Refugia Newsletter #44

Native plantings, youth in court, the battery economy, and nature therapy

Refugia News

Well! So much for imagining that Michigan is a great place to hide out from climate impacts. This past week, we won the (unofficial) “Worst Air Quality Anywhere” award with several days in the red and purple zones on the AQI meter—Unhealthy and Very Unhealthy—with readings up in the 250s for a while. It was gross. Hazy, dense, and icky to breathe. I mostly stayed inside and worked at my desk. Did I feel an ominous rumbling of apocalyptic anxiety? Yes. Yes, I did.

Thankfully, we had a good rain Thursday night and Friday was better, but we may be in for more particulate-laden air as winds shift.

The Canadian wildfires continue to burn—despite heroic efforts by Canadian and US firefighters—and send smoke swirling around with the weather patterns. Here’s a snapshot from Friday morning from the EPA’s AirNow website. The glowy dots are fires in Canada, the gray areas are smoke, and the colored dots indicate how much particulate matter is in the air. Sorry, East Coast. The ick is coming back to you now.

Image credit: airnow.gov.

I wrote about the EPA’s website and mobile app last time, and boy did I make use of it this week. Highly recommend.

Meanwhile, we’ve been putting in our front yard native garden. Or trying to! The intrepid young women doing the labor had to quit in the middle of the day on Tuesday. They were all getting headaches and feeling dizzy from the air. On Friday, they came back and finished the work. Here’s an in-process photo. Final results photo at the end of the newsletter!

In process. The professionals from Native Edge use that nifty drill to create nice holes for the plant plugs. Cool!

One more thing before we get going here. Substack has a new feature that allows subscribers to get credit for referrals. In other words, if you refer other people to the newsletter, Substack will keep track of that. And you can get prizes! In my case, the prizes are pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean this couldn’t get competitive. There’s a leaderboard and everything!

I’ve noticed that a lot of people read the newsletter but haven’t yet actually subscribed. So why not get more people to sign up, so that the newsletter plops conveniently into their email every two weeks? Current subscribers will be receiving a separate email about all this today. Watch for it! And thank you.

This Week in Climate News

Two quick things and then a great story about youth activism and legal solutions.

Divestment

Which institutions have divested their money from fossil fuel companies so far? You can find out. Thanks to Rev. Jim Antal for showing me this amazing website that tracks fossil fuel divestment. Total divestment so far is estimated at (gulp) over $40 TRILLION. And check out how important faith-based are in the overall global divestment movement. Wow!

Image credit: divestmentdatabase.org

COP 28 and Lobbyists

If you’ve wondered why on earth this year’s global meeting on climate, COP28, is happening in the United Arab Emirates and presided over by the CEO of an oil company, well, yeah. You’re not the only one to imagine there could be some, say, conflicts of interest there.

Finally, the UN has recognized that fossil fuel lobbying and influence over COP (COP means “Conference of the Parties”) has gotten WAY out of hand. Hence, this year, there will be some new rules. Every attendee must now disclose any affiliations with any entity, including fossil fuel companies. These affiliations will be public.

Wait, you say, you mean they didn’t have to do that before? Correct. Hence there have been plenty of fossil fuel spies, essentially, influencing the proceedings. Last year, at COP27, there were over 600 fossil fuel lobbyists running around. This article by Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News explains.

Meanwhile, ya gotta love United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who continues to deliver bracing straight talk. He’s not afraid to call the fossil fuel industry “the polluted heart of the climate crisis.” “Let’s face facts,” he says. “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels—period.”

Montana Court Case

Did you know that there are youth-led cases filed in every state in the U.S. intended to hold states legally accountable for protecting the environment? I so admire how youth climate activists are doing much more than marching in the streets. They are working the systems.

The case in Montana is now in court, as of June 12. This article by Richard Forbes describes Held vs. Montana in detail, and offers inspiring portraits of four of the sixteen young people involved in the case, including Rikki Held, whose name will forever be associated with the case:

The first of the lawsuits brought by young people in the United States to go to court, their lawsuit hinges on Montana’s Constitution, which guarantees its citizens the right to a clean and healthful environment. Rikki and the other plaintiffs claim that Montana’s state energy policy (which was recently repealed, likely due to the lawsuit) and the state’s methods of environmental review are unconstitutional. The state, they claim, by prioritizing the extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the warnings of decades of science, is breaking its own laws. And to many observers, the Montana legislature’s actions in the lead-up to the trial show that the state is taking the plaintiffs’ suit seriously.

Deeper Dive

What is up with batteries? That’s the question we’ll tackle this week. It seems every day we hear more about clean energy investments and build-out and grids and argh! It’s so complicated! Financial Times recently reported that clean energy investments in 2023 are forecast to be $1.7 trillion, compared to $1 trillion in fossil fuels. So, good and bad there (bad = $1t in fossil fuel investments). But of course, when we generate tons of clean energy, we have to move it around, hence grid infrastructure, and we have to store it. Hence: batteries.

