Daddy's Cheap Arse Recpies

As a stay at home dad I decided to make as much of my own stuff as possible. To start with that's Dishwashing powder and washing powder. It's heaps cheaper and good for the environment. I was asked by a friend "are the recipes on your blog?" well now they are...

Clothes Washing Powder

5 cups shaved soap or Lux flakes
2 cups washing soda
2 cups bicarbonate of soda
2 cups of borax

Mix & Use 2 tablespoons per wash.

Dishwashing Powder

50% Borax
50% Washing Soda

2 Table spoons per wash

White Vinegar in the rinse aid part of the machine

2 teaspoons per wash

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Next time you think you hear someone say "reduce, reuse, recycle" listen carefully to see if "reduce" is actually there. The last couple of times I have heard a corporate entity use "reduce, reuse, recycle" they've replaced "reduce" with "renew" or some other synonym for "reuse" or "recycle". Why? because "reduce" means "buy less stuff" which no corporate entity wants to tell you to do. What's more if you "reduce" there's no need to ''reuse or recycle". ''Reduce" is surely the most important as it is about the way we live. "Reuse" and "recycle" are just about what we do with our junk. I'm all for buying less and living with less.

I Want To Build An Earthship

Last week I watched the film Garbage Warrior. The story of Michael Reynolds, an architect who builds self sufficient homes made out of garbage. The houses are made out of tiyes, bottles & cans. all the power is solar and wind, all the water is collected, recycled including grey water through a vegetable growing green house at front of the house. with angled glass at the sun facing side of the house and a huge thermal mass in the back of the house.

I want to build one.

Apart from the obvious difficulty of building your own house finding a council that will let you build a house out of tyres that is not connected to any services will be all but impossible.

Below are a couple of clips to get you acquainted with Earthship buildings.

Climate Change Spoof Ad

The Folks at Get Up have brilliantly spoofed the Australian Government's recent climate change advertising.

It's one think something isn't important it's something else to try and convince the public that you do think it is important and that you are doing something about it. This spoof was just asking to be done.

Having trouble being Eco-Friendly

I'm probably a little bit more environmentally aware than most people. I'm aware that one of my big environmental problems is not using public transport. But, public transport is not an option. It takes me 25 minutes to drive to work and there is not a single pubic transport service that will get me to work before 9am and not one that will get me back home after 5pm. Not even if I get up at 5am it just doesn't exist. I live in the suburbs of Perth and out of my window I can see a train station so I'm not exactly living and working on the fringes, but yet this simple activity is not even an option. So what's the green thing to do?

Tomatoes!

For the few who are keen to know how the veggie patch is going. The answer is some good and some bad. Things are looking promising but self sustainability is a long way off unless I can learn to live solely on Tomatoes. They've been great, even growing in a bed where we hadn't put any seeds (with much thanks to the compost heap that has fertilised the veggie patch). This is the latest haul.


We'll eat some and dry the rest.

Ecotheology Part 3

Ecotheology Part 1, Ecotheology Part 2

Previosuly I mentioned I didn't like to use words like steward or priest to describe our relationship with the earth. I know that these are words the Bible uses so I'm now going revisit what I think are the Biblical meanings behind words like steward and priest. As I said before for almost all readers these are not helpful images, and arouse ideas over authority and domination. To help us rethink the these words I wanted to start by looking at the way God relates to us because I think there are similar power issues between God and humans.

Central to the relationship between humans and God is Christ, the servant king. Jesus becomes king by being a servant to all. Central to the relationship between God and humans is that any power within the relationship has been inverted. Jesus becomes king by being servant.

Similarly, Paul continues this way of thinking in Ephesians when, whilst agreeing with the thinking of his day that that men are the head or stewards of the household, (“In the Old Testament, the term steward usually refers to ‘the man over the house’, with responsibility to the master for the affairs of the household and his possessions, such as Daniel 1.11.”) he qualifies this by saying that a husband and wife are to serve each other. And, that a husband is to be a steward of his wife in the same way that Jesus is the head of the church, that is by being the exact opposite. To be King, steward or ruler, is to be servant. Once again in the same way the writer of Hebrews call’s Jesus our great High Priest, because of the sacrifice Jesus made for us.

