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August 2013 Budget As Well As Producing Prayer, Please Write Or Email: Dangerous Fumes Friday 30th August Sources: Prayer guide for the care of creation: Londoners Martin Riddiford and Jim “Sacred Economics” by Charles Reeves have devised a gravity- Eisenstein powered lamp to bring light to homes Green Health Watch magazine Prayers in remote parts of the earth. The Positive News about the GravityLight is powered by filling a bag www.edie.net with rocks and sand, and slowly lowering it towards the ground. Gears Environment transfer the weight into energy, If you would like to receive the prayer creating around 30 minutes of light. diary each month by email (free), please for each day of The pair hopes to sell the lights for email prayer-guide@christian- about £3.22 each to serve as an ecology.org.uk alternative to kerosene, which can take up to 20% of a household’s For further information and requests for August 2013 budget as well as producing prayer, please write or email: dangerous fumes. www.deciwatt.org Philip Clarkson Webb, 15 Valley View, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” Southborough, Saturday 31st August Tunbridge Wells TN4 0SY (Luke 12.34) Creation Time begins tomorrow and Email: [email protected] “Man did not make the earth, and, though he had lasts until October 4th. It is a time for Website: www.greenchristian.org.uk prayer and action for all the churches. a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his Resources are available from Picture on front cover: Gate by Judith property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator Churches Together in Britain & Ireland Allinson (www.ctbi.org.uk ). In addition, open a land-office, from whence the first title deeds should Operation Noah has prepared sermon Christian Ecology Link Ltd is a company issue.” (Thomas Paine) notes and prayers for use during registered in England and Wales. Administrative Office: Creation Time, combining insights “Debt can endure for ever; wealth cannot, because its from bible passages with themes from 10, Beech Hall Road, Operation Noah’s Ash Wednesday Highams Park, London, E4 9NX physical dimension is subject to the destructive force of Declaration regarding climate change. Company Registration No. 2445198 Registered Charity No. 328744. entropy.” (Frederick Soddy) www.operationnoah.org/creationtime tel: +44 (0) 845 4598460 [email protected] 12 1 Thursday 1st August money, and so few by reclaiming climate change can be reached at the benefiting from this except the “Money today is not like bread, fruit or common resources and protecting Paris summit in 2015. farmers; there are no patents, indeed any natural object. It is the sole natural and cultural treasures. “There royalties or licensing fees.” exception to nature’s law of return, is no money in it” is a phrase we constantly hear. Wednesday 28th August which says that all things ultimately Thursday 29th August return to their source. Money does not A new method of growing crops called System of Root Intensification (SRI) Only 10% of rural Haitians and less decay over time, but in its abstraction Saturday 3rd August from physicality, it remains changeless has dramatically increased yields of than 25% of city-dwellers have access or even grows with time exponentially, Why, in a world of plenty, does half many crops without the use of to proper sanitation, leading to high thanks to the power of interest.” - the world go hungry while the other hybridisation, pesticides, synthetic rates of cholera. Composting human half wastes enough food to feed fertilisers and GM technology. The waste prevents it from entering the Charles Eisenstein in “Sacred them? We pour vast resources into crops include rice, wheat, potatoes, water system, while the high Economics” wars, plastic junk and many other sugar, yams, tomatoes, garlic and temperatures of the compost kills off products that do not serve human aubergines. SRI demonstrates how cholera bacteria. Sustainable Organic Friday 2nd August happiness. Poverty is not due to a lack farmers everywhere can eventually Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), of productive capacity, nor to a lack of dispense with expensive pesticides founded by Sasha Kramer in 2006, If I asked my bank “I would like £1 willingness to help. Many people and biotechnology in growing their now provides compost toilets to more million to buy this forest to protect it would love to feed the poor, restore crops. Farmers growing rice, instead than 24,000 people across Haiti, from logging. It won’t generate any nature and do other meaningful work, of planting clumps in waterlogged including over 14,000 people still living income, so I can’t pay you interest. but cannot because there is no money fields, now plant younger plants one in camps after the 2010 