Tag: TED Talks

End Poverty, Protect the Planet

by Donald Fausel

On September 25, 2015, world leaders at the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Developmental Goals. Here are those 17 Goals.

Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well being for all at all ages.

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.

Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries.

Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

From those 17 goals, today’s blog will focus on Goal 1, ending poverty, and on Goal 13, taking urgent action to combat climate change. It will also include moral issues from Yale Climate Connection. If you want to read the entire article on Sustainable Development 17 Goals, when you get there, click on Goals.  

The forward of the document begins with a statement that is no secret, that it is the poor countries and people who tend to be particularly vulnerable to the difficult effects of climate change and there “…are already evident, natural disasters are more frequent and more devastating and developing countries are more vulnerable…they are more vulnerable because of their high dependence on natural resources and their limited capacity to cope with climate variability and extremes.”

Can We End Poverty?

According to the Sustainable Development goals, more than “…700 million people live in extreme poverty and are struggling to fulfill the most basic needs like health, education, and access to water and sanitation.” That’s a lot of people, and sadly Children Suffer the Most… Even in developed countries there are 30 million children growing up poor in some of the world’s richest countries. Any discussion based on the thesis of “ending poverty” couldn’t evade the question: Can it be done? If you don’t ever listen to another TED Talk give yourself a big treat and listen to a 16 minute Alex Thier’s TED Talk on The End of Extreme Poverty . Thier explains how it can happen and how you can help solve humanity’s greatest challenge. He leads policy development, strategic planning, learning and evaluation at the United States Agency for International Development—the lead development agency for the US government and the world’s largest bi-lateral donor. Enough of his background, except to say this Talk is dynamite.

Science and Mortality

“The absence of certainty is not an excuse to do nothing.” This is a caution that Christine Todd Whitman, President George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), made. Whether we’re talking about poverty or climate change, we can apply her wisdom to almost any situation. However, recently there’s been a shift in the conversation from scientific and technical issues to mortality and ethics. According to the Vatican Radio, April 28, 2015, a meeting of world leaders issued a final statement declaring “…human-induced climate change is a scientific reality…and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.” Basically, the statement says that humans have the technological and financial means, and the know-how, to combat human-induced climate change, while at the same time eliminating global poverty.

Fighting Poverty and Climage Change Must be Done Together is a twelve-minute interview with Isabella Lovin, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate, who explains why goals must not be dealt with separately.

Science and Values

Douglas Allchin opens his essay Values in Science: An Introduction, by writing, “A fundamental feature of science, as conceived by most scientists, is that it deals with facts, not values. Further, science is objective, while values are not.” Later he acknowledges that this value-free notion has been challenged by sociologists of science about the authority of science, and its methods are “overstated and misleading”. Many of us might say that science can only provide data to inform our decisions but cannot tell us what we should do, that we should leave our values up to religion. If you read Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape, you might not agree.

But for the present time lets us see what some of our religious values are that will help us end poverty and combat climate change. Since this blog is mainly for the Southwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, it seems appropriate to start there. Here is an article from the Yale Climate Connection website by Christine Woodside on April 4, 2012, The United Church of Christ on Climate Change .

I like the first phase of the article; Humans carry responsibility—and should take action. I also was impressed by the Rev. Jim Antal, the head of the Massachusetts United Church of Christ conference, spending three days in jail last August for refusing to leave the park across from the White House. It’s also very motivating to see how the synods have moved forward from 2005 despite  “…all the resistance we met…”. And how about the “Not Waiting for Someone Else to Do It” activity. And how Pastor Susanna Griefen gave a sermon about the climate titled “Slouching Towards Crisis” a play on William Butler Yeats poem, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. And don’t miss Politics Aside… ‘Everyone Wants to Take Care of the Earth’ I believe we can all learn these.

Below are a list of other religious groups and what they are doing for the poor and climate change. All of these are worthwhile. I want to end this blog with paragraph from the ‘Preach-In’:

“All people of faith share a moral obligation to care for the poor and vulnerable. These are the people who are least able to adapt and who are most affected by the climate crisis. We must not turn our backs on the future generations.”

I’ll focus on other goals in future blogs!

Also see, as part of this continuing series on faith-based groups:
Nationwide Climate ‘Preach-In’ To Target Broad Faith-Group Congregations
The Catholic Church and Climate Change
Judaism and Climate Change
Episcopalians Confronting Climate Change
Baptists and Climate Change
‘Green Muslims,’ Eco-Islam and Evolving Climate Change Consciousness
Presbyterians and Climate Change
Preachable Moments: Evangelical Christians and Climate Change
Mormon Silence on Climate Change: Why, and What Might It Mean?

From Earth Day to Earth Week

by Donald Fausel

Last December I joined a group of residents at the Beatitudes Campus of Care in Phoenix, Arizona to plan for a celebration for Earth Day on April 22. Early on in our meetings we decided to make our celebration a week long event rather than just a day. For the next three and a half months we met regularly to plan activities for each day of our Earth Week. I’d like to share with you some of the events that we had during the week.

Since the Beatitudes is a faith-based campus, we started and ended with:

A PRAYER FOR MOTHER EARTH AND OURSELVES

God of the sun and moon
Of the mountains, deserts and plains,
God of the mighty oceans, rivers, lakes and streams
God of all creatures that live in the seas and fly in the air
Of every living thing that grows and moves on this sacred Earth
Help us to love and respect it,
To repair what we have damaged,
To care for what You have made good and holy.
Give us the wisdom and the passion to change our minds,
Our hearts and our ways.
Let us be mustard seeds in our world
Bringing about ecological conversion which grows and
Spreads to every corner of the Earth.
Four our sake now and for every generation which is to come
We offer this our prayer. Amen.