To me to say that we should be stewards or priests is like reading Jesus phrase “first shall be last and the last shall be first” and telling people we need to be first. We may be called to be first but we do this need to by being last. Similarly, we may as Christians be called to be stewards of the earth but we don’t do that in a dominating the earth in an un-Christ like manner, we do it by being servants.

Now that we have looked at God’s relationship with us being one free from issues of control and one of harmony, rather than ruling over us. I would like to, with some liberty say that God’s relationship with us is in it’s essence creative. This is a theme I have mentioned before I would like to repeat a metaphor that I think of for describing the relationship between my self and God.

That metaphor is that of a Jazz band. Where I am the improvising soloist and God is the rhythm section. If I, the soloist, ignore what the God, rhythm section, is doing I am not going to sound good. By the same token the rhythm section does not dictate what my solo will sound like either. No matter how badly I play there is nothing the rhythm section can do to fix it. If I play exactly what the rhythm section is playing it will sound bland at best. What will sound best is when I am in tune to what the rhythm section is doing and I am able to freely and creatively expressing myself. As a soloist in a Jazz band there is no requirement of obedience, and there is more than just the freedom of playing alone. There is more than freedom there is harmony. The freedom of synergistically creating a sound with the rest of the band that is more beautiful than the individuals by themselves. So too I think is our relationship with God. The usual power paradigm of obedience or freedom, need to be replaced with paradigm of disunity or harmony.

Human relationships with God and with each other are by nature creative. There is not a formula or a method that we need to apply to them, creativity is not only what we have in common but is the space in which we are able to have relationship.

From this I conclude three things...

1. God wants to live in harmony with us, rather to rule us
2. God is creative in relating to us
3. God’s relationship with us is free of issues of control

The question is then how do we, who have so much power to affect the earth, serve the earth? How do we relate to the earth? In order to live in harmony with the earth we will have to intimately get to know the earth. In the same way that someone cannot sing a harmony unless they know the tune, we cannot live in harmony with the earth unless we know the earth. I think prolonged contact and interaction is as important for us and the earth as was for God walking in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Only a deep interaction with the earth can lead us to an empathy for the earth that will propel us to go beyond asking the earth “What are you good for?”.

It is only once we have and intimate knowledge of the earth that we can start to creatively relate to the earth. To think creatively about living with the earth will mean most likely that the solution to our ecological crisis will most likely be one that we have not thought of. It will most likely not be a retreat to a pre-industrialised way of living and equally will not be a blind trust that technological advancement will have the solution.

Essential to any effective ecotheolgy must be how do those who believe that the state of the earth is in crisis and are actively seeking to change it, communicate to those who do not believe this and are not seeking to change things. I believe that once again we need to take up the principles of harmony, creativity and relinquishing control.

This is a song I wrote about the Earth...

I have missed you for so long,
I have not sung your holy song,
You are my sister, you are my brother
We were created with each other
I lived right above you
I did not live right beside you
Can I heal the wounds, of all we’ve done
Is it to late, to live as one

You give me joy extraordinary
You are my holy Sanctuary
And I see God in all you do
God give me the grace to show it back to you
Can I heal the wounds, of all we’ve done
Is it to late, to live as one

Ecotheology Part 2

Ecotheology Part 1

The idea I raised last time that the Earth is a creature, is taken directly from James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which I found to be both impressive and persuasive. James Lovelock says that “Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean, and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here, as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name of Gaia." (James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia) As much as the Gaia Hypothesis appealed to me I wanted not to read the Gaia hypothesis back into scripture but to see if a Gaia hypothesis or something similar was already within the Biblical texts.

In Genesis 1:1 we read that the earth (like humans) was created by God. If we can define a creature as simply something that has been created by God then the earth is a creature. Over and above this the earth also exhibits many, many features that one might usually consider solely the expression of a creature rather than an object. Indeed these are all creature like features that the earth and humanity share. These are…

• We are both created by God
• We both sing praise to God
• We are both blessed by God
• We both have a Sabbath
• God has made a covenants with both of us
• We are both cursed from the fall
  
• Jesus was sent for both of us
• We are both awaiting redemption
• We can both become a new creation in Christ

Scharper describes the earth (Gaia) as “a self-regulating system, a "creature," which moves forward into the future regardless of what humans do.” For me the fact that the earth is created, acts like a creature in the Bible and acts like a creature in a scientific sense is where the Earth gets intrinsic worth.

The Question that arises from concluding that the earth is a creature is how do we relate to this creature? Or, how do we relate to the earth?

