Book Review-Serve God, Save the Planet

As part of GreenBean's Bookworm Challenge I chose to read a couple of books this month.

First, I borrowed Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" from my daughter-in-law Traci. I can see why Traci liked this book. She's a dietitian, and a farm girl, so all the discussion of gardening, cooking, and nutrition was right up her alley. I liked the book mostly for Kingsolver's writing style. Having at one time had a very large vegetable garden of my own, it brought back memories of the hard work, seasonal business of putting up the produce, and some of the frustrations of that life. Actually, not enough of the frustrations, in my opinion. She doesn't seem to have had her green beans annihilated by bean-leaf beetles, or her zucchini plants killed by squash bugs, or her sweet corn raided by squirrels and raccoons. Maybe I'm just a pest-magnate, and maybe working with a bunch of small children underfoot was another distraction, but my experience was not as idyllic as hers seems to have been. I don't really do the vegetable garden thing any more.

I also felt the additional material inserted by her husband broke the flow of the narrative she was writing, and I wound up skipping those parts as I got further into the book. However, her visit to the Amish farm in Ohio was a lot of fun to read about. All in all, I found the book to be a pretty good read.

Next, I read "Serve God, Save the Planet" by Matthew Sleeth. This book was highly recommended to me by Donna. Sleeth is a physician who became alarmed at the increase in asthma cases he was seeing, as well as the uptick in cancer diagnoses. He could see their correlation to the increase in environmental pollution, and felt it was time to sound the alarm about what was happening to our health. He also comments on mental health issues that he attributes to lifestyle. He and his family chose to radically simplify their lives by reducing their material belongings, and , eventually, moving into a house that was comparable in size to the garage of their original house. He left the practice of medicine and began to speak at churches about the need for Christians, motivated by the command to "Love one another", to take seriously the care of God's Creation.

Sleeth's reasoned arguments, under girded with Scripture, as well as his appendixes that outline his methods of changing his lifestyle, outline for group study of the issues, and quotes from famous Christian thinkers about the subject of Creation Care, made this book valuable.

One of my favorite quotes from this book: "Love is not part of the rhetoric of global leaders, power brokers, or conglomerates. It does not make the evening news. It does not appear in medical journals". In contrast, he points out, "love one another" supersedes all of Christ's commandments except the command to love God. A Christian's motivation to live simply is to share wealth with those in need. The motivation to live an environmentally responsible lifestyle is to prevent harm to others and honor God's beautiful creation. I related to these motives far more easily than Kingsolver's. I recommend this book highly.

I appreciate the push from this challenge to read these books, which I might not have done otherwise. Thanks, GreenBean!!

Aargh! Now I'm Behind

I left town for a few days (wonderful!) and now I feel like there are about ten posts I need to write to get caught up. As if someone was holding a gun to my head to do this.

Tonight, I'll just get a few things out of the way.

1. I keep getting wrapped up in these challenges! So, for Chile's, I'm giving up the dryer for the summer. I'll let you know how that goes. We get a fair amount of rain here. I did it years ago, with a bigger family in the house, but now that I actually have a dryer, I may be tempted to break down and use it.

2. For GreenBean's reading challenge, I still haven't finished the book I originally committed to, because I keep finding others that appeal to me more. But I just finished "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and am now reading "Serve God, Save he Planet", and I have this great idea for a compare and contrast review of those two books. Sometime this week.

3. Arduous has just started a really neat challenge to encourage people to be more generous. Pop over there and sign on for that one! I can't wait to see what happens when people open their eyes to the needs around them.

4. There was no Sunday Stroll this week, unless you count my little Malorie's high-speed crawling. It's just too cute when crawling baby girls have little ruffles on the seat of their pants! Oh, wait, I promised myself that I would not be a boring Nanna talking all about her adorable grandchild! But trust me, she IS adorable!

5. Lastly, I just want to say I don't understand why gas was $4.03 here and $3.69 in Claremore.
That seems like a big difference to me. Not sure I'll ever understand the economics of fuel prices.

On Not Keeping Up With The Joneses

It's spring yard work season, when I focus on trying to stay ahead of the weeds in hopes of averting disaster later in the summer. I'm not a competitive grass grower, but out of respect for my neighbors I try to keep the front lawn looking reasonably nice, as in mowed, trimmed, and weeded. Most years I have put a dose of weed-and-feed on to knock back the dandelions. Isn't it funny that people don't like them? Such a cheerful yellow, and they look wonderful mixed with all the violets! Yes, I have biodiversity in my lawn. No one seems to mind the violets, but oh, those dandelions are evil. They exemplify a household too lazy to get out and dig them!

