Water - the low down

It is something which permeates every facet of our lives – it is the foundation of hydration, our food, our heating and cooling systems, our construction, our clothing and shelter.

And we’re using A LOT of it. According to Denver Water, the City & County of Denver uses 265,000 acre-feet of water. Imagine a football field with a foot of water standing on it – then picture 265,000 of those. Let’s put it another way. The average person in Denver uses 168 gallons of water per day! And lest you think its all those restaurants and businesses squandering all that water, in all reality, residential (single and multi-family homes) usage accounts for over 65% of all usage (172,000 football fields full of water!).

To top it all off, 55% of all water usage at the residential level is for outdoor irrigation/use, i.e. your sprinkler system.

A quick scenario to bring this home. My wife and I recently purchased our first home in the Barnum neighborhood in August. The average sprinkler head sprays about 3.5 gallons per minute, and the home had a sprinkler system consisting of about 10 heads. Now, if we watered as per Denver Water’s Stage 2 watering rules (in effect as of April 1^st this year), which is only twice per week, we’d use about 27,000 gallons from May through September and spend about $75 in water bills.

Now, if we switched entirely over to drip irrigation and grew vegetables (which we’re doing), and watered 45 minutes every single day, in that same five month period we’d use approximately 3,200 gallons and spend $8.32!!! Not only would we save $67, we’d also save enough water to provide the average Denver home with 141 days of water!!!! Not to mention all the money we’d be saving on food from the wondrous produce we’ll be harvesting.

And this is a reality for 200 low-income families this year through Revision’s Re:farm Denver program. 200 families are receiving drip-irrigation systems, using less water, saving money, and are empowered to lead healthier lives. Want to help them out? Donate now. 

Education

It all starts with education. Think about it, from the moment we were born, our parents were trying to teach us, to educate us how we should comport ourselves – what we should eat, how we should speak, what we should wear, and on and on. The first eighteen to twenty-two years of our lives are spent dedicated full-time to becoming more educated and even after we ‘graduate’ from institutional learning, our personal journeys are always influenced by what we’re learning.

Even though I’m no expert in history, I think its pretty easy to look back  and see how societies and the global community has been shaped and has evolved according to what people were taught (or not taught). Adam Smith teaching there is an invisible hand out there called the market altered the course of history as people began to focus more on appeasing the market than on their local contexts. William Wilberforce was educated by his contemporaries about the evils of slavery and in turn he educated and inspired the United Kingdom to abolish the trade. Martin Luther King Jr. educated a generation about the hypocrisy of American culture; preaching freedom as a founding principle while practicing systematic and cruel oppression on a huge segment of her citizens.

Change begins with education. Without realizing there is a problem (or a solution), no one can work towards fixing it. The world today is in need of education. As ‘rich’ countries continue to half-heartedly try to help ‘poor’ countries ‘develop’, more and more people continue to slip into poverty. True development has stalled and is in peril of sliding backward. I believe this juncture is a result of a decision which needs to be made about how development is done and how education around development should be developed (pun intended). The ongoing criticism of development as being a hand-out instead of truly empowering people to help themselves is well based. As long as development ignores the environmental challenges which everyone on this planet faces, it will continue to be a hand-out. If people and cultures are given economic opportunity while destroying that which sustains their lives, that economic opportunity is actually a disservice and will increase their dependency on outside aid in the future. If people or cultures cannot grow their own food because all the farmland is being used for exporting ‘cash’ crops which are depleting the soil only to leave them worse off in the future, that ‘cash’ is again increasing their reliance on foreign aid. (I use foreign to refer to anything outside a community, not necessarily following border lines).

Environmental education and increasing the focus of environmental work in development is absolutely necessary. One project which is seeking to address this important work is the Global Sustainability Project, led by Bill Gugerty. It seeks to document case studies of when and how environmental projects are increasing development in developing countries around the world. Understanding sustainability projects’ impact on development is the first step towards changing the fabric of development itself.

So educate with me and support Bill’s project. If you’re into helping out more at home than abroad, that’s great, because 5% of the money raised for the Project goes directly to Revision International, a Denver-based organization focused on educating, inspiring, and empowering individuals and communities to achieve transformational change.