(Based on Catholic Earthcare, Australia 2003)

Our Earth Week began on Sunday evening when we started with Vesper services accompanied by our Campus choir.

On Monday Gerald Roseberry and I had our first of four TED TALKS. Before each TALK we would read a prayer or petition from an article titled Where’s an Earth Prayer When You Need One?  I found all these requests very inspiring.

Each of the TALKS was about 15 to 20 minutes. After each TALK we would encourage audience participation by our asking questions or their bringing up points they thought would be helpful.  For example, the first TALK was given by Al Gore titled The Case for Optimism for Climate Change. If you haven’t followed his career since he ran for president of the United States, he’s been quite busy. He was co-recipient of a Nobel Laureate Medal with the Intergovernmental Planet on Climate Change for their documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2007, is chair of The Climate Reality Project, and has authored Earth in the Balance, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and most recently, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. In this TED TALK he asks three powerful questions about “…man-made forces threatening to destroy our planet—and the solutions we’re designing to combat them.” You’ll see, he’s still optimistic about our overpowering climate change.

Our second TED TALK was by Sylvia Earl. She is a legendary ocean researcher who is known by her colleagues as “Her Deepness” or by the Library of Congress as a “Living Legend” and by Time Magazine as the “Hero for the Planet”. She’s earned these titles because she’s “… led more than 50 expeditions and clocked more than 7,000 hours underwater. As captain of the first all-female team to live underwater, in 1970 she and her fellow scientists received a ticker-tape parade and White House reception upon their return to the surface. In 1979, she walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any other woman before or since.” The title of her TED TALK is My Wish to Protect Our Oceans .

Dr. Earl’s hope is, “I wish you would have all the means at your disposal—film! Expeditions! The web! More! To ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.” I hope you’ll find her TALK interesting and motivating.

Our third TED TALK was by Dr. James Hansen. One of his titles is The Father of Climate Change. As far back as 1988 at a US Senate hearing, Hansen declared that the “greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. Later in his career as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he “…described how government officials had…changed his testimony, filtered scientific findings and controlled what scientists could and couldn’t say to the media—all to underplay the impact of fossil fuel emissions on the climate.” He now is an American adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. (One of my Alma Maters.)

I had the good fortune to attend a lecture he gave at Arizona State University before we had his TED TALK at our Earth Week last April. He sat right in front of me before his lecture. As usual, he was wearing his wide-brimmed hat and started his lecture  by saying, “What do I know that would cause me, a reticent mid-western scientist, to get arrested in front of the White House, protesting?”  I had a chance to talk with him briefly after he finished his lecture and I told him about the Elders for a Sustainable Future that we had at the Beatitudes Campus. He was very supportive of what we were doing as Elders and he flippantly asked me if he was old enough to join since he had turned 75 recently. So much for my claim to fame! Here’s Hansen’s TED TALK, titled, Why I Must Speak Out about Climate Change.

Our final TED TALK is by Alex Teffen and titled, The Route to a Sustainable Future. After working as a journalist on four continents, Steffen co-founded and ran the online magazine Worldchanging.com from 2003-2010. “In those seven years, he made Worldchanging one of the world’s leading sustainability-related publications with an archive of almost 12,000 articles and a large global audience. He also edited an internationally best-selling book surveying innovative solutions to the planet’s most pressing problems: Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. “ His most recent work is Carbon Zero, a book describing cities that create prosperity not climate change, accelerating their economies while reducing their climate emissions to zero. As the New York Times said in a recent profile, “Alex Steffen lays out the blueprint for a successful century.”

THE WEEK THAT WAS

In addition to the TED TALKS there was some activity related to our planet every day between April 17 and 23. To mention a few, on Tuesday there was a campus stroll to learn about our campus vegetation and a planting of a tree. The Roadrunner Extra, that is published periodically “for the residents and by the residents” had nine articles/poems on issue that related to Earth Day. For instance, The Day that Mother Earth Jolted My Attention Irrevocably!!! by Leroy Calbom was about the 1980 explosion of Mt. St. Helen in Spokane, Washington. Or a beautiful poem by Una Thomas titled Mother Earth and Father Time. Then there was Earth Day on the Farm by Bob Hunter.

The library had a display of books related to climate change and residents were provided with pictures of Mother Earth to past on their apartment doors. Residents also had the choice to take an Earth Day Pledge.  The pledge has four practices:  To REDUCE, RECYLE, REUSE and to BECOME ENVIRONMENTALLY—MINDED.  Each section had at least a dozen pledges. For example, the first three practices for REDUCE were: Take quicker showers—Walk short distances instead of driving—Turn of the lights when I leave a room. If you chose to do anyone of these you put an X next to that practice  you agreed to do. There were 24 practices altogether. At the end of the sheet was the pledge: “I pledge to begin as many of these good practices in my day-to-day life as I can to be a good steward for the future of Mother Earth and for the benefit of humanity.”

THE GRAND FINALE

Friday evening we had a two-hour program with a diversity of participants. From readings from the Chinook Psalter, to a piano solo, and a PowerPoint on the Greening of our Campus, to singing It’s a Small World, to a number of Earth Notes that were read by residents; to a couple acting out their version of This Earth is Your Earth, we had a great time. But the presentation by a number of fourth grade singers from the Casa Academy brought down the house, as they say in show business.  

So as my father used to say, “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise”, let’s look forward to Earth Week 2017.