Guest columnist David H. has been a newspaper editor and reporter for more than 20 years and now works for a large daily in the New York/New Jersey metro area. He also regularly attends a small Mennonite church, where there is frequently a focus on social needs and Christian-service responses.
During a Sunday School presentation I was made aware of another unintended consequence of the short-sighted US effort to produce more ethanol. It seemed like something we might want to discuss at this blog.
The United States is the world’s largest corn producer. According to an industry organization, this country produced nearly 257 million metric tons of corn in 2003. Nearly 20 percent of that crop was exported, making the US by far the world’s largest corn exporter as well (we account for nearly 65 percent of the corn exported around the world).
While 2007 is shaping up to have a larger export than 2006, the world reality is that corn prices are climbing because of weak crops in countries like China and Brazil, but especially because of US demand for corn to meet the exploding demand for ethanol. President Bush has called for the U.S. to be using 35 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2017. A lofty goal considering U.S. ethanol production in 2006 was less than 5 billion gallons. Read the rest of this entry »
12-13-2007 |
5 Comments »The following is excerpted from an interview with Ruth Padilla Deborst in the August 2007 issue of Christianity Today. Padilla Deborst is a distinguished theologian and educator and current president of the Latin American Theological Fellowship. She will be a featured presenter at the 2007 OTM conference Hear. Listen. Connect.
What good, if any, can come from North American Christians having such a concentration of wealth and power?
I don’t think it’s very useful to say, I’m sorry I have so much power. I wish I didn’t have it. Or for individual North Americans to try to erase that inequality personally. You could step out of the grid, but the grid still exists. Rather, I think you need to say, I do have power. Whom is it supposed to serve?
The free-trade agreements between our countries are supposedly about giving people opportunity. There’s something to that: Part of human dignity is the capacity to work. But people need to be granted that option. How can free-trade agreements really be free when this country subsidizes its agriculture and other industries in order to favor its own interests? North American Christians can do something about this with their own political power - by calling for trade agreements that are both free and fair.
Read the rest of this entry »07-30-2007 |
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“As part of this insane and suicidal economy, we act as though the resources we consume are infinite and the wastes we deposit are invisible. Just as our bodies consume food and produce excrement, in this economy we consume trees and produce smoke, consume clean air and produce smog, consume clean water and produce sewage and toxic waste, consume rock and produce radiation, consume oil and coal and produce gases that turn our planet into an overheating oven in which storms boil and oceans rise and deserts spread and forests wither. Our prosperity system thus becomes an excrement factory.”– Brian McLaren, from a preview of Everything Must Change
07-23-2007 |
12 Comments »This article was originally posted on Dave Richard’s blog in February 2006 and he has graciously given his permission for us to repost it here. Dave is a co-founder of Off The Map and a microfinance expert. Dave cares passionately about economic empowerment and you can learn more about innovative solutions for ending global poverty on his blog.
I discovered a new microfinance service called Kiva which is attempting to truly enable person-to-person loans between a loan provider in developed countries and a low-income borrower in developing country.
I am very interested in these kind of innovations because there are currently very few options for middle-class North Americans to invest (not donate) their money in helping very low-income microentrepreneurs start or expand their microbusinesses in order to grow their income and break cycles of generational poverty.
Kiva is using technology to keep the costs of this kind of personalized service to a minimum. Here’s how it works. You go to the Kiva web site and browse through a selection of pre-reviewed loan applications. You get to read an overview of the borrower (including photo), what business they want to invest money in, what size of loan they are requesting and how much they have raised so far. Once you’ve found someone you’d like to make a loan to, you can instantly (using Paypal) make a loan for a portion (minimum $25) or all of the remaining loan ask size. All of the money is managed by Kiva’s web service with human intervention so it is very cost efficient and scalable.
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07-16-2007 |
4 Comments »Found this today from wikipedia:
A warmonger is, pejoratively, someone who is anxious to encourage a people or nation to go to war. It is often used to describe militaristic leaders, or mercenaries, commonly with the implication that they either may have selfish motives for encouraging war, or may actually enjoy war.
