This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

by Valentine Cadieux

Valentine Cadieux

As the days grow darker this advent season, I find they also make me more sensitive to the dual pressures of the holidays:  the extreme consumerism along with the space and time we need to meaningfully process its effects. So as a visiting scholar on this blog, my Christmas gift to you all is an argument from a sustainability perspective about how and why to build the time for refuge in this season, and in all seasons.

American trash production doubles in the month around Christmas.  This is not only what is left over after the gatherings and gifting, but the idea of “trash” can also include all things and people we wish could be magically spirited away because we don’t need or want them anymore, or they present difficulties we would just rather not contend with.  After last year’s election and the increasingly extreme political, economic and cultural dynamics that began to emerge then, Hamline University students and faculty returned to a January term, and I could feel the despair pouring off the students and my colleagues.

Sustainability is not only accounting well for where our things come from, and where they go, but it is also a set of relationships and practices that help us understand what in our lives and culture are worth sustaining, along with how that might be possible, especially in the face of what daunts us. Clued in to the impending despair last year by many people’s desperate visits to the sustainability office – not a place we had adequately understood to have a pastoral mission – I spent the J-term learning how to build refuges.  What does it mean to meet the other face to face, especially when it may be with others whose experience we find daunting – whose perspective we might prefer to just trash, send away, where we don’t have to experience it.  How does one keep an open heart during such times?

This is the heart of sustainability:  to meet each other well, to build refuges for and with each other to find what we need, for the emotions we have trouble acknowledging, to create space we can learn to live vulnerably and wholeheartedly.  I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, when I let myself be vulnerable – to all of the connections and implications that my privileged life, built on a sustained history of colonial and extractive oppression, inherently entails – I feel so vulnerable that my heart isn’t big enough for the amount of breaking it needs to do. But this seems like the crux of building a refuge:  you have to do it with others.  At the same time, it can become the death knell of colonial whiteness that contributes to so many of the problems sustainability work is trying to fix: our individual compulsion to fix things, often badly.

This fall I heard a remarkable talk by Desirée Williams-Rajee, on the occasion of accepting one of the first decadal awards from the U of M’s Institute on the Environment, where she delivered her speech while weeping through almost the whole thing.  Learning to talk through crying is something I talk with my students about. Particularly in fields like academics, where women struggle to be taken seriously, the idea of speaking in public with emotion is anathema to most of the things we’ve been trained to do to be able to pass as academic, and this fear is real and valid.  Right now though we need those people who are willing and able to lead with wholehearted experience more than ever, who don’t excise the emotion or water down what needs to be said and what we need to hear. The institutions we build to teach communities and students how to live toward futures we want need to model practices that are “body-ful”, that are refuges for our embodied experience and emotion along with our thinking. Hamline Church’s vision to be a Sanctuary for the City is about creating these refuges of sustainability for our spirits as well.  In this act of creating refuge, we might learn sustenance such that there is no trash at the end of it of things or people.  I invite you to reflect on how you can create with others a refuge during this holiday season.

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

by Barbara Deming

Barbara Deming

I’ve been walking to church from the start. My family lived next to, or a few blocks away from the church when I was growing up, and I remember speed walking with my mom as we were inevitably late leaving the house. Slow kicking home through the leaves with my sisters and brother. Picking up some friends to walk home with for lunch afterward. When I returned to church as an adult in Saint Paul I walked to Hamline and Church of the Good Shepherd, which lacked a parking lot, and then Hamline again, once pulling kids on a plastic toboggan after 12 inches of snow had fallen. The habit dies hard.

Now I mostly bike or walk alone, as other family members are out of town or not church-going. During those 15 – 45 minutes I am where I want to be: outdoors, moving my body to get somewhere else I want to be, listening to podcasts (I’m not completely unplugged!) or occasionally singing when no one is around. Sometimes I see another walker, usually connected to a dog, but mostly I’m alone out there on Sunday mornings. The rugged individualist in me is fed and I am able to show up at church ready to join in.

Sometimes I hop on the light rail or bus if it gets me there faster, thanks to the miracle of our shared community commitment to helping each other move around.

After six days of speeding around on four wheels to get to work, school and everywhere else, being on foot or bike puts me in a different place mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Maybe it’s a check-in with my privilege, reminding me of who I am when alone on two feet. Sure, I’m still burning the energy from good food and wearing the warm boots I am so lucky to own, but walking is a small pin-prick of a reminder of what’s underneath the busy schedule, house full of stuff and hefty ego.

I invite any of you who are able to join me (in body or in spirit) in the slow church movement on Sunday mornings!

Did you know?  According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas. About five pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.  Consider what you are not putting into the atmosphere when you choose to walk or bike!

