Out of Fashion

Fashion appears to be killing us. Fast Company tells us several really disturbing things about its effects.

• Think you are helping by sending your old clothes to Goodwill? In California alone, the company spends seven million on dumping them.

• In Vasteras, a town in Sweden, a power plant relies on unsold H&M products as a fuel source.

• Every piece of unsold clothing has relied upon materials to make and package them and fuel to transport them. Now destroying them takes additional resources that are destroying us.

• Clothing companies are making 53 million tons of clothes. Much of it ends up in landfill or in oceans; much of it includes plastics.

The writer of the article notes that some companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless 100 billion pieces of new clothing for the seven billion humans on the planet in 2015 and that number has doubled in 15 years. The 80-20 rule also applies. We wear 20% of what we have 80% of the time.

The journalist’s solution is to buy better quality and more expensive and fewer clothes. But she doesn’t deal with the reality that those of us in the West have far more clothes than we need already - or that our identity is tied so closely to what we wear. Other kinds of beauty are all around us. We’re not the most important species on the planet and the most clothes or the most luxurious clothes will never change that.

A recent documentary of CBC’s The Passionate Eye documents the real cost of cheap fashion to those who produce it ad you can watch it here. The effects of the use of water is particularly sobering and the devastation of the environment is heart-breaking. The telling moment is when some of the young women who promote fast fashion on their websites saw this for themselves, they changed their attitude. Telling the full story to the consumers is our greatest challenge.

A Challenge from our Youth

A letter published in the Guardiian Today

“We, the young, are deeply concerned about our future. Humanity is currently causing the sixth mass extinction of species and the global climate system is at the brink of a catastrophic crisis. Its devastating impacts are already felt by millions of people around the globe. Yet we are far from reaching the goals of the Paris agreement.

Young people make up more than half of the global population. Our generation grew up with the climate crisis and we will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives. Despite that fact, most of us are not included in the local and global decision-making process. We are the voiceless future of humanity.

We will no longer accept this injustice. We demand justice for all past, current and future victims of the climate crisis, and so we are rising up. Thousands of us have taken to the streets in the past weeks all around the world. Now we will make our voices heard. On 15 March, we will protest on every continent.

We finally need to treat the climate crisis as a crisis. It is the biggest threat in human history and we will not accept the world’s decision-makers’ inaction that threatens our entire civilisation. We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes. Climate changeis already happening. People did die, are dying and will die because of it, but we can and will stop this madness.

We, the young, have started to move. We are going to change the fate of humanity, whether you like it or not. United we will rise until we see climate justice. We demand the world’s decision-makers take responsibility and solve this crisis.

You have failed us in the past. If you continue failing us in the future, we, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves. The youth of this world has started to move and we will not rest again”..
The global coordination group of the youth-led climate strike

Paul Winter and Missa Gaia

There are a number of personal strands in the announcement that Paul Winter will receive the Thomas Berry Award at the coming conference of the American Teillhard Association annual meeting to be held at the Cathedral of St, John the Divine in New York City. While I am a supportive newcomer to the worlds of Berry and Theillard, I had a small connection with Paul Winter several decades ago.

Winter is a jazz musician of considerable prominence. His original sextet toured the world and was the first jazz combo to play at the White House. His later Consort has existed for years with a rotating membership. In the 1970’s Winter became interested in another species and its ability to make music - whales - and travelled with Greenpeace to try interaction with them and his soprano saxaphone. This encounter later produced the Missa Gaia or Earth Mass, which had its world premiere at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1981 and continues to be performed there each year. Performers include a chorus, vocal soloists, the jazz consort and an assortment of recorded whales, wolves and other animals, whose songs often provided the inspiration for the melodies. You can hear the entire mass here as well as several selections on YouTube.

