Our Earth is in serious trouble and more than 11,000 scientists worldwide made that clear earlier this week when they released a report saying we are facing a “climate emergency.” Politicians, business representatives, and people in general have talked a lot about climate change over the past 40 years, these scientists say, but they “have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament.”
The report outlines six broad policy goals that must be implemented to address the crisis. It addresses population growth and calls for strengthening human rights for women and girls and making family-planning services available for all people. It calls for keeping coal and oil in the ground and never burning it to generate energy. It calls for a shift to eating mostly plant-based foods. It calls for reducing inequality over growing wealth. It calls for preserving intact forests that store carbon along with other lands that can rapidly bury carbon. And it calls for instituting agricultural practices that increase the amount of carbon the soil absorbs.
As you know, a team at St. Andrew Lutheran in Beaverton, OR has been busily surveying their suburban yards and studying their capacity to sequester and store more carbon—thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a major contributor to global warming. The lawns in their yards are the largest irrigated “crop” in the US, so it is not only farmers who need to act to enable more carbon to be fixed in the soil.
And the good news is that it’s not that hard or expensive to do! The Community Carbon yard team will share more of what they’ve learned with the congregation on November 24th. That’s also the Sunday that Kristin Ohlson, award-winning author of The Soil Will Save Us, will be at St. Andrew to share the hope she encountered in researching and writing her book.
Please join the St. Andrew community at 9:45 am on Sunday, November 24th, in Fellowship Hall for a special Adult Education session featuring Kristin Ohlson. Invite your friends, members of your garden club, and others so that we can spread the word far and wide. We’ve talked a good talk and now it’s time to walk the walk.
St. Andrew Lutheran
12405 SW Butner Rd,
Beaverton, OR 97005
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