Half Dome

This week I've been watching--as much as my schedule allows--Ken Burns' new documentary on the National Parks. In Spring 2007, my family visited Yosemite National Park, and writing about it on my blog afterwards, I said that "we were already making plans to return." Well, plans don't always happen very quickly, but we are returning, this winter--about 2 1/2 months from now.

Until then, I'll have to be content with looking at photos from our previous trip, like the one below.

What About the Trash?

Alright, here's the real reason I wrote about scouting last week. In my son's boy scout troop, there is an expectation that every parent will be involved somehow, an expectation that I appreciate and respect. It didn't take much persuasion for me to sign-up as a committee member. (I'm also the popcorn fundraising chair for the troop; want to buy some popcorn?) I know how important scouting was for me, how it helped form my character, how it instilled in me many of the values that have helped shape my life.

Two weeks ago, I attended the first 3-day session of a training program called Wood Badge. Wood Badge is the premier training program for adult scouters, and it takes place in one form or another around the world, in many of the countries where there are boy scouts.

At Wood Badge, adults are organized into patrols, just as scouts are organized within their troops. I'm in the Beaver Patrol. We have a second 3-day training session in a few weeks. For this second session, we will camp as a patrol, hiking a short distance to our mountain campsite.

We will cook our own meals. Last Sunday, our patrol met to plan, among other things, the menu for our upcoming trip. One patrol member said he had a really good chili recipe that we could use for our first night's dinner. Of course, my preference would be a vegetarian black bean chili, not the beef chili with bacon that he suggested, but wanting to be agreeable, I, uh, agreed. Then he mentioned that he'd cook it ahead of time, freeze it in plastic bags, and all we'd have to do on our camping trip is drop the bags into some boiling water. Or something like that.

As we continued discussing our menu, I pointed out that we'd need to make sure we had some pots or basins big enough for dishwashing. One of the other members pointed out that, even though we would be camping, the Wood Badge staff had promised us trash service. "We can all bring enough disposable plates and utensils for the three days, and throw them away. They'll get rid of our trash for us, and won't have to do dishes."

Our patrol guide, an advisor to our group, spoke up. "Remember, the idea is to implement 'Leave No Trace' while you're camping."

There was a moment's silence. Then another member of the patrol said, "So... we all bring disposable plates and utensils for three days, and just throw them away. Sounds good to me."

Am I missing something?

The guys in my patrol are all good guys (the "Yes on 8" bumper sticker on one of their cars notwithstanding). They would never think of leaving their trash behind in the camp. They agree that the "Leave No Trace" guidelines are good, as far as they apply to camping, and I'm sure we'll leave our campsite looking even better than we find it.

However, if it's so important to "leave no trace" in the campsite, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to me to insist that we at least try to limit the impact we have on the world beyond the campsite. Is it really such a good thing to keep our trash out of the campsite if we're just going to have it shipped across the mountain to a landfill that is overtaking another part of the wilderness? Wouldn't it be better to reduce the amount of trash we create in the first place?

I thought about these things as I rode my bike home after the meeting (we met in my office at church). I was starting to feel a little smug and self-righteous, until I realized that I could have spoken out a little more than I did. I am sometimes too quiet when it comes to speaking out.

I also realized that, when it comes to speaking out on producing trash, I don't have much ground to stand on. A few days earlier, I took the boys out for pizza. There were two pieces left over, so I asked for a box in which to take the leftovers home. I certainly wasn't about to waste two pieces of pizza.

But what about the pizza box? Used once, to get the two slices of pizza from the restaurant to home, then thrown away. Grease-stained cardboard isn't even recyclable. And a pizza box is no small piece of trash.

The trash and recycling containers are in the alley behind the house. I never see the trucks come empty them. Sometimes, though, I hear them, just before dawn, and I curse them for the noise they make, waking me a half hour before I had planned to wake up. And I get even more upset when I consider that, already, before sunrise, those trucks are out and about, polluting the already smoggy air.

Rarely does it occur to me in those early mornings that perhaps my best response is simply to produce less trash, and do my best to leave no trace.

Update: The Beaver Patrol has since decided that using disposable plates & utensils is a bad idea. We'll be using our own washable camp mess kits instead.

