Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

The day came when we decided to grow more of our own food.   We live on the side of a mountain with rather poor soil and, rather than spend a couple of years building soil in our subarctic home, we would simply buy some.   One company advertised rich soil, but guaranteed to be low in weeds the first year; they had sterilized the soil.   As neophytes in gardening this sounded good to us; how could fewer weeds in the first year be a bad thing? We did grow some things that first year, but not nearly as much as we did in years to come.   We were simply ignorant of the society of organisms needed to make soil productive.   We had never heard of mycorrhizae or any of the other “plant friends” necessary to make soil productive.   And so our first year, with this essential soil community sterilized away, was a bit of a disappointment.   In later years, the soil turned out to be much more productive…and we learned that some of those unexpected wild plant...

In this video David Suzuki, who brings science to millions of people across Canada and beyond, describes the impact of anything that is growing exponentially.  Basically, exponential growth means any upward graph that doubles in a predictable time frame. What issues are expanding exponentially, and why is understanding this video so important?  Here are the graphs of factors currently growing exponentially as listed by Larry Rasmussen in the graphs section of his book, Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford University Press: 2013). Note that two others not listed include ocean acidification and combined land-ocean temperatures word wide.  Note that since I got the following two graphs from different sources, they are more up-to-date than the ones from Rasmussen, thought the trend should be clear in all cases.

In an interior Alaska January the sun doesn’t come up until nearly 11 A.M.    When it finally peeks above the horizon,   the frost crystals that have formed on top of the snowbanks to sparkle, bringing joy and a renewed sense of wonder to my heart.. There is something appropriate about a late dawning sun making its appearance at a planning retreat—or at least it seemed appropriate to me at that particular retreat.   The planning team needed new energy for its work of making connections between the disparate parts of the church.   Although everyone present knew it was important, no one had any real desire to work on it.   The work was lagging, and the presbytery was suffering because of it. Amazingly, right near the 11:00 A.M. dawning, someone spoke words that had life in them.   “We need real people to make these connections, in the flesh.   We need to go to the churches, not conference call with them…”   Energy entered the room. ...

--> There are times when someone speaks and what they say seems magical. It was a -20 F day at the Knox Retreat Center in interior Alaska.   Along the edges of the lake where the trees met the ice a parallel edge   formed, a curtain of ice crystal suspended like fog in the air, restricted only to the edges of the lake.   It was cold outside and the wood stove inside provided both heat for the building and a charming ambiance for the people to gather. Fourteen people had traveled from across the state to spend time together renewing their connections and revising the purpose and plans for their work.   One of the purposes for the group has to do with building connections and communications between congregations across Alaska.   This is not simple since nearly half of the presbytery’s congregations are in rural Alaska, without connections by road, and often with extremely slow internet connections.   How do we communicate and build rel...

The snow alternated in its fall between a diagonally downward trajectory to downright horizontal. Even with all the clouds and snow, the sky remained bright.   The reflections off the white ground and the frosted mountains gave a brilliance to the whole day. No self-respecting goose would ever fly in this weather , I thought.   We’re wasting our time. I turned my thoughts away from catching food to observing the place in which I sat.   There was a brilliance to the light, glistening through the snow.   There was a majesty to the wind, blowing from the north and shaking the dwarf birches in front of me.   There was a joy to the whole day, sitting in white parkas and snow breaches alongside my hunting partner, just watching nature do its thing.   I realized that this was one of those moments of awareness.     Why is it,   I wondered, that people seem more likely to experience a special closeness to God—even a sense of spontaneous...