Image credit: Financial Times

So, what are the problems we’re dealing with?

Raw materials

With the explosion in demand for batteries, we need more of the materials that go into batteries, particularly lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite.

U.S. officials say that the global supply of lithium alone needs to increase by 42 times by 2050 to meet the rising demand for electric vehicles. Projections by the International Energy Agency suggest that global demand for lithium will grow by 42 times by 2040. [source—also linked below]

That means two problems: politics and mining. We are now facing a shift in geo-politics. Countries with lithium or cobalt suddenly find themselves with high-demand items they want to dig up fast. Will they do it the old-fashioned way, with exploited labor and by ruining the land for generations? Are we facing a new period of colonialism, where powerful countries exploit less powerful ones? Sure, if nations are not held to account about it. In the Congo, for instance, “artisanal mining” is a euphemism for modern slavery. This story by Katie Surma in Inside Climate News sums up human rights and environmental challenges around battery resource mining—and what human rights groups and nations are doing about it. And here’s a piece in an industry news source about making mining more sustainable.

The upside, of course, is that mining for minerals is not the sort of constant, endless resource extraction that burning coal, oil, and gas has been. Still.

Processing

Someone’s got to process the raw materials and make the batteries. Right now, that’s mostly China and South Korea.

Image credit: Paul Horn, Inside Climate News

Well, the U.S. wants to change that, securing supply and manufacturing chains that don’t depend so much on China. That means politics, negotiations, incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and more. This article by Ana Swanson in the New York Times sums up some of the power dynamics around this process. Bottom line: a lot of careful diplomacy and trade deals.

Battery Tech

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to improve batteries for all kinds of uses. One of the Chinese giants, CATL, has just announced a new and better lithium-based, semi-solid-state battery,

a next-generation battery that will have an energy density of up to 500 watt-hours per kilogram, which is roughly double the energy density of the leading batteries on the market—a difference that will lead to longer range before needing to recharge.

So, more punch without making it hugely bigger or heavier.

But EV batteries are not the whole story. Non-lithium technologies, like sodium-ion batteries and iron-air batteries, could be useful for grid applications or “stationary storage.” If you don’t have to cart them around in cars, batteries can be bigger, and that opens the door to other tech. This article by Casey Crownhart in the MIT Technology Review summarizes a range of battery innovations in the works for all kinds of applications, and mentions some battery recycling initiatives, too.

The New Grid

OK, so how do we create an energy grid based on clean energy, like solar and wind, that doesn’t “produce” every minute? Well, basically you store the energy. In batteries. This could mean that every household will have a battery, connected to your rooftop solar and the grid. The battery system will be “smart” enough to know where to draw energy from at a given moment. Sun shining brightly? Draw from the panels and store the extra; use later. Run out of battery power? Draw from the grid.

Hey, maybe we can somehow attach all our batteries together, to make a new kind of grid, like a “virtual power plant”? Yep, that’s happening. According to reporting by Dan Gearino:

After years of pilot projects, utilities and battery companies now have networks with thousands of participants in California, Utah and Vermont, among others.

The batteries in virtual power plants add megawatts of capacity to the grid when electricity demand is at its highest. And most of the electricity from the batteries is generated by rooftop solar.

All this to say: how are we doing on batteries? It’s all happening very, very fast.

Refugia Sighting

Time for another Three Questions Interview feature! I’m delighted to introduce you to Kimberly Knight. Kimberly—if I may attempt to sum things up—creates refugia spaces for others in partnership with the natural world.

She is a graduate of Candler School of Theology and an Association of Nature Forest Therapy certified guide. She is also a former aerial photographer and zoo instructor, a digital strategist, a counselor, spiritual practice teacher, and more. Originally from the Southern U.S., she now lives in Leiden, the Netherlands, with her wife.

These days, Kimberly is “Chief Shenanigator” (love it) for Wildwood Wisdom, which leads Wild Church in Leiden along with numerous other programs. This October, with her collaborator Rachel Pinto, Kimberly will be leading an Our Sacred Nature Retreat near Little Rock, Arkansas—a retreat held by and for LGBTQIA+ people.

For more, see Kimberly’s website. Check out Our Sacred Nature retreat information. And learn more about Rachel Pinto, owner/director of Cardinal Counseling in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Kimberly, what does it mean to be a Nature and Forest Therapy Certified Guide and how did you decide to become certified?

As a Forest Therapy Guide, I get to partner with the forest to facilitate gentle, mindfully sequenced walks, offering invitations for sensory-opening activities to participants along the way. As we say, the forest is the therapist, the guide opens the doors. 

My journey to certification as a Nature and Forest Therapy Guide was a long and winding path that ultimately led away from the tamed world of institutional religion in the American South to a verdant life and faith in the beautiful forests of Western Europe, most especially the parks, polders, and forests of The Netherlands.

Eight years before I landed in Amsterdam with my wife, I graduated from Candler School of Theology, just a stone’s throw from Atlanta, Georgia. And as it turns out, just about the time I sat in my first Biblical exegesis class, I also tiptoed over the closet’s threshold to come out into the light of my truth as a lesbian. 

