Know Your Local Ecosystem, #1

A couple streets over from our house there is this really, really magnificent tree.  Our neighborhood seems to have wisely left a number of big trees growing smack dab in the middle of its streets.  This is annoying for motorists but brilliant once that fierce midday sun starts to beat down.  Our street is home to a mango tree, but it is a mere shrub compared to this baby.


This is an ent-tree.  The trunk is worthy of a Giant Sequoia, the canopy is like a cathedral roof.  This would be the perfect tree for climbing were I somehow three times larger - it's like an apple tree on steroids.

At the close of a great article entitled "How Species Save Our Lives" Richard Conniff offers a list of 13 practical ways we can work toward saving species and preserving biodiversity.  One of them was this:

7. Learn to identify 10 species of plants and animals in your own neighborhood, then 20, and onward.

Now the amount of biology I don't know and never learned would fill, well, a lot of biology textbooks. But since we're now living in a new ecosystem I thought I would try to see if I could actually identify 10 species.

So this is the first one: our neighborhood arbolón is more properly known as the ceiba or kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra, if you want to see what the Encyclopedia of Life has to say about it).  It probably evolved in the Americas but has since spread to the tropics in Africa and Asia.  In Mayan mythology, the world tree was a ceiba.  We've seen a couple other ones around Managua (there's another in the parking lot of the fancy mall) and it's nice to see that at least sometimes people try to keep them around rather than just bulldoze 'em.

I Did Learn That in Seminary

Read my piece about theological education at Fidelia's Sisters. :)

Reading Material

I wrote an article for the Global Ministries website about climate change and God's call for us to do justice in the world.  You can read it here; it's basically a more polished version of some earlier blog posts on the subject.

Also, if you just can't get enough of climate and religion, check out the cover of Sojourners magazine this month.  They have a bunch of articles on talking to climate skeptics and overcoming denialism (free w/ registration).

Touristy Stuff

Here's a bunch of photos that I haven't blogged about because they were taken while we were having "fun" rather than "working" -- although sometimes its hard to tell which is which =)
I really love this one of Quinn and Laura Jean floating in the Laguna de Apoyo, which is a nearby volcanic lake that is just about perfect for swimming. Warm, calm, little bits of pumice floating along with you.




The Volcán Masaya is an active volcano located about a 20 minute drive from our house. You can drive right to the rim, park you car (facing outward, for safety) and look right in. It's totally awesome, but you can't really linger up there thanks to the toxic gases.

There's not a ton of tourist attractions in Managua itself, but the Plaza de la Revolución is pretty cool (if usually weirdly deserted). Looming to one side are the remains of the old cathedral, destroyed in the 1972 earthquake and never properly rebuilt.

The Laguna de Tiscapa is the highest point in Managua and was the site of Somoza's mansion. So naturally after the revolution they erected a giant statue of Augusto César Sandino in its place.

The Laguna is also the perfect spot for great views of Managua and the lake behind. Here's my sister Jessica and Quinn watching the sun set.

The view of beautiful Granada from a church bell-tower.

Amy and Laura Jean having lunch.


Jess trying out the swinging chairs.

Quinn in the garden.

Some guy with a bell.

Another view of Granada from above, with the volcanoes of Ometepe rising in the distance.


Volcán Mombacho rising over Granada.

Margaret and Brendan in front of the cathedral in León.

Óscar Romero, 31 Years On

Today marks the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying mass.  The man who allegedly ordered his killing -- Roberto D'Aubuisson -- went on to found El Salvador's primary right-wing party and commanded many of the death squads who caused so much bloodshed during El Salvador's long, sad civil war.  If you want an introduction to Romero and his words, this article by Michael Campbell-Johnston SJ is a good place to start. (There's also a pretty good movie starring Raul Julia.)

On 24 March 2011, people all over the world will be celebrating the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador. He was shot, by orders of the government, while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the hospital for incurables where, as Archbishop, he lived. The previous day he had preached what was to be his last Sunday sermon in the cathedral. In it he made an appeal to the ordinary soldiers in the army and low-ranking policeman, calling on them not to obey immoral orders from their officers.