It’s not surprising that Winter and Thomas Berry connected in New York City when they were both involved in shifting our consciousness to the beauties of the natural world and our responsibility to protect it. My own threads are many. I taught at a small Episcopal School near the Cathedral from 1960 -1963. The school at the time was in the process of raising funds to build a new facility and used one the Cathedrals’s chapels for the school to start the day. The work was premiered in Canada as part of the Joy of Singing International Choral Festival in 1989 by the Consort with the Toronto Mendelssohn Youth Choir conducted by Robert Cooper. As the Executive Director of the provincial service organization for choirs at the time I was a last minute adult recruit buried in the alto section when the conductor thought it needed an extra voice two. It was one of the most inspiring and enjoyable performing experiences of my life.

While I probably won’t make the award ceremony, it is gratifying to know that I will hear the Missa Gaui performed again in Toronto by a local choir and joined by some of Canada’s best classical, jazz and gospel musicians.

You can find more about the Toronto concert here. And it is also good to know that Thomas Berry wrote a beautiful poem after attending a Winder Solstice performane of this work, which is the last entry in one of his books. You can find a brief quote from it elsewhere on this site.

"Big" History

I’ve just discovered a site called the Big History Project. Much of the content is similar to that of the film, Journey of the Universe. Both are designed to help young people and adults make sense of their world as a starting point for understanding and direction. It’s remarkably good.

The course began as a co-project of historian David Christian and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Prof, Christian began as a Russian historical scholar but became interested in a multi-disciplinary approach that would cover history from the Big Bang to the present. For someone like myself, whose secondary school history focused on Canadian and British constitutional history and expanded to European history in university, it’s a revolutionary approach. It also has real implications for young peoples’ understanding of our current world As an addition to the more serious presentation the online site has joined forces with John and Hank Green’s parallel version for the kids. While the latter is lighthearted and sometimes frenetic, it also delivers the goods.

Occasionally I am asked to teach Sunday School and I am always pleased to be at the same table with this group of kids aged six to ten.  Their world outside that one hour of the week could not be more different than the one presented in a curriculum of early bible land often replete of Victorian art. It doesn’t surprise me that as soon as the kids have any ability to object to this worldview they depart.  Churches spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the absence of young people – as they should.  But they may be missing the point. 

David Christian noted in 2010, “Over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of "universal history"; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods.”  This is what our kids are already learning in school and it is supplemented by online learning like this project. Most religious education programs focus on a small segment of this history without realizing the wider framing that the kids are experiencing.

With assistance from Bill Gates, the Big History Project was launched with a TED talk in 2011.  After comprehensive pilot testing, the course has been made available on a site here for free to teachers, students and interested life-long learners.While the course is intended primarily at the middle and high school level, adults will benefit in several ways.  History starts with cosmogenesis and moves through several distinct stages that the creators term The Goldilocks effect were exactly the right conditions produce something dramatically new. When we meet the planet, we have lots of indications of how things came to be.  When humans enter the picture, there are clear indications of how they live through stages and how their interactions with the physical environment affect cultural development.  Unlike my own history courses years ago with too many forgotten dates and documents, these sessions are lively and relational – and focus on why things are as they are.  They are also a reminder of the pace in which our young people operate.  It’s sometimes dizzying – and it is also real.

Modern kids and adults now have resources and sense of scale that are totally different from those covered in any Sunday School curriculum. We also have access to disciplines that were not known to all but a few of the people of those times.  We had better remember that.

A Lake as a Person

The morning news in Toronto’s Globe and Mail and in the US has articles that resonate. In Canada a chief of staff has resigned over a spat involving the Prime Minister’s office, a federal minister and a multinational corporation whose employees have been accused of bribery in a foreign country. In the Guardian’s US edition there is a report that the city of Toledo will vote on a legal bill declaring that Lake Erie have the same rights as a corporation or a person. The citizens of the city wish to become legal guardians with the ability to sue those who poison its water and make it unsuitable for bathing or drinking.

Both stories - and another in the Globe which criticizes the government for failing to consult with first nations people on environmental remediation - show dawning realization that how we treat the natural world has consequences. Indigenous people had a better relationship with their land. When populism, distrust of government and endless tweeting by people who should know better predominate in front page news, there are moments of hope as citizens try to take responsibility for what we do to the planet.