By the time I graduated with my M.Div., I’d served as a chaplain in training at a senior living facility, a women’s college, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Then I jumped right out of seminary and into a variety of contexts, from being the circuit rider for The Beatitudes Society to later serving the UCC at the national level as the minister of digital community for Extravagance UCC and, nerdily enough, as director of digital strategy for Agnes Scott College.

Fast forward to late one night in November of 2016, sitting on a couch with my soon-to-be wife, we decided to look for an opportunity for her to return to teaching in international schools in Europe. 

Fast forward again to the pandemic, and I am working at the American School of The Hague where my wife was hired as an English literature teacher. Though my work there allowed me to serve a fantastic community of teachers, students, and families, the role of Administrative Assistant was not exactly one in which the fullness of my heart and mind could flourish. 

So, I reached back to my formation in ministry and forward to start exploring the Dutch countryside, searching for new roots in my adoptive homeland. In my wandering and wondering, I (re)connected with a sense of wholeness in the presence of Creation and experienced, deep in my old bones, a sense of numinous love permeating every living being. 

Pursuing certification as a Nature and Forest Therapy guide felt like the next step in responding to the still-small voice that calls me to share a wild love for the world with others, inviting them into their own encounters with wholeness. Everything I learned in the training and keep learning as a guide affirms that I've reconnected with the Ground of my being and am living into my calling.

You mentioned in a video about the Our Sacred Nature Retreat that many queer folx finally feel a sense of relief and transformation about their own value when they reconnect with nature. Why is that, in your experience? 

My process of evolving faith has not so much been a deconstruction; it has been a process of rewilding. I have not been not lost in the wilderness; I am found in the wilderness.

What I found, or what found me, is a transcendent acceptance in the forest, where my heart and mind have flourished in ways I would have never anticipated. 

My particular queerness is most alive when I am experiencing awe and delight in a vast meadow, or deep peace in the cool tranquility of a forest, or quiet refreshment by a gentle stream, and connection to the wheel of the year that celebrates the earth’s natural cycles. Anyone, especially LGBTQIA+ individuals, can find solace and acceptance in the natural world, fostering deep self-acceptance, resilience, and spiritual renewal. 

The tree that I behold, who beholds me in return, does not discriminate based on any human construct—not gender, not race, not ideology, not nationality, not on abilities I may have or lack, and never, ever on the bases of gender identity or sexual orientation. In an infinite web of reciprocity, we are connected, that tree and I. 

By living into our interconnectedness with all beings and disentangling ourselves from the limits imposed upon us by the church and the industrial growth society, we can tap into deep solace in creation's embrace. The wild diversity in nature reflects the shimmering tapestry of our human diversity, constantly reminding us that we are an essential thread woven into the complex fabric of life. As a nature therapy guide, I have had the honor to witness other people, queer folx especially, encounter a deep sense of peace, connection, and authenticity. 

For me, forest bathing, outdoor spiritual care, and nature retreats are practices for rewilding self and soul. In these experiences, I invite others to become rooted in a deep sense of belonging, empowering us to explore and celebrate our inherent sacred worth together. 

What have you learned about the intersection of faith and climate work from living in the Netherlands?

This is a very interesting question because what I have learned in this largely secular country, with a significant portion of the population identifying as non-religious or having a nominal religious affiliation, is that never the twain shall meet. While the Netherlands is known for its active stance on climate change and a commitment to sustainability, the intersection of faith and climate work is not commonly emphasized or discussed as far as I understand. The focus here in Holland tends to be on logical, scientific solutions and policy measures to reverse climate change and promote sustainable practices. 

Here we are indeed free to live our lives of faith as we may see fit, as long as that does not limit the lived freedom of others. What I have observed of the existing pockets of Dutch Christianity is that it is quite literal and Calvinist, with no significant interest in spiritual ecology. But, because mijn nederlands is niet zo goed, it is rather likely that I'm missing aspects of Dutch religiosity undetected by my very limited American lens. 

To be honest though, the clear separation between secular society and faith has freed me to connect more deeply with the divine in unfettered, tangible ways that I look forward to sharing with folx back home.

Bonus Question! What’s the latest really good book you’ve read?

I just finished the novel Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and wow! I listened to the audiobook and loved the whole ride, literally, as I listened to it while commuting to and from work through the cities and farmland via my trusty Dutch e-bike. Catton's characters and story are powerful and disturbing gifts we need right now.

The Wayback Machine

Eh. Never mind the wayback. Instead, I’ll leave you with that photo I promised. In fact, here are two. This is our new little front-yard refugium, freshly planted and ready to grow. Thanks to Native Edge, a local ecology-focused landscape design business, for designing and installing.

Almost done! Thanks to Jamie, Miah, and (on the first day) Bethany for their work in very sweaty humidity.

Ta da!! Grow, little native plants!

May you reap blessing from all the good things you sow in the world.