I can't see the forest through all the trees

Suddenly I could feel, even while speaking words I had spoken a half dozen times before, that familiar tightness in my throat. My eyes began to burn as I tried to keep my cool and finish my sentence but the welling up in my throat wouldn’t allow it and somehow the muscles attaching my chin and lower lip were colluding with my vocal chords as both started to tremble.

Yep. I was crying. And the feeling is familiar because I actually cry quite often. I don’t know what it is, but I find myself touched in profound ways by other people’s stories, even if they are fictional. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (the book and movie) had me in tears multiple times, as did Up, The Intouchables, the wedding I was at this weekend (well, if I’m being honest, pretty much every wedding I go to), and countless other times throughout my young adult life.

This particular moment I was sitting across from my dad at my favorite breakfast place in Buena Vista; the Evergreen Café. I had ordered the eggs St. Elmo, named after a deserted 19^th century mining town nestled in the Chalk Creek canyon between Mt. Princeton and Mt. Antero just Southwest of BV, the dish was home potato fries covered in melted cheese, two eggs any style (sunnyside up for me), and wheat toast. The coffee aroma wafting from my cup came from beans carefully roasted just down on main street at BV Roastery. Yet all this took a backseat as I tried to figure out my own overpowering reaction to the words I had just said.

I was talking about the work of Revision International, which I often do. I was telling my dad about an exciting new partnership we’re entering into with the Denver Foundation and members of the Somali Bantu refugee population living in Denver. We’re helping forty Somali Bantu families start farming a one-acre vacant lot in Southwest Denver. Not only is this going to provide fresh, healthy food for their families and the surrounding community, it is also reconnecting the Somalis to their culture – their heritage.

The Bantu people in Somalia were an especially persecuted group of people, having been brought as slaves to that country from mainly Southeast Africa in the 18^th century, but having chosen to try to retain their unique language and culture instead of assimilating. After spending years and years in refugee camps in Kenya, some were offered asylum in the US.

Since coming to Denver, these families (trickling in over the past ten or so years, now there are about 400 refugee families in the Denver-metro area) have been struggling to get their feet under them, and find their own way in this foreign society. On a walking tour of the vacant plot about a month ago with Revision’s ED, Eric Kornacki, one elder started to cry as he stood looking at the land. Eric asked him, through another Bantu named Rasulo who speaks excellent English, why he was crying. The words came back from Rasulo’s lips saying the man had the same feeling at that moment – gazing upon land which he might be able to start farming – that he had first had the moment he heard he would be able to bring his family to the United States from the refugee camp.

I’ve been processing this ever since Eric told me of the exchange the next day. It takes immense imagination to try and place myself in a refugee camp in Kenya, forced into exile from the land which had persecuted him. Then held there, in that camp, for a decade before hearing that there was hope for a different future. I try to ask myself; would he have lost hope at that point? What did he do in his time in the camps? Were his children born in the camps? Had he any reason to think they might have a better future than that he had had? Then to hear that there was an end in sight. How immense the excitement must have been. How tangible the hope and how incredible the joy on his face and in his heart when he told his family the news.

I can’t imagine.

Nor can I comprehend how important farming and growing food must be to him and the Somali Bantu culture to have those same feelings standing on an overgrown acre of land surrounded by the cityscape as when his life changed and he moved continents. We take so much for granted as a culture here in the US, as “Americans”. We don’t give a second thought to food. Perhaps we enjoy cooking, or maybe gardening, but it can’t be said it’s a part of who we are as a people. In fact I struggle to think of anything aside from technology that defines the American culture. Do we have something, anything connected to nature or the Earth that sustains us which we feel anything close to these emotions when we think about it?

How amazing to be a part of this opportunity for these families, this beautiful sub-culture of human beings. I feel honored to have met them. To have the possibility of getting to know them deeper and hear more of their stories.

Perhaps I was crying this particular time of recounting the story because I had lost sight of why I was working so hard. Maybe I couldn’t see the beauty of the forest because I was stuck wading through the thicket of trees. But I feel for some reason in that moment I had stumbled onto a hilltop or broke out of the dense trees and had to squint my eyes and reset my paradigm as I took in the awe-inspiring landscape surrounding me. The forest and its immensity couldn’t be more breath taking.

