” edition of Evening Prayer at Table (organized by the Daily Office Ministry). Greening peeps brought soups and salads inspired by Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1970). Motivated by her awareness that people were going hungry in the midst of plenty, Lappé investigated U.S. food systems, finding that they are dominated by monocultures, rely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, consume huge volumes of water, generate greenhouse gases aplenty, and waste food while many people lack sufficient nutrition. Lappé made recommendations for individual actions that could chip away at this scenario, including making food choices that are local, organic, and plant based.
Our Earth Day event was a presentation by environmentalist Gordon Okumu, “From Field to Fork: Food Choices as Creation Care.” Okumu brought a case study of his natal village in Kenya, which both rhymed with Lappé’s findings, and extended her insights to a global context. His analysis of the global food system found that monopolies control seed, land, and water; industrial farming is contributing to climate collapse; and global corporations are urging governments to institute policies that favor them, but strip farmers of support and their dignity.
Both Lappé and Okumu are concerned with “food sovereignty” as well as food security. While the latter term speaks of adequate, safe food for everyone, the former, sovereignty, speaks to local and culturally appropriate control over food and creation of food systems.
In Okumu’s case study, a consortium of corporations and non-profits, including Monsanto and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had made deals with government officials in Kenya to provide seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, with the promise that harvest yields would increase and feed more people. But with their promises came conditions limiting farmers’ autonomy to save, sell, or swap seeds, and the genetically modified seeds could not thrive without farmers applying the expensive fertilizers and pesticides. The net result was not an improvement over traditional farming methods, and it threw many farmers into debt peonage.
In the post-presentation discussion, folks remarked that U.S. farmers were similarly captive to corporate interests, and one person remarked that genetically modified seeds had helped relieve starvation in Asia. Our allies in Creation Care, the Grounds Ministry, also addressed food in April: they build their planting boxes on the sunny side of Wells Hall, filled them with soil, and are now starting to plant vegetables in them. The eventual produce will be donated to the non-profit Food Is Free. The project was initiated by Linda Johnson and Ronn Johanson, who won a grant to purchase the materials for the project.