Environmental Justice articles

These articles originally appeared in Connections, the newsletter of the North Central New York Conference of the United Methodist Church. 
Written by Janet Allen, Environmental Justice Coordinator, 
Board of Church and Society, NCNY Conference

Articles for 2005

January - Turning Over a New Leaf
February - Eat Here
March - Dirty Power; Healthy Choices

Turning over a new leaf

If your church office is like most, you probably use a lot of paper. Paper may not be the biggest part of your church budget, but it does add up. But even more important, our paper choices directly affect our forests and even our health.

Purchasing post-consumer recycled, chlorine free paper for our church offices and then using it with restraint is another easy way we can be responsible stewards of God's creation.

  The solution: Part 1 – Buy post-consumer recycled paper. Look for paper with “post-consumer” content rather than “total recycled content.” The post-consumer content represents the reuse of all that paper we put in our recycling bins.

  The solution: Part 2 - Buy "processed chlorine free" (PCF) or "totally chlorine free" (TCF) paper. Chlorine is often used in the bleaching process, releasing dioxin and other toxins. Dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known.

United Methodists have made special efforts in this area. Our resolution for “A Dioxin-Free Future” supports a phase-out of the production of dioxin, including bleaching of pulp and paper with chlorine.

IMPORTANT: "Elementally chlorine-free" paper is not the same as PCF or TCF; this process still produces dioxins.

  The solution: Part 3 – Use less paper. Conserve paper and you conserve trees, energy, and water. And since buying chlorine-free, post-consumer recycled paper can sometimes be more expensive, you can reduce your total office paper expenses just by using less.

Here are some ideas for reducing your use of paper:

Use a software program such as FinePrint that allows you to easily print two or more pages on a side, print on both sides, delete unwanted pages before printing, as well as many other printing tricks. You can save a lot of paper, ink, and money by investing in this type of software, and it will make it easier to print documents the way you want them to be.

The solution: Part 4 – Spread the word. Put a note at the bottom of the paper indicating that you're using post-consumer recycled, process chlorine-free paper. Let people know that your church is a good steward of God's creation, and perhaps you’ll inspire them to do the same!

February 2005 - Eat here 

Those of us who are middle-aged or older have witnessed a dramatic change in the source of our food. About 50 years ago, local farmers still supplied much of our food. Today, the average pound of food travels about 1500 miles from farm to plate even if it could be grown nearby. Indeed, it seems to come from almost anywhere except local farms.

Prices for these industrial foods are artificially low because many of the costs are hidden. Taxpayer subsidies for gasoline and roads. Economic and health costs of smog and global warming. Ecological fallout from industrial farms. You don’t see these costs on your supermarket receipt, but we pay them nonetheless.

But making different food choices can help change this.

By eating local – that is, buying local – we can help preserve and restore family farms and their stewardship of the land. We can also help preserve and restore rural life, one of the concerns of the United Methodist Church.

By eating local/buying local, we also preserve and restore the multitude of small grocers, bakers and related businesses, which are currently being replaced by national and international conglomerates.

Every dollar spent on local food generates nearly twice as much income for the local economy than when that money is spent at a supermarket. Rather than trucks crisscrossing the country, we could have a multitude of thriving small businesses and farms providing food and related services for their own communities.

And the best benefits of locally grown food are the great taste and added safety!

So how can you and your church act to “Eat Here?” Here are some suggestions:

Are these suggestions as simple as just continuing to buy food from the supermarket? Of course not (although they’re not that difficult)! But for that effort, you’ll be creating economic and environmental justice in a very powerful way: by Eating HERE.

Some resources to learn more about this important topic:

Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket by Brian Halweil
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet For a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe

March 2005 - Dirty Power; Healthy Choices

As Christians, we care about people’s health, especially that of the most vulnerable: our children and the elderly. One source of many serious health problems is our dirty power plants. 

Dirty Power: Dirty Air

Our power plants are the source of many pollutants that harm health. A recent study found that:

Fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants cuts short the lives of nearly 24,000 people each year, including 2,800 from lung cancer.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer each year from asthma attacks, cardiac problems, and respiratory problems associated with fine particles from power plants.

Power plant pollution is responsible for 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks per year.

The elderly, children, and those with respiratory disease are most severely affected by fine particle pollution from power plants.

People who live in metropolitan areas near coal-fired plants feel their impacts most acutely, and their death rates are much higher than areas with few or no coal-fired plants. In NYS alone, over 3 million children live within 30 miles of a power plant, the area in which the greatest health effects are felt.

Dirty Power: Toxic Mercury

One in six American women of childbearing age has enough mercury in her blood to pose a risk to her unborn child, which can result in lowered intelligence, learning problems, and brain damage. In adults, mercury exposure can cause irreversible damage to the brain and cardiovascular system, and can reduce fertility.

Coal-fired power plants are the country’s largest unregulated source of mercury pollution, and these plants account for 1/3 or more of all airborne mercury.

We Can Choose Health

We can choose health for our children, for the elderly and for ourselves. Here are a few actions related to our energy use:

1. We can reduce our use of electricity by conserving energy and using it more efficiently. After all, the cleanest energy – the energy that produces no harm to health – is the energy we don’t use. Protecting health is of course the most important reason for taking this action, but we also benefit financially. We won’t be “shivering in the dark,” and we can use the savings to fund our core missions rather than paying unnecessarily high utility bills.

2. We can purchase clean, renewable energy. It’s easy in New York State. Your service provider remains the same, but your dollars support the development of clean, renewable energy such as wind and solar. For the average household, this costs less per month than you might spend on a pizza! 

3. Advocate for clean energy. As a nation, we will soon be making energy choices that will have consequences for us and for future generations. Analysis of current energy proposals indicates the bipartisan Clean Power Act (Jeffords-I, Collins-R, Lieberman-D) will best protect our health, followed by enforcement of the current Clean Air Act. And according to the National Academy of Sciences, compared to simply enforcing the Clean Air Act, the Clear Skies proposal would increase air pollution and further expose millions of people--especially children, the elderly, the poor, and the sick--to toxic substances including mercury.

New York Interfaith Power & Light (NY IP&L)