And yet I feel the awe precisely because I know the forest wouldn’t exist without each tree. Each tree is every act of kindness. Every action toward justice. Every person who decides to honor someone else before fulfilling their own instant desires. Gratitude overwhelms me realizing that I am simply one tree in this forest of humanity. My roots draw life from the same soil as the Somali Bantu; my leaves stretch toward the same sunlight which bathes the Hispanic/Latino families of Southwest Denver; the rain which stimulates my growth also falls on the refugees still in camps in Kenya and drenches those who are struggling with fear of deportation from the States or living with loved ones who are stuck in the middle of drug wars back home or those who are dying from famine in the Republic of Niger or living repressed by Israeli settlements or fighting for justice in the streets of Cairo or working grueling hours in sweatshops with no chance for a brighter future let-alone a vacation.

We are all human. The forest wouldn’t exist without each one of us, and yet alone, we’d wither and die under the scorching heat of the sun. 

Gratitude

Even though I was on the inside looking out the window at the frozen and snow-dusted Earth my breath still made its presence known before disappearing into the air. The dark lines of the plowed soil in the garden formed patterns on the ground, providing visual relief from the otherwise white land. The sun kept threatening to break through the hazy layer of clouds which were holding it back. 

My body was in the summer kitchen of our host family’s house (i.e. unheated kitchen in the winter), cooking banana pancakes made with milk from a neighbor’s cow and a touch of cinnamon. But my mind was back in Colorado. Back with friends. With our old small group. With my family in Buena Vista. With Revision International and the communities it serves. With our faith community Denver Community Church.

I looked down into the cast iron pan to see the edges of the pancake starting to harden and the bubbles appearing briefly in the middle of the batter before popping. My hand extended, already holding the metal spatula, and seemingly on its own deftly flipped the pancake over to expose the golden brown goodness waiting on the other side. 

In the midst of the beginning of a new year; exactly a year since our evacuation from Niger; after the holidays we just missed at our homes; about to move into a new house here in our village in Moldova. So many emotions are stirring in my mind and heart. Over the past few months it has begun to dawn on me just how much Ash and I have to be thankful for back in Colorado. And in those moments, perhaps aided by the aroma of cinnamon banana pancakes and the anticipation of dowsing them in homemade raspberry syrup before slowly enjoying each bite between sips of coffee, I was reminded once again how much we have to be thankful for in general.

The birds were flying in and out of the bare branches of the trees out back. The grape vines lay dormant, hanging on the wires strung between the concrete posts and waiting with what I imagined to be something akin to the same anticipation I felt toward breakfast toward the coming spring and the chance to bloom and bring forth life once more. The clucks and crows of the chickens reached my ears from their coup. The light shifted with the clouds, changing ever-so-slightly my perspective on the frost-bitten village and surrounding hills.

I am surrounded by life. I am surrounded by miracles every second. Indeed the breath I see dissipating into the air is itself the culmination of a million miracles within my body. The biggest miracle of all; God having created all of it and deeming it all good. Him who is endlessly knowable having created something (really trillions of things) so complex and so interconnected that we will never fully grasp how they exist.

The wave of gratitude helped lessen how much I was missing home and ground me again in the knowledge that wherever we are, we can be thankful.

Human Virtues

How can we fully express our human virtue in the decisions we make?

Ask not, What shall I do? Ask, What kind of person do I want to be? Then act as that person would act. You are what you do. To be the sort of person who helps move the world toward shared, sustainable flourishing will require a strong set of virtues:

A sense of wonder, to perceive and value the extraordinary beauty and mystery of the thriving world.

Compassion, to feel the suffering of both human and nonhuman animals caused by climate change and ecological collapse.

Imagination, to envision new and sustainable ways to provide for human needs without plundering the planet.

Independence of mind, to distinguish true from false, to distinguish real needs from created markets, to understand how to make good moral decision under conditions of uncertainty.

Integrity, to do what one thinks is right, even if it means making decisions that are radically different from the decisions one’s friends and neighbors make, decisions contrary to what is well advertised or easy.

Justice, to honor the needs of other people and other species as highly as one’s own, and to respect in others the rights one claims for oneself.

Courage, to do what needs to be done even if the lonely odds are against you.

So now. Choose one virtue. Make a decision (what to purchase, how to travel, where to donate time) that embodies that virtue. Now choose another virtue. Make a decision that embodies both of them. Continue. Virtues are habits of the mind and heart. Habits are developed by practice, over time.

- Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. Edited by Moore & Nelson. Trinity University Press. 2010.