Plastic Bag in the Lemon Tree

In California, 400 plastic bags are distributed every second--14 billion bags per year. One of them managed to find its way to the top of the lemon tree that is growing behind my house. I see it when I go out to pick lemons, but unfortunately, the bag is too high up in the tree for me to reach. I don't remember when I first noticed it, but it's been there at least all summer. I wonder if the Santa Ana winds forecasted for this week will send it flying into another tree, or to the ocean.

More info about plastic bags

Clenching Fist, Open Hand

ht: Brian McLaren

Leave No Trace

From my earliest days of camping with the boy scouts, I was taught and trained to leave no trace. What this meant was that if someone were to come to our campsite after we had left, they would not be able to tell that a group of ten or twenty or thirty boys had just spent a night there. There would be no trash, no dug-up ground, no matted down plants. Looking closely, one might find a few footprints, but that would be all. If previous campers had left trash behind, we would pick it up and pack it out, leaving the campsite better than we found it.

As I grew older, I wondered what it would be like, if it would even be possible, to "leave no trace" in my everyday life at home. I thought of the trash that is produced. I thought of the electricity that is used, the resources used to produce electricity, and the pollution that results. Even the simple act of eating food, I realized, left traces on the environment--some big, some little, depending on how and where the food was grown or raised. It wasn't long before I decided that it's impossible to "leave no trace" on the world. However, at the same time, I realized that it is possible to take some significant steps to reduce one's impact on the world.

Well, it turns out that there is a man who has taken this line of thinking to the extreme. His name is Colin Beavan, although he is more popularly known as "No Impact Man." For one whole year, he and his family unplugged from the grid, produced no trash, travelled exclusively by bike, and bought nothing except food. He's written a book about it, and a documentary movie based on his year of "no impact" living is being shown in select cities across the continent.

For most of us, living as the Beavans did is not realistic or even desirable. However, on his website, Colin lists six guidelines for a "low impact" life. They are:

1. Save the world by improving your diet. Cutting beef out of your diet will reduce your CO2 emissions by 2,400 pounds annually.


2. Get your drinking water for free. Giving up 1 bottle of imported water means using up one less liter of fossil fuel and emitting 1.2 pounds less of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.


3. Observe an eco-sabbath. Don’t buy anything, don't use any machines, don't switch on anything electric, don't cook, don't answer your phone, and, in general, don't use any resources. Do it for a whole day each week to cut your impact by 14.4% a year.


4. Tithe a fixed percentage of your income. If an average family contributes 1% ($502.33) of their annual income ($50,233) to an environmental non-profit, they could offset 40.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year.


5. Get there under your own steam. If you can stay off the road and ride your bike or walk just two days a week, you'll reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 1,590 pounds per year and get good, healthy exercise and we'll all breathe fewer fumes.


6. Commit to eco-service. Take time off from television watching each week and join with others to improve our planet. Spend three fewer hours each day sitting in front of your plasma television and you will reduce your carbon emissions by 550 pounds each year.

The leave no trace principles that I learned in scouting have since been formalized into a program called, appropriately, "Leave No Trace." The program, which involves extensive training and recognition, is a partnership of the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service (website: http://www.lnt.org/).

I'm sure I'll never reduce my impact to the extent that the Beavens did. In fact, I think they're just a tad crazy. Yet I'm thankful for the example set by them, and the inspiration it gives me as I continue to seek ways to reduce my impact, and love this earth just a little more.

Community Clean-Up

Here's a picture from two weeks ago. For reasons that I won't mention, I determined that my son was in need of some "constructive" activity. So I got him up early on a Saturday (I know, that in itself should have been punishment enough), and took him along with me to a community clean-up event.

It just so happened that this community clean-up took place along my new jogging path.

Ethan didn't seem to mind too much, especially when he learned that there were donuts for the volunteers. Together, we filled up about two large garbage sacks of trash. Then we went home.

This week, he and I each received thank you letters from the mayor of Signal Hill.

Strange Looks

By now, I'm used to the strange looks: the looks that come when I'm walking down the street, and a friend driving by pulls over and offers to give me a lift, and I say, "no thanks, I'd rather walk;" the looks that come when I take used 8 ½ x 11 paper that has been printed on one side, cut it in half, and hand-write my sermons on the blank sides before typing them into the computer; the looks that come when I'm offered a soda, and I ask for water instead, insisting that I really do prefer water to soda; the looks that come when people find out that I don't have cable or satellite TV, and wouldn't want it even if it was free.