By etymology a warmonger is literally a seller of war, from monger used as a transitive verb, meaning a peddler.
The etymology bit is fascinating. Fishmongers sell fish, and warmongers sell war. Selling things is partially about dollars. Have you all seen this counter?
07-04-2007 |
8 Comments »“Fair trade needs to move from guilt to solidarity. Guilt is a demeaning emotion. It’s another way of exerting one’s superiority. And it’s repulsive to the recipients. Pity doesn’t recognize the humanity, the equality, of working people. They don’t want pity. They don’t want a special break - they want an even break.”
- Adam Neiman, founder of No Sweat Apparel
This quote was excerpted from the May issue of Sojourners magazine in an article entitled What Would Yeshua Wear?, which also mentions our very own Joe Turner. Hurray for Joe!
05-06-2007 |
7 Comments »Over this last week I’ve had a couple smallish opportunities to do something smallish and been encouraged in both of them. First of all I finally followed up on a suggestion from Julie Clawson, and bought fair trade sugar from Amazon. We had run out of sugar (probably not a bad thing) and so I though it an ideal time. However, I was feeling a little guilty, because this sugar costs 4 times “normal” sugar, and we are not exactly in brilliant financial straits at this time. My friend Karl (a Mennonite, interestingly), encouraged me in this. He said that I am simply assuming the full fair price of the sugar, instead of outsourcing that full cost to someone else who is actually a lot worse off than me financially. This made me feel good. I also felt stoked when I actually received the box full of 10 one pound boxes of sugar via Amazon. I read the little blurb on the back about the Alter Trade Foundation and their Alter Eco Products, and I felt rather proud of myself.
The other thing I did this last week was inspired by Anna and by something Brian Mclaren said at an event I recently went to. He said that one of the evil results of nationalism is that nobody cares about any place. That is, we think of ourselves as Americans, and thus not as a member of this little neighborhood above Nathan Hale High School. Brian said “Learn your address–not your street address–your environmental address. You live in a watershed. Something is happening in terms of water geographically and environmentally where you live. Check it out on google earth.” This got me to thinking about my particular watershed, and little old Thornton Creek down there and how stuff moves at various rates down into that, and gradually out into Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and the Pacific. And it made me notice litter. So I grabbed a plastic bag when my girls and I walked down to the park next to Thornton Creek, and we picked up litter along the way. My two preschool girls really got into. It became “It’s *my* turn to hold the bag” and “Look, there’s some more garbage–I’ll get it!”. Made me feel really good in lots of ways.
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05-02-2007 |
3 Comments »This is the text of a Letter to the Editor that was published last week in our local newspaper. It was written by my friend Marti Berger, who is active in the Save Darfur Coalition in our area.
Sudan divestment is critical
With Senate Bill 1089, the Oregon Human Rights and Anti-Genocide Act of 2005, our state divested its public funds from Sudan in acknowledgment of the genocide and humanitarian crisis taking place there, created and sustained by the government of Omar al Bashir, voted Parade Magazine’s “world’s worst dictator”.
In a January annual report to the legislative assembly, it was reported that $38 million had been reduced to identified companies in the region since the Act was instituted. Although I am proud that Oregon was one of the first of fewer than 10 states to divest, and the impact meaningful, it is not enough!
There is a current movement called Fidelity Out of Sudan. Fidelity Investments currently holds $1.2 billion in Petrochina, a Chinese oil company in the region. Given the fact that 70-80% of Sudan’s oil revenues are used to purchase weapons of war, Americans with investments in Fidelity are inadvertently funding the war. Please check with your financial planners to see if your money is invested in Fidelity and consider moving it unless the investment company changes its policy.
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04-30-2007 |
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Here is the latest installment in our series from artist Tim Nyberg.
Our industrialized economies are based upon the idea of continual economic growth. The advertisers generate need and the consumers buy ever more goods and services. It seems quite subversive and counter-cultural to question or challenge this system.
04-10-2007 |
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