Green Team

Green Team

What’s New at the Green Team Headquarters
~ Barb Morrow, Coordinator

Green Team Meeting
Sunday, December 7 at 12:15pm / Meditation Room

Ecological Footprint Environmental Assessment and Survey
The Ecological Footprint Environmental Assessment and Survey for Evergreen UU Fellowship members has been launched. You may complete the survey on the Evergreen website. Or you may complete a paper version of the survey which will be available starting December 7, at the coffee hour. There is a separate page for calculating your Carbon Footprint. These forms are attached to the survey, on our website and available at the Green Team Kiosk Table in Beaman hall. All surveys are due back to the Green Team by the end of January 2009.

Environmental Audit
In other news...The Green Team has completed the Environmental Audit of the building which included a free PUD energy audit. Dave Hunt, the PUD auditor and Michelle Valentine of the Green Team combed through the building to identify areas for improvements to reduce our utility costs. More news to come on how to tackle some of these.

Better World Club
Can’t afford a new Hybrid car? Try the next best thing! Switch your roadside auto service from AAA to Better World Club. They offer the same roadside, travel and discount services as AAA on hybrid car rentals, with just about the same reliability in roadside service as AAA. I’ve used them twice for a flat tire and dead battery. They arrived in less than 30 minutes. All these service are at the same membership price as AAA. In addition they have roadside assistance for bicycles, donate 1% of their revenue to environmental cleanup and advocacy, and refund up to $10.00 per quarter in gas receipts.
To learn more and switch from AAA to Better World Club, go to their web site at betterworldclub.com.

“Finally, an auto club with genuinely decent values.” Click and Clack

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Contact Barb Morrow at greenteam@evergreenuu.org.

Plan of Action
After the Audit and Survey are completed and studied, a Plan of Action is developed to meet the requirements for certification: twelve activities in the four areas mentioned above. The Plan of Action is presented to the Board for approval and then to the Fellowship to be approved at the annual membership meeting in June.

Green Team Tidbits

A Gift for the Earth
~ Jim Anderson, December 08
The Holidays are approaching. This news is often met with a groan: so much shopping to do, gifts to wrap, decorations to buy. Visions of traffic at the mall dance in our heads. There is a deep irony in all this: this holiday (holy day) is a celebration of the birth of a radical who said things like, “Do not lay up for yourselves an earthly treasure. Moths and rust corrode; thieves break in and steal. Make it your practice instead to store up spiritual treasure.”

Consumption, “laying up earthly treasure,” is the foundation of our economy - even our patriotic duty; after 9/11 our President told us to “go shopping.” The original meaning of the word “consumption” referred to a progressive wasting disease of the body; the disease “used up” and “wasted away” the body. Our consumption “uses up” and “wastes away” the Earth’s ecosystems. And now, at this time of year, consumption becomes more than just our national duty; it is a measure of our character - kind and giving people buy stuff; mean and selfish people don’t buy stuff. It is important to remember that it is possible to be kind, generous and giving without buying anything.

In these difficult times give yourself permission to shirk your consumptive duties. Buying less stuff is a major way to contribute to saving the environment; see this as your gift to the earth. Choose one person with whom you traditionally exchange gifts and make a mutual agreement to not buy anything for each other during the holidays from now on. Consider non-material ways to express love and appreciation for those you care about. Sing songs with your family. Play games with your children. Do something kind for someone less fortunate. Be creative.

May your holidays be filled with spiritual treasure.

The Pump Is Not the Well
~ Jim Anderson, November 08

“Few people realize that the marvelous advances in technology made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well.” - Aldo Leopold

     Our system of consumer capitalism is based upon an accounting error: it liquidates its capital and calls it income. As we learned from collapsed fisheries in the North East, overfishing takes more resources out of the account than the “interest” (the sustainable yield) it generates. In modern economic theory Nature doesn’t really exist - “resources” enter from stage left and waste products exit stage right. What matters is the profit-generating “pump.”
     Take a dollar bill out of your wallet. This is the “water” the pump extracts. These bills are your connection with the earth. Instead of working directly with the earth to get what you need, you use these bills to buy what you need. Right now the pump is extracting about 55 trillion of these bills every year (the GDP of all the nations on earth.)
      Economic crises are problems with the pump; overworked parts begin to fail. Our present “liquidity crisis” is a pumping systems failure involving the “credit default swap” market. Credit default swaps are derivatives that “insure” securitized mortgage tranches. Credit default swaps now total $63 trillion - more than the GDP of all the countries on earth. The failing $63 trillion market for credit default swaps was leveraged speculation on securitized tranches, which were leveraged speculation upon failing mortgages, which were based upon falling home values, which were determined by those bills you carry in your wallet, which are pieces of paper used to buy wood and other house-building materials, which come from the earth. The ecosystems of the earth (our “well”) are finite and are being depleted by a failing and overheated pump. Repairing it is a temporary band-aid. We need a new pump. A slower one.
      Finding ways to slow down, save more and buy less is not only good financial advice in these scary times but it is good for the earth.

We Are All Survivalists
~ Jim Anderson, October 08
     When we hear that someone is “living off the land” the image is often of a “survivalist” on a homestead far off in the mountains. However, the truth of the matter is that we are all survivalists living off the land. It’s just that the land we survive on now is spread over the entire earth and lies at the distant beginning of an immensely complicated system. We still live off the land, but we are strangers to the land which supports us.
If we take the total amount of this land us survivalists need to survive and divide it by the current human population we get about 4.5 acres per person. If we then set aside one fifth of that land for humans (huge for just 1 species) and leave the other 80% for all the other millions of species we get a little less than 1 acre per human.
     The current amount of land required to support the average American is 24 acres. Consequently, if everyone on earth lived like Americans (as they would all dearly love to do) it would require 5 more planet Earth’s to support us all. This is what is meant by the word “unsustainable.”
     You can go to www.earthday.net to find out how much land currently supports you now. Also, look for a survey coming soon to the Evergreen website where you can examine the environmental impacts of your lifestyle. This Environmental Audit will provide a way for you, in your personal life, to become a participant in our fellowship’s Green Sanctuary project.

The Value of Life
~ Jim Anderson, September 2008
     The EPA has begun calculating the “Value of a Statistical Life” to determine whether environmental regulations are worth the “cost” of imposing them. They recently lowered this estimate from $8,040,000 to $7,220,000. So now a regulation that could be estimated to save 100 lives is “worth” $722,000,000 rather than $804,000,000.
     It is interesting that this only considers the “value” of, first, an American life and, second, a human life. What, one wonders, is the “value” of the life of an Ethiopian? Or the “value” of the life of a Pileated Woodpecker?
Our system of consumer capitalism strongly urges us to measure our worth - our “value” - in dollar terms. David Korten looked at this in When Corporations Rule the World. He said, “When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.”
     It is difficult to step out of this “collective, suicidal insanity.” Many people would agree with these sentiments but, given the nature of our species, there is a difference between the values we express verbally to each other and the values that show up in our behavior.
     Examine your purchasing behavior. Does it express your values? When you buy something, first pause and ask yourself some questions: “Do I really need this?” “How did the production, packaging, shipping and storage of this item affect the people involved in those processes?” “How did those processes help or harm the earth?”