When it comes to TV, most of the strange looks I get come from my wife and kids. This has become a source of debate in our family. Ginger, I suspect, wants Lifetime and HBO and channels that have shows that go behind the scenes of Twilight and New Moon. The kids, being 8 and 12, aren't sure if they want Disney Channel or MTV, but are certain that having both would be far better than having neither.

All three of them point out that there will also be plenty of the "boring documentaries" that I like to watch.

They're right. With all those channels, there will be lots of shows that I would like. However, there will also be lots of shows that do nothing for me, but which I'll watch anyway. And if I watch all those shows, I won't have time to walk places.

As summer vacation was drawing to a close, the kids spent a lot of time playing with other kids on our street. Sometimes, they went over to their friends' houses to do things they couldn't do at home: watch cable TV and play video games.

More often, though, all those neighbor kids ended up here, at our house, despite our limited electric entertainment opportunities. They rode their bikes out front, played with legos on the living room floor, created skits which they then performed, played games that they had invented themselves, and spread blankets on the front lawn after dinner so they could stargaze.

One evening I joined them. I pointed out to them the Summer Triangle, about the only thing that could be seen through the urban light pollution. I identified for them Altair, Deneb, and Vega. They gazed upward in wonder, and forgot all about giving me strange looks.

Unity Bike Ride

Yesterday I participated in the South Coast Interfaith Council's Unity Bike Ride. The relaxed, 25-mile round trip ride brought together about thirty different people from different faiths for a day of fellowship and recreation.

Ministry of Presence

The other day on TV, I saw Governor Schwarzenegger consoling victims of the brush fires. I saw this twice; once, he was in northern California, offering comfort to those affected by the Auburn fire, and then, later, doing the same for victims of the fire in Los Angeles.

Both times, the sight caught me off guard. Each scene showed a woman, in tears or nearly so, with her head on the governor's shoulder, his arm around her shoulder. Who knew that the "Governator" had such a soft and caring side to him? Who could have pictured such a scene when he was an action movie star?

However, that's not the only reason the scenes caught my attention. Indeed, I have been similarly struck by scenes of other elected officials offering their comfort and consolation to disaster victims. It's such a personal thing, to be comforted in one's sorrow; and yet, the people receiving comfort likely have never met the official who is metaphorically, if not literally, wiping their tears. It's possible that they didn't even vote for him, that they disagree with some of his policies, etc.; but even so, they find his presence comforting.

The governor is there for only a few moments. To some, it may appear to be nothing more than a photo op. The comfort he provides does not replace the help and comfort of family and friends. Nevertheless, it is a type of comfort that only he can provide. It is a comfort that consoles not only the one in his arms, but also all of us--the entire state--we who have not been directly affected by the flames, but who have seen the smoke, felt the ashes falling, and who have found ourselves caught up in the emotional tragedy that we read and hear about in the news.

It is, in short, a ministry of presence, an aspect of ministry that I admit I have been slow to understand.

Especially baffling and intriguing to me is how this ministry is one which can only be carried out by the "man at the top"--in this case, the governor. It's the same role that church pastors often find themselves in. It doesn't matter how often we emphasize the "priesthood of all believers." It doesn't matter how many times we emphasize that the elders of the church are spiritual leaders of the congregation. It doesn't matter if every member of the congregation offers support, prayers, and encouragement. Such things do matter, of course, and yet it's not the same as a call or a visit by the pastor.

I'm not always comfortable with this aspect of the pastor's role. It's not that I don't want to be there for people; I do. It's just that I worry that anything I can say or do will be inadequate. All I can do, really, is show up, be present, and offer a prayer. It's nothing that anyone else couldn't do. But because I'm the pastor, it has added significance and meaning.

So this week, I've been watching you, Governor. It hasn't been to criticize you or to point out ways that the guy I did vote for could have done better. I've been watching so that I might learn from you, and learn more about the mystery of the ministry of presence.

Angeles Forest, near Big Tujunga

Readers of this blog know that I often go on hikes in the mountains. A number of the places I've gone hiking over the past year and a half have been in a section of the Angeles National Forest which is now being consumed by fire.

Here's a picture I took a few months ago on one of these hikes. Most likely, this canyon looks very, very different now.