Grow Zones – get your community growing

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Churches Together in England is promoting Grow Zones.  There have been many similar community gardening schemes over the years and they can be very rewarding.

How can you combine growing your own delicious food, making new friends, learning a natural growing method, and the opportunity to reconnect at a deep, spiritual level with creation? The answer is Grow Zones, a community growing project being launched through local churches across the UK.

Designed specifically with churches in mind, Grow Zones provides an opportunity to engage new people from your neighbourhood in a simple, practical project that bears on our common concern for the earth.

The idea is very simple. Someone from a local church or neighbourhood hears about Grow Zones and, with the aid of the Grow Zones kit, forms a local team. People are introduced to a natural growing method known as Permaculture and helped to redesign their gardens so they can grow more of their own fruit and veg. Each team is offered insurance as part of the package, and sets out on a series of visits, where they work on one another’s gardens to make their dreams real. The commitment is deliberately light just four mornings make up the whole course, but experience shows that deep bonds form between people, lasting friendships are made and many go on to experience and learn more.

One participant said having experienced Grow Zones: “I don’t know what it was; the sunshine, the friendship, the labour, the food, the fresh air, but my spