Refugia Newsletter #62
EU restoration law, plastic poisons, depaving, degrowth, Wild Church, and dormant seeds
Refugia News
February always seems like the longest month to me, and this year the month-that-drags-on even had an extra day in it. Here in Michigan, we commemorated Leap Day (I guess?) with bizarre weather: 70ºF on Tuesday followed by 20ºF on Wednesday and Thursday.
Thankfully, that ridiculously warm day was precisely the day I had scheduled to take my environmental literature students outdoors for a service day at our university’s greenhouses. There we spent an hour moving flat after flat of native perennials, bucket-brigade style, from their winter spot outdoors and into a greenhouse space, where they can start waking up for spring. It’s not quite as much fun as planting little plants in the mud, but we had a good time trying to pass the names of all the plants down the line as we handed the flats along. Our little task was part of all the nitty-gritty work required to propagate many thousands of native plants, which the university uses to heal and restore our watershed through our Plaster Creek Stewards program.
My students moving a flat of swamp milkweed. Image credit: Hanna De La Vega
And now, my university has arrived, after many long weeks in our semester’s epic journey, upon that temporary haven, the mythical land of Spring Break. Husband Ron and I are celebrating with a day-long Dune marathon today, capped by heading out to the theater to see the new movie. I shall try not to yammer on too much about drought, deforestation, colonial exploitation, and other climate-related topics that are obviously relevant.
This Week in Climate News
The last two weeks in climate news have delivered a standard mix of bad news/good news. Let’s start with a couple of the many, many encouraging stories about restoration work around the world. Then, I’m afraid, we’ll be talking about plastics.
First: ecosystem restoration. The European Union’s parliament passed a law this week to make ecosystem restoration a binding goal for European states. The law has been in the works since at least 2021, and aims to help Europe meet global biodiversity goals agreed to earlier, including the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a non-binding plan for conserving 30% of land and 30% of marine ecosystems by 2030.
According to detailed coverage in Carbon Brief, the new EU law—which still needs to be approved by the EU Council—“aims to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030.”
Within this wider goal, countries need to restore 30% of habitats covered by the new law (including forests, rivers and wetlands) that are already degraded by 2030. This increases to 60% by 2040 and at least 90% by 2050.
From what I can discern, the law is really about prioritizing the very worst spots for immediate action in order to achieve maximum early impact. The law gives each country latitude for how they’re going to meet their goals, but the idea is to urge countries to focus on “degraded” ecosystems, based on a European Environment Agency (EEA) 2020 “state of nature in the EU” report.
While there is some opposition to the law, and the final version is somewhat watered down compared to earlier versions, Europeans are overwhelmingly in favor of this kind of work:
More than 110,000 people and organisations responded to an online public consultation on the proposal in early 2021. The results showed “overwhelming support” for legally binding targets, with 97% of respondents in favour of general EU restoration targets across all ecosystems, the commission said.
The restoration work is expected to cost an estimated €154 billion, compared to the estimated €1.86 trillion in economic benefits accruing from these restorations by 2050.
For some reason, a lot of the photos associated with this story feature cranes. Image credit: W Schulenburg, birdguides.com
Ecosystem restoration depends on big visions and goals, but implementing those goals comes down to sweaty tasks like depaving a parking lot, for example. A nice little article by Chris Baraniuk for the BBC featured a nonprofit group in Portland, Oregon, called Depave. They help remove “unnecessary” pavements, restore soil, and plant native plants and trees. More “spongey” areas in cities help with water management and bring many other benefits, including increased wildlife, shade, beauty, and mental health improvements. Baraniuk, interviewing Katherine Rose, writes that the group has
depaved more than 33,000 sq m (360,000 sq ft) of asphalt in Portland alone since 2008 – an area equivalent to nearly four and a half football pitches. The work is “joyous”, says Rose, because it unites enthusiastic local volunteers. They get a safety briefing and then muck in together.
I noted that the project Rose was working on during the interview was a church parking lot. Hmmm.
Image credit and caption: BBC
The article goes on to note projects in Ontario, Belgium, France, and Australia. Depaving to create pocket ecosystems is becoming an effective tool in urban design. But it has to start with local groups working together to make it happen.
All right, time to deal with plastics. I’ve noticed that eco-minded students at my university often more or less equate environmental work with recycling. They just don’t have enough experience and knowledge—yet—to realize that recycling, while a good thing to do (at least theoretically), is not going to address the roots of the climate crisis. They are just beginning to understand that waste management, and plastics in particular, are a much, much bigger problem than even virtuous recycling programs can fix.
In this excellent interview with Dr. Leonardo Trasande by Steve Curwood featured in Inside Climate News, Trasande discusses a recent study on the health harms of plastics. Not just plastic waste, but the plastics we are exposed to constantly, the plastics in our lungs and bloodstreams. Curwood writes:
Plastic trash is ugly enough, but the invisible host of chemicals [plastics] contain wreak havoc on the hormone systems of the human body, leading to devastating and costly health outcomes.
A recent study published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society found in 2018 alone disease and disability caused by chemicals in plastic cost the U.S. a whopping quarter of a trillion dollars in health and economic losses.
Trasande remarks:
We all have a little bit of that Pacific garbage patch in our bodies, and it’s harming us, it’s hacking our hormones and contributing to disease and disability. So we not only need to get rid of waste from plastic, we need to reduce our use and production of plastics, period.
The problem is that plastics are extremely cheap, useful, and profitable. Plastics are made from petrochemicals, and this is how the fossil fuel companies are currently planning to continue making huge profits as fossil fuel use declines.
Image credit: Arielle Samuelson
If plastic exposure is problematic for all us, it’s far worse for those living near the big petrochemical hubs in Louisiana and Texas, for example. This article by Arielle Samuelson of Heated features the environmental justice leaders in Port Arthur, Texas, which Samuelson describes as “ground zero for some of the worst pollution in the country.” People who live in this town have a cancer rate 18 percent higher than the Texas average, along with higher rates of other health issues like heart and respiratory problems.
It seems every week I come across a whiz-bang story about some microbe that can break down plastics. Which is great! But while we’re trying to cope with the unimaginable tons of plastic trash already floating around and piling up, we’re also producing much, much more. Only about 9% gets recycled worldwide and even recycling can be extremely problematic.
Image credit: Duncan Moore, UNEP
In fact, Arielle Samuelson followed up her Port Arthur article with another piece in Heated that dropped yesterday, titled “Plastic Recycling is a Scam.” This one explores how the fossil fuel industry has known all along that plastics recycling is largely an illusion. We have the receipts on that.
The United Nations Environment Assembly is working on a global plastics treaty to address the full life cycle of plastics. The treaty is set to be completed late this year. What to do in the meantime? Well, according to Trasande, reduce plastic use. Avoid plastics numbered 3, 6, and 7. Don’t heat plastic in the microwave or the dishwasher (oops—I do that every day—urghh!).
Bonus news: If you ever want a brisk, reliable summary that answers the question “How are we doing on addressing the climate crisis overall right now,” try this nifty eight-minute video by atmospheric physicist and climate communicator Simon Clark. (Thanks to the Pique Action people for recommending this. Note: The last few minutes of the video are a pitch for Nebula, a paid platform for more climate news. I haven’t tried Nebula, so I can’t recommend either way. )
Deeper Dive
Well, that was a lot of news! So let’s keep the deeper dive simple—never mind, just kidding, we’re going to talk about economics.
Last time, to honor the Christian liturgical seasons of Lent, I wrote about giving up or reducing consumption of meat. Wanna go deeper? OK, here goes.
I’ve written before about how certain economic ideas are so entrenched as to be sacrosanct. Chief among these is: growth. Economies must grow, or: apocalypse. At least, that’s the conventional wisdom. However, since “growth fundamentalism” has led us to gravely serious ecological overshoot as well as gravely serious injustices, economists have been playing around with (don’t panic, but) degrowth.
This article by Bob Berwyn for Inside Climate News summarizes a new paper on alternative growth strategies and neatly outlines various approaches to getting beyond idolizing a burgeoning GDP. Berwyn interviews paper author and sustainability researcher Manfred Lenzen, noting that
Lenzen also co-authored a 2021 paper describing a “degrowth” alternative to the existing IPCC options, based on the idea of shrinking economies in rich countries in a controlled way by reducing production and consumption, in order to protect natural resources and reduce environmental damage while improving well-being.