Too often I think that our relationship with the Earth has fallen into these four possible categories: Rock, Gift, Slave and Master

1. The Earth is a rock: This is pretty much an ancient Greek view of the world where all physical matter is corrupt, and the earth has value only for what we can get from it.

2. The Earth is a gift from God: This kind of sounds nice and to an extent is true the only problem is that the earth has value purely because it is a gift from God and has no value in it’s self.

3. Earth is our slave (or under us): Whether we try and dress this up by using words like steward or priest invariably we will take this as meaning the earth is inferior to humanity, due to the authority we have been given to stewards and priests. For this reason I think these words are not helpful.

4. Earth is the master we obey (or above us): This probably the view James Lovelock would ascribe to. He asserts that when humanity dies out the earth will live on and that bacteria deep in soils and seabeds are probably more important to the earths survival than plants and animals. The problem with this, even though it may be true is that I don’t think this view in necessary helpful when for my entire lifetime I could do as I please to the earth and feel no real consequence as a result. In many ways, I think, an earth centred ecotheology will, in the long run, be as unhelpful as wanting to replace Patriarchy with Matriarchy. The answer to anthropocentric theology is not earth-centred theology but a de-centred theology of relationship. A theology of relationship between two co-created creatures were we view our selves not as stewards over creation, but as kin.

Part of the reason I like to use the word relationship with the earth, rather than phrases like ‘steward’ or even terms like inter-related, was to avoid any word that had a hint of power or control. Although it may be true that humanity and the earth are interrelated the reality is that most western Christians are living as though we are not, and can quite happily live as though we are not, until the environmental crisis gets so bad and it is too late to turn back. What is more the term inter-related may have overtones control, a kind of wrestling were if one does one thing that may affect the other and vice versa – which could lead us back to asking questions of who controls who rather than a picture of two co-created beings standing beside each other ready to start to understand each other.

This does not mean that there is not power in the relationship. Whether it is we have the power to destroy the earth or as James Lovelocks suggests that we will be a mere hiccup on the earth this is not helpful. What is more different people in different places on the earth will have different relationships with the earth. We i the west are more likely to be the oppressors and not the oppressed. So a western response to how they relate to the earth may be very different to how someone in a dessert ravaged country with seasonal flood might relate to the earth. In the later case it may indeed be appropriate to encourage them to follow Genesis 1:28 and subdue the earth by building some dams to hold the flood waters and grow vegetation with this water.

Therefore, it should be no surprise that there isn't a single uniformed attitude towards the natural world in the Bible. Different time periods and circumstances require different perspectives. This is surely the nature of a relationship! That is it changes and grows.

Final installment next week.

Ecotheology Part 3

Ecotheology Part 1

Ecotheology is something that I think is very important to me and I think I may have a bit of a unique spin on the whole thing. So I thought I'd do a little series on it. To start with a quick quiz...

Who am I?

• I am created by God: “in the beginning God created me” (Genesis 1:1)
• I sing praise to God: “I clap my hands and sing for joy at the presence of the Lord.” (Psalm 98:8-9)
• I am blessed by God: I am “Blessed by the Lord, with the choice gifts of heaven above, and of the deep that lies beneath; with the choice fruits of the sun, and the rich yield of the months; with the finest produce of the ancient mountains, and the abundance of the everlasting hills.” (Deuteronomy 33:13-16)
• I need to rest every Sabbath: God said to my people “In the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest” (Leviticus 25:4)
• God has made a covenant with me: God promised “you will never be destroyed” (Genesis 9:9-11)
• I am made to be in covenant with humans: It was said to Job “you shall be in league (covenant) with the stones of the field, and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.” (Job 5:23)

I am... the earth.

• And I am cursed because of humanity: God said to Adam “cursed is the ground because of you.” (Genesis 3:17)
• God so loved me that Jesus was sent for me: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. (John 3:16)
• And I wait for my Redemption: “I wait with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. I have been groaning in labor pains. Together we wait for adoption, and redemption.” (Romans 8:18-23)
• Where I will be new in Christ: For God Said “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17-25) Yes I will be renewed like humanity “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” (2Corinthians 5:17)
• Where I will live in harmony with all of God’s creations: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.” (Isaiah 11:6-9)
  

Xns and Xn organizations are often indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures. It is not too much to say that often Christian organizations are as happily indifferent as most industrial organizations to the ecological, cultural, and religious implications of industrial economics. Xns often seem as likely as anyone else to join in teh destruction of creation. Especially western Xy which is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. Not only is there a dualism between humans and nature but it is often insisted that it's G0d’s will that humans exploit nature for their own ends.