But nowadays no one actually digs them; they are nuked with chemicals, either applied by the homeowner (in my case), or by a lawn service (in the case of most of my neighbors). After all, we are all about saving time while maintaining curb-appeal.

I was going to take care of that little task this weekend, until I started reading "Living Downstream". By the third chapter, Sandra Steingraber's evidence on the relationship between cancer and herbicides/pesticides was giving me pause. No, actually, it was giving me chills. I could picture all those chemicals being washed into the storm drain in front of my house during the next little rain we have.

From there, the water would wind up kitty-corner from my house in a drainage swail that runs through Mattis Park.

It still looks nice and clean at this point. When I went to take this picture I gave Mr. and Mrs. Mallard quite a fright, and they frantically tried to lead me away from their nest. And, just as my own children did, there must have been someone catching tadpoles down there recently, judging by the orange Little League cap caught in the gravel. When I have walked past this area, I have often seen muskrats, ducks, frogs, Canada Geese, and even herons. It does have many of the hallmarks of a "wetland". I remember when I was a girl, this part of the neighborhood was still open fields, and this particular spot was always a little swamp. Later, the city ditched and drained it to put in the road. They left a little flood plain along the ditch, which is good, because it definitely still gets full to the brim when we have a big rain.

Without this ditch my basement would be wet about 2/3 of the year. That's because this is the very spot on the county watershed map that is designated as the headwaters of the Embarass River. From here the water goes down to a man-made retention pond, and then, ultimately wanders in the form of the Embarass over toward the Wabash, then the Ohio, then the Mississippi, then the Gulf of Mexico. And along the way, it gathers a lot of fertilizer and pesticides running off lawns and fields

The Embarass isn't the only river affected by all of us in Champaign-Urbana. At this very point in the county are located the headwaters of both the Kaskaskia watershed and the Vermillion watershed, as well as the Embarass. It sure doesn't look like it, but we are actually high ground here, thanks to the glacier, and all the water runs away downhill from us. All the oil that drips out of our cars, all the trash that blows into the the creeks and ditches, all the lawn care chemicals that are used here in this town, are headed off to the Gulf.

So, you see, I and my immediate neighbors get first crack at polluting the Embarass. And today, I just decided I'm not going to have any part of it. I'll do my best to keep ahead of the dandelions, but if you drive past and see a few little golden twinkles in my lawn, please don't write me off as a slacker. I'm not trying to bring the neighborhood down. Hopefully, our children and grandchildren will benefit from my tolerance of those weeds. Bring them over, and I'll let them pick a bouquet for you!

Challenge Number 2

I've been involved this month in a challenge with some other bloggers to attempt to purchase nothing unnecessary for the month of April, and I did really well until today. Then, in an attempt to find a book to read for a reading challenge, I made the mistake of entering Pages For All Ages Bookstore. Really, a judge should issue a restraining order to prevent me from going in that place. I simply cannot leave without buying something. All I can say in my own defense is that this time it really was only one book!

Anyway, the book I purchased was, as I said, for another challenge for the month of May. Participants are supposed to read a book related to environmental issues. I was looking for "Serve God, Save the Planet" by Matthew Sleeth, but they were out of it and will be ordering it for me. My thinking was that if I bought that book, read it myself, passed it around the family, and then donated it to the church library, it would be a worthwhile purchase. But, since they were out of it I just had to look around.....and buy a different book.

I'm glad I did though. The book I wound up with is "Living Downstream-A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment" by Sandra Steingraber. Steingraber is a Central Illinoisan and biologist/environmentalist, as well as being a cancer survivor. She writes beautifully about this part of the world and the environmental degradation that has led to clusters of cancer diagnoses, carefully tracing back, back, back to the origins of those carcinogens. Naturally, buying the book caused me to scrap any practical use of my time today and dive right into reading. After several chapters, I can tell you I am completely hooked and would highly recommend this book to anyone.

I do hope to also read Sleeth's book this month. It's been on my "To Read" list for a while. I'll review that one as well when I get to it. If you are interested in getting involved in the reading challenge, look on my blog roll and go to Green Bean's blog. And I promise to learn to hyperlink soon!!