 Read the whole thing here.

Sabbath

Lately I've been reading Holy Ground, a collection of essays by religious folk of all stripes about the importance of caring for the Creation and the responsibility of communities of faith to protect our environment.  It's edited by our awesome friend Lyndsay Moseley and you should definitely check it out.

This passage from a 1951 essay "Beyond Civilization" by the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel caught my eye and I thought I would share:

The solution of mankind's most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization but in attaining some degree of independence of it.

In regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude--to have them and to be able to do without them.  On the Sabbath we live, as it were, independent of technical civilization: we abstain primarily from any activity that aims at remaking or reshaping the things of space.  Man's royal privilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day.

And later:

The seventh day is the armistice in man's cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man; a day on which handling of money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world's chief idol.  The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.

In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil, there are islands of stillness where man may enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity.  The island is the seventh day, the Sabbath, a day of detachment from things, instruments, and practical affairs as well as of attachment to the spirit.

Too often I think we are caught in a false dichotomy when it comes to our crazy modern world -- both in a spiritual sense and an environmental one.  We feel that we are stuck with pollution and stress and commercialism as a kind of tax levied on the many good things we receive (antibiotics, modern dentistry, the ability to talk to my parents instantaneously across thousands of miles, stuff like that).  It's also a common retort to environmental concerns: if coal power is so bad, do you want us to live in caves, eating only locusts and honey?  Well, no.

But the idea of attaining independence from our cell phones, emails, cars, TVs and all the other toys that invade our lives, in order to clear out a bit of space to decide what is really important -- that struck a chord with me.  (And of course Heschel is writing about a specifically Jewish conception of how to celebrate the Sabbath, but his words have a universal heft to them.)  And similarly, gaining independence from the dictates of the free market, to have a little space to inject other values into our decision making, where would that get us?

San Juan de Limay

Last weekend I gave a seminar on climate change to the churches of the western region.  For the talk we traveled to San Juan de Limay, a small pueblo far to the north, near the Honduran border.  To get there, you drive for a little over an hour on dirt roads, up over a beautiful mountain ridge and back down again.  San Juan de Limay is famous for its soapstone artists and the road there is lined with about a dozen large stone statues like this one:



At the top of the mountain we saw a few coffee farms and gorgeous views of the mountainous northern region.

The climate change talk took the better part of a full day and a group of 40 hardy souls showed up to listen to my stumbling Spanish.  The talk was divided into: (1) what is climate change (the greenhouse effect and all that), (2) what are the likely impacts of climate change, both worldwide and in Central America, and (3) what should we do about it.  We also did a small science experiment to learn a little about absorption and reflection of sunlight (thankfully, it worked!).

The most interesting part for me were the stories from the participants.  Many of the church members and pastors in that region are farmers by trade and the church is developing a seed bank project in the region to help provide a little economic security for them.  After yapping at them for a while, I divided them up into four groups and asked them to think about the changes in their local environment and what the old folks in their communities said about the past.

To a person, they all stated that farming had become more and more difficult.  Years ago, good harvests were more common and required less investment of effort and money.  Nowadays, they said, crop pests were more common and farmers had resorted to using stronger and stronger pesticides just to stay even.  They also said that the rains were becoming less reliable and were causing havoc.  Now it is difficult to say for sure if these changes are climate related (after all, a lot of other things have changed over the years too), but I think this experience of environmental change made the other parts of the talk more relevant to their lives.

Dios es Amor // God is Love.

For this latest voyage we were joined by Sonia, Carlos & Cindy and their kids Camila and Cristian.  Quinn had a blast running wild, getting extremely dirty and playing with the other kids at the church while the adults talked.

San Juan de Limay is a ways off the tourist trail, but its actually a really beautiful little town.  It's nestled in the mountains and (maybe thanks to the artistic influence) the town itself is colorful and peaceful and well-tended.  After the talk ended, we headed out of town and saw a gorgeous sunset over the mountains.  We continued another hour through the dark over rough roads to El Sauce, where we stayed the night before returning to Managua the next morning.