I have read different ecotheologys and I have never been completely satisfied with the ecotheologys that I have read so far. Here I would like to present my own Xn ecotheolgy. I have tried to create an ecotheology with roots deeper than current environmental crisis and hence one that can may have a future if and when this crisis is over.

There are three points to my ecotheology

1. The earth (like humans) is a creature
2. We have a relationship with the earth
3. We need to relate to the earth the way God relates to us which is...
i. Harmonious
ii. Creative
iii. Free of issues of control

More next week.

Ecotheology Part 2

Companies v's Countries

I have been a letter for a Amnesty International and while I still believe that is a great thing to do. I'm wondering if that is really only addressing half of the world's injustices. Often when I buy a product I wonder under what conditions the product was made. I cannot help but think that my power as a consumer maybe far stronger than my power as a citizen of a relatively unimportant foreign country. In 2007 I am planning to start writing letters like this.

Dear -company-

I am writing to ask that you please tell me about the conditions under which your -product- is made. I realise that much of the manufacturing process maybe outsourced to other companies but as it is -company- who I am buying the product from I believe it is your responsibility to know how your product is made.

I would like to purchase all my products from companies that pay it's producers a fair price and helps them gains the necessary skills and knowledge to develop their businesses and work their way out of poverty. Also I would like to buy from companies that have a neutral affect on the environment. If these things are not achievable I would at least like to purchase products from the industry leader in these matters.

If you can please write to me and let me know about these matters, including endorsements from any a well recognised NGOs. That would be much appreciated.

I realise that implementing some of these things may result in an increase in the final cost of the item. I am more than happy to pay this.

Yours Sincerely

Chris

Do you think they would have any impact?

A call to Vegetarianism?

I have been recently hit by a desire to become vegetarian. Killing animals to eat them has never sat well with me but buying meat at the supermarket is fine. However I think it's time to stop pretending they are two unconnected things.

I always remember the first time I read Genesis and realised humanity was vegetarian until after the flood. I'm guessing there wouldn't have been an abundance of fruit and vegetables after a flood. (Here are the passages)

God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 1:29-31

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

Genesis 9:3

Part of my own theology has always been an idea to "Get back to the Garden". That is that God's desire is not to wisk us away to some ethereal church like heaven, rather it's to get us back to Eden. So, in every thing I think how can I make the world more Eden like. And, I think being vegetarian just might be one of those things. My sister, who used to own a t-shirt with the slogan: if animals could talk they'd say "please don't eat me", will be happy and it's going to be much better for the planet if we are all vegetarian. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. But if you think it does here's a quote...

Nothing will benefit human health, and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth, as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Nuclear Power - Green Power

Speaking of least worst options. I have been convinced by James Lovelock's idea that we need to start using Nuclear Power. Basically the idea is that Green power is the best but Nuclear power is bad but Fossil fuels are even worse and since as a society we are not ready to go completely green, becsue the technology is not good enough yet to meet our escalating power demands and we are not ready to cut down on our power use enough to survive purely on Green Energy.

I suggest we push to...
2020 No use of fossil fuels, all replaced by nuclear
2021 - 2070 Each change the percentage of Nuclear power to Green energy until in 2070 we are using no green energy. Duringt this time we let people know how they are going - setting targets for households and industry alike.

For those in Western Australia watch out for signing up to "Green Energy" as western power has 2 types of green energy.

1. Earth Friendly which they heavily advertise and you can apply for on the net. Earth Friendly energy still uses fossil fuels but western power pledge to plant a few trees to make up for it.
2. Natural Power which I haven't seen mentioned in their advertising, you have to ask for a paper application form (which I did a over a week ago and it still hasn't arrived). Natural power uses natural energy sources such as wind and solar.

They both cost about the same.

Tying to treading lightly

I did the survey at www.myfootprint.org the other day and although I did better than the average person in my part of the world I am still walking way to heavy on this gift from God that we call earth. So, after a couple of times hiring a petrol mower I've decided it's time to get a push mover, and my little flymo is a thing of great beauty, all the very best of sweedish design.