The idea is to rein in rich economies while also seeking appropriate kinds of growth in developing countries. The goal is not to deprive anyone, but to reduce wasteful and damaging consumption while paying better attention to health and happiness for everyone.
We have already achieved “decoupling,” a term that refers to the way that, thanks to cheap renewable energy, an economy can now reduce fossil fuel consumption and still keep growing. In fact, we often hear hear about “green growth.” It’s an appealing idea and that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now, but the math and timing are rather tricky, as the article explains.
Of course we need a graph at this point!
Berwyn also interviews ecologist William Ripple, a co-author of the paper:
“As our current predicament makes clear, business-as-usual isn’t working and continued economic growth in wealthy countries isn’t sustainable,” Ripple said. “This motivated us to call for a shift toward post-growth economics where quality of life and societal wellbeing are the main priority.”
Speaking of degrowth, I am intrigued by recent indicators that oil stocks are starting to lose their former luster and power. In a New York Times piece, Manuela Andreoni explains:
A study published this month by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio-based think tank, found that stock-price indexes (or broad baskets of stocks) that excluded the fossil fuel industry performed slightly better than those that didn’t in the past decade.
The situation is not straightforward or simple, but one IEEFA financial analyst told Andreoni that “what we are seeing is a decline of the fossil fuel industry.”
Refugia Sighting
Speaking of degrowth and Lenten practices, the Green Sabbath Project urges everyone, faith or no faith, to observe a true Sabbath once a week and focus on rest—rest from spending, consuming, working, and making demands of creation as best we can. The Green Sabbath website explains:
We envision individuals and groups choosing whichever day is most meaningful to them. While inspired by ancient religious sources, the green sabbath is a self-consciously refashioned ritual practice aimed at addressing current realities. As taken up by individuals and communities, it may or may not be connected to organized religion or God.
We may recall from the pandemic quarantine that slowing down can make a big difference in carbon emissions and wildlife health. The Sabbath, as described in Scriptures, is intended as a form of care for non-human creatures as well as for humans.
I also want to feature the Wild Church Network—finally! I learned about this group after I wrote Refugia Faith or I would have mentioned them in the book. They are a loose affiliation of folks trying to do church in a way that reconnects people to place and nature. They represent one great approach to refugia church. Victoria Loorz describes the vision in her book Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us Into the Sacred (Broadleaf, 2021).
Many wild churches worship outdoors, experiment with alternative worship actions, and engage in advocacy. One group, in Marquette, Michigan, explains on their website:
We are rooted in Christ and the teachings- we do not 'worship nature' we worship in nature a God who created ALL things. We are a cross-denominational entity that brings forth a lot of ancient Christian wisdom especially from the desert mother/fathers, the lives of the Saints, and modeling after Christ.
Wendy Janzen, who helped found the network in North America on the model of UK “forest churches,” emphasizes that the church where she pastors, Burning Bush Forest Church in Kitchener, Ontario, attracts people who have left traditional churches as well as people “supplementing” their regular congregation. She observes:
People are longing for ways to connect with creation. Some people enjoy more contemplative worship so that might be what draws them. I think a lot of people would say that nature has always been a place where they’ve sensed God’s presence, so it’s a natural fit for them to come to a worship service that’s outside.
The Not-So-Wayback Machine
Another Lenten reflection for you today. I wrote this essay for Feb. 24 on the Reformed Journal blog. “Unless a Seed Falls” combines observations about the native planting areas in my yard with some thoughts about John 12. You can hear the conversation that inspired the post on the Green Lectionary Podcast in the episode releasing on March 8.
Now it’s February, the snow’s temporary modesty panel melted away, and my little patch is exposed in winter nakedness. Even I have to admit, it looks terrible: broken, rotting stalks, bare dirt, no happy winged visitors. I tell myself there are over-wintering insects in there, that native roots are strong, that spring is coming. But right now: stillness, death.
That’s it for now. Till next time, be well!
(As always bold type in quotations is added.)