The Green Mission: Cultivating Sustainability and Community

The Green Team at our Sisters of St. Joseph Residence in London was formed several years ago with the aim “to educate, empower and promote environmentally sustainable practices within the community and at home”. Composed of three sisters and several staff members, the initiative focuses on the education of integral ecology.  The hope is to have everyone involved and participating within and beyond our residence.

Along with many initiatives, the Green Team sends educational items to the staff newsletter and in poster form throughout our home as well. At Sisters’ house meetings there is information given re: ongoing ecological initiatives.

Our staff communication APP also carries eco information in the form of short educational videos etc. This is also communicated by closed circuit tv.   From time-to-time, in the staff room, incentive posters remind us, “Earth needs all of us”.

Special April Earth Day activities get people up and doing. Armed with compostable yard bags, compostable garbage bags, gloves and long trash pickers to pick up the refuse, off we go to collect garbage from the grounds and our section of Windermere Road, here in London, Ontario.  Every year, the debris lessens.  (In fact, I’ve almost given up my beer-can collecting business). Usually, a few drivers honk to encourage us in our green efforts. Indoors, coffee and Timbits are enjoyed while staff are invited to watch special Earth Day presentations and celebrate our various initiatives.

Sisters in Peterborough making “milk bag mats” to send overseas.

Another successful initiative with which many are familiar is collecting specific types of plastic bags which volunteers transform into durable mats for people in other countries.

Integral ecology involves composting which we see in action in our dining room and kitchen.  Following meals, food scraps are put in specific compost containers.  To ensure that every item gets to its proper place, a framed notice announces, “Compost is hungry for Kleenex and napkins too”.  Posted on the wall nearby are colorful educational compost posters: “Things that CAN be Composted” and “Things that CAN be Recycled”.

At the service entrance in the garbage room stand huge blue, green and black containers for specific kinds of waste waiting to be picked up by Waste Connections of Canada.  The oil products in the black container will be turned into biofuel and the contents of the other compost bins will be processed to nurture soil in fields, gardens etc.

On a creative note, what is prettier than hand-picked wildflowers arranged attractively, in front of our chapel altar?  Incidentally another way to replace costly store-bought bouquets. This too, is integral ecology!

-Sister Jean Moylan, CSJ

Header image: Jan Kopřiva/Unsplash

Let's Celebrate, eh!

HAPPY CANADA DAY!

School is out!  Now we can review what we have learned.  It’s holiday time!

Image: Chi Liu @chiditty/Unsplash

We begin by viewing our country—Canada. 

We’ve learned that we are a country that values its freedom and when we look around the world at wars and totalitarian regimes, we get a sense of how fragile freedom is.

We’ve learned that our land produces enough food to feed Canadians as well as provide for other countries, yet we are not encouraging youth to farm and are paving over more and more prime farmland every year.

We’ve learned that we provide education for all our children, yet we see rising in our society, more and more bullying, violence, suicide, mental illness and addictions especially among young people.

We’ve learned that a sense of belonging is what each person craves.

We’ve learned that we are dependent on nature. Plants and animals, the four seasons provide for our very existence, and we are learning, and need to learn more, how to dance together in harmony.

We are aware. We have attitude. We need action.

HAPPY CANADA DAY - LET’S CELEBRATE, EH!                                      

- Sister Elaine Cole, CSJ                                                    

Image: Hermes Rivera @hermez777/Unsplash

Genocide in Canada?

Genocide in Canada? NEVER!!!

Celebrating National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada

The news has been inundated with the realities of genocides all over the world, but rarely is Canada included in that list.  A little dose of TRUTH is in order to get a proper perspective.

Prior to the European arrival, millions of various tribes existed across Turtle Island with their system of bartering, governing that worked for them.

Columbus’ “discovery” of the land, was affirmed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, when he issued the infamous “Doctrine of Discovery” that stated that empty lands “terra nullius” “discovered by European Explorers, became the property of the Crown.  In fact, these lands were inhabited by millions of peoples comprising one fifth of the world’s population at that time. They just happened to be non-Christian and were therefore deemed to be uncivilized and hence the term “terra nullius” or empty lands.

The mentality incurred by the Doctrine of Discovery paved the way for our Indigenous peoples to be horrifically treated due to the policies of the First Prime Minister of Canada by establishing the Residential School system which was specifically launched “to get rid of the Indian problem” and prevailed from the 1870’s to the 1990’s in which more than 130 Residential Schools were established and run by many of our churches.

The “savages”, a term used by Duncan Campbell Scott, were deemed to be subhuman (Indian Act in a plain-language summary). Colonizers attempted to assimilate them into European culture through the residential School System and by the 60’s Scoop when the children were ‘scooped up” and placed into European settler homes. It is estimated that there were even more Indigenous children in the child welfare system than the 150,00 that were in Residential Schools.

The past Chair of the TRC, the Honourable Murray Sinclair’s words ring so true for today:

“it is education that got us into this mess, and it is education that will get us out of it.”

One of the first steps to “getting us out of this mess” was the submission of the TRC 94 Calls to Action 94 Recommendations of the TRC report of 2015. It was carefully drawn up after the Commissioners interviewed thousands of abused survivors and it is estimated that 6000+ died in residential schools.  This is a significant number. This is a genocide. Truly the darkest part of our Canadian history.

Perhaps this is best summed up by Connor Sarazin in the June Kairos times Newsletter:

“Over the course of history there have been acts of genocide from one nation over another on a global scale. Although, you may not see the struggles of Indigenous Peoples regularly on the nightly news. The Indigenous Peoples remain in a fight for their survival. Many communities don’t have running water, never mind being drinkable. Many communities don’t have hydro and rely upon diesel generators for power. Children must travel hundreds of miles away from their home and community to get a high school education, and there are more children in care than at the height of the Indian Residential Schools. It is an alarming rate of epidemic proportions that women, girls and 2Spirit Peoples are murdered and go missing every day. It is easier to erase a people when they have no women.

Words like genocide are used to describe other nations around the globe who are fighting for their survival. We tend to forget that the struggle for the First Peoples on our own land carry these same words and have so for hundreds of years.”

On June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day, may we recognize and celebrate the history, heritage, resilience and diversity of First Nations, Inuit and Métis across Canada.

-Sister Kathleen Lichti, CSJ