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

Mary Kay Olson

It has been both exciting and a true pleasure to support the further development of Hamline’s Green Team this past year.  From the beginning, there has been sustained interest from our team members as well as from leadership and the congregation.  Add to this so much support from outside Hamline Church with our new partnership with the US Green Building Council and the resources they have procured on our behalf has been amazing.  From the initial MN Annual Conference grant to experts provided for our January launch to a local engineering firm that has volunteered to create an energy model of our church to aid in potential future HVAC decisions, we are grateful recipients of this support.

Our green team began its efforts this Spring with a roll out of expanded recycling that now also includes organics.  All the paper towel waste as well as new compostable plates, utensils and cups for our weekly hospitality and other events at the church will be recycled.

As we begin our “Sanctuary for the City and Beyond” capital campaign this Fall, many of the proposed projects have a “green” element to them.  First and foremost, the greenest building is the one already built, so keeping up our historic structure is in itself an act of sustainability.  The We are considering major building “envelope” work (tuckpointing, possibly window replacement) which will protect our Sanctuary’s interior beauty for years to come.

Our first approved project initiated by our green team is new solar panels on the education wing roof!  We hope to offset about half our current electricity consumption with this 34kW array that will be producing renewable power by Spring 2018.  Thanks to a Made in Minnesota State Solar Incentive program, the panels will pay for themselves in about 10 years.

Our sustainable sites team has been busy envisioning campus outdoor space changes that embrace the spirit of our HCI process of being a “Sanctuary for the City”.  The scope of work will depend upon the amount of campaign funds raised.  On the north lawn, a new patio for the bread oven is envisioned.  Heading to the south side, imagine if you will next to the SPROUT garden a natural play area and outdoor Sunday School for our children instead of dumpsters and dirt.  If you walk along the east side of the church, you will be among a meandering new sidewalk with new landscaping, trees, and sitting areas which will be doubling as a solution to our basement water infiltration problem.  Roof water runoff will be captured in a new rain garden to the north, and piped to a storage tank to the south to water our SPROUT garden.  With this one project, we will be both beautifying our campus and saving money!  We will also be helping our community by keeping storm water on our property in situ instead of sending it out through the storm sewers, lowering the demand on our city’s water treatment infrastructure.

As we hope you can see, so much of what we are contemplating is being “green”.  For those of you who already recycle, bike or walk instead of drive, use energy efficient lighting in your homes, and who have brought that spirit and practice to our Hamline Church community, we invite you to consider these improvements as an expansion of your “green” values and will join us in supporting the campaign with your time, talent, and treasure.

If you would like to join Hamline Church’s green team, contact Diane Krueger at dkkrueger@comcast.net.

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

Craig Bowron with his wife Stephanie and their children Isak, Caleb and Julia.

My name is Craig Bowron, and I’m a member of Hamline Church’s Green Team. It’s a very select group:  we only admit church members who are biologically dependent on the Earth for their existence. If you breathe in oxygen every five or six seconds, then you’re in. We evaluate non-breathers on a case-by-case basis.

Two main interests brought me to the Green Team: avoiding unnecessary waste, and solar power.

For myself, I believe waste is the sincerest form of ingratitude to the earth; it is the opposite of reverence. Since a sense of gratitude has been proven to be a key indicator in happiness, eliminating waste is a key to happiness. Take an aluminum can for instance. Aluminum is made from a raw ore called bauxite; refining bauxite into aluminum is very energy intensive. Why would we collectively dig a hole to mine bauxite, spend all the resources required to make it into an aluminum can, and then dig another hole (landfill) to throw it into? We don’t have too many aluminum cans around Hamline Church, but an audit shows that we’re wasting a lot of energy. I’d rather put my money in the offering plate than throw it out a leaky window.

Solar power: it’s already the dominant form of energy on this planet. The gas you use to drive to church is old sunshine—sunlight that hit the Earth 300 million years ago and was captured by an array of microscopic photosynthetic organisms that eventually became buried under the seas. Percolating under intense heat and pressure, these microorganisms were slowly distilled into oil and gas.

Putting solar panels on the education wing of Hamline Church is not only a good investment, it sends a message that we are a forward-thinking congregation that recognizes both the science of climate change and the injustice of its consequences. I anticipate that Hurricane Harvey, Irma, and now Maria will prove, yet again, that when disaster strikes, the rich lose a little, and the poor lose a lot—maybe everything. And Jesus has called us to help the poor. We can shine a light by capturing the light.

Hamline Church will begin producing solar energy beginning in late Spring 2018.  We expect it will be enough energy to offset about half our current electricity consumption.

If you missed the first Green Team blog post by Natalie Freund click here.