Practical Actions

If you’ve ever driven through parts of the San Juaquin Valley in Central California, you’ve probably noticed the stench and, quite possibly, had difficulty breathing. The stench and foul air come from factory farms whose animal waste is emitted as ammonia from lagoons and combines with other molecules in the air to become ammonia nitrate.…

America’s bees are dying at an alarming rate. Some of us may see that as a good thing; the fewer bees (and wasps, and other stinging insects), the fewer stings. But bees are pollinators of about 70 to 100 major crops, ranging from apples and blueberries to watermelon and zucchini. There’s a simple equation: the…

When we open a wine bottle with a natural cork, we often don’t appreciate that the cork was once a living thing, harvested from the cork oak tree, a species of evergreen oak tree found primarily in southern Portugal, southern Spain, and in northwest Africa. The trees themselves play an important role in western Mediterranean…

On the surface, styrofoam appears to be completely innocuous. It is durable, which makes it invaluable for packaging fragile items. It retains heat well without becoming excessively hot, making it perfect as containers for hot beverages such as coffee and tea, as well as for take-out foods. Despite its durability and strength, it is also…

We all intuitively believe, as John Wesley expressed it in a sermon, that “cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.” And so often unthinkingly and with the best of intentions, we wash our dishes, do our laundry, and shower, and shampoo our hair. Most commonly, we focus on the short-term result for ourselves and are unaware…

In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The self-accolades accompanying the delisting noted that the recovery of grey wolf populations in the continental United States was a remarkable achievement that spanned half a century. Confined to northern Minnesota and nearby Isle Royale, Michigan, in the…

Often, when we see a pest, such as an unwanted species of wildlife, an insect, a slug or a snail, we feel no qualms about eliminating it, typically by using a chemical pesticide or poison. This is an anthropocentric approach; it reflects our assumption that God has made us lords of his creation to do…

Our weekly blog posts aim at providing practical steps that we each can take to defend our common home, as well as discuss ways in which we can change our way of thinking about science, about our relationship to the world around us, and about our understanding of our faith. Our hope is that, through…

In Are We the Pests We’re Getting Rid of?, we discussed the damage that pesticides do to the environment and to human health. Rather than using chemical pesticides, a wide range of safe organic alternatives are available, many of them with specific targets. In this post, we’ve listed some common alternatives to herbicides – that…

A common view of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides is that, after we apply them, they’re effective for a certain length of time, sooner or later lose their effectiveness, and then somehow magically disappear without a trace. Although it is true that the effective shelf-life of these products is limited, their magical disappearance is not. Instead,…