earthquake. But if you need the money, I could sell in it. Money utterly fails to connect by one 25 cm. apart in dry fields. Sasha Kramer says: “Our mission is to the forest and pay you back the£1 gifts and needs. Why? Careful weeding allows air to get to transform waste into resources. We million”, the bank would have to the roots. Yield increases of 30-45% primarily do that by taking human decline my proposal. But if instead I are now commonplace. Professor waste, which for most people is said: “I’d like £1 million to buy this Sunday 4th August Norman Uphoff of Cornell University disgusting, and transforming into forest, cut and clear it, sell the timber Be with us, Lord, when we go explains: “It is the exact opposite of something valuable. We turn it into for £2 million, out of which I will pay shopping. If we have little money, help the 1960s green revolution which said soil, and then we use that rich you 12% interest and make a tidy us to choose wisely and not to hanker you had to change the genes and the compost to do agricultural and profit for myself”, an astute banker after things we can’t afford. Make us soil nutrients to improve yields. That reforestation projects.” would agree to my proposal. content, in spite of the voices all came at a tremendous ecological cost. www.oursoil.org Money only goes to those who create around us inviting us to spend and Agriculture in the 21st century must be new goods and services. This is why spend. practised differently. SRI offers so many jobs are to be had by millions of disadvantaged households converting natural resources into far better opportunities. Nobody is 2 11 mineral rights, oil reserves and Monday 26th August Help us if we are well provided with Tuesday 6th August patents. Only if rates of interest move If everyone worked 20% less instead money. Save us from self-indulgence New money is created by debt and, as into negative territory would this of 20% of people working not at all, and extravagance. Help us to such, has no theoretical limit. wealth begin to circulate and benefit unemployment would no longer be contribute to the needs of those who Therefore it is easy for economists to society at large. Intellectual property seen as an unmitigated evil and are hungry. Be Lord of all our lives, believe in the possibility of endless could be returned to the commons by people’s time could be freed up to including our money. exponential growth. But the real world shortening the terms of copyrights and contribute their gifts to society. When Amen. is not like that. Lost in the abstract patents. New sources of wealth such every economic relationship becomes Monday 5th August nature of money, we ignore the limits as the genome and cyberspace a paid service, we are left independent of the real world to accommodate the should be kept in the public domain, of everyone we know and become Before money was invented, gifts growth of money. Moreover, allowing their use only to those whose dependent, via money, on were the medium of exchange. Then technology constantly widens the list aim is to benefit society and the anonymous, distant service providers. money became a convenient means of things available on the market – planet. That is a primary reason for the of connecting gifts with needs. Finally now including intellectual property, decline of community in modern money became an end in itself – the gene sequences and water rights. one thing that is the measure of, and Sunday 25th August societies, with its attendant alienation, Charles Eisenstein describes an loneliness and psychological misery. exchangeable with, almost anything economic system that disallows profit- Father, we pray for all who work else. A billionaire, when asked “How by-owning, yet rewards the closely with the natural world: much is enough?” was stumped for an entrepreneur’s spirit that says: “I know For farmers and gardeners who grow Tuesday 27th August answer. The reason is that we have a way to use it better” and allows that our food; China, the world’s biggest producer of decoupled money as medium-of- spirit free rein. CO2, has drawn up a plan to cap its exchange from money as store-of- For scientists and technologists who value. Aristotle recognised in his probe the secrets of life; greenhouse gas emissions from 2016. Its National Development & Reform “Politics” that wealth-getting for the Wednesday 7th August For foresters who plants and harvest Commission has put forward the plan sake of accumulation bears no limits. “How” asks Eisenstein “can we build trees; to China’s State Council, but experts Increasing doses are required to dull communities when the building blocks indicate that the NDRC’s the pain of unmet needs, but no – the things we do for each other – For artists, poets and photographers amount can ever be enough.
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