Treading Lightly

Concerned about environmental impact? Thinking about reducing your organization’s footprint? There are so many simple and cost-effective ways you can do so. Consider:

• When serving meals to groups, are cups and utensils recyclable?
• If water is served, why not offer water with lemon, and recyclable paper cups, reducing plastic?
• If the group gives out or sells branded items, why not add cloth shopping bags into the mix?
• Perhaps the congregation could become involved in a local conservation effort, joining forces to protect a certain species, or to keep a certain habitat pristine.
• There are certainly many other ways an organization might become more environmentally conscious. Contact us with your good idea and we may just add it here.

One Reason: The Albatross

Many birds enjoy the vast ocean, and among the most rare and beautiful  are the albatross. Birdwatchers love them, because their story is so romantic: they mate for life; both adults care for the young, and their first solo flight can last for years over the sea. They accomplish this by turning off part of their brain for sleep, still flying while never fully sleeping.

Walking on the beach, the ocean’s majesty sometimes takes your breath away. Enormous waves come crashing down, and it seems endless. Abounding.  It has always held abuntant food resources. Birds have skimmed the surface looking for jellyfish. There was a time when anything they saw on the ocean’s surface was  edible, but now that there’s so much plastic floating on the ocean’s surface, they can fill their stomachs and think they’ve eaten well, and still end up starving.

Because these majestic birds empty their stomachs before they take off, we know a bit about what they’ve eaten from the ocean, and it’s very sad. Many albatross are indeed showing evidence of having eaten many plastic bits and pieces.  Our shores are showing evidence of plastic washing up daily. A beach pictured below shows just one day’s worth of the detritus that has washed up on shore.   Many resorts clean up this plastic in the early morning, so tourists won’t see it,  butonce we have seen the truth, how can we not act? Plastic is there. It’s doing great harm. With knowledge comes responsibility. The good news is that as leaders in non harming ministry, we are in a position to really make a change, and be of influence to others.

The short clip below was shot at Na’Aina Kai  Botanical Gardens on Kauai in December of 2011, as part of a special bird watching tour. The gardens gave out stainless steel water bottles as a gift to encourage conservation, resource stewardship, and the thoughtful protection of wildlife. Our grateful thanks to our guide, Marty Fernandes, for her support and encouragement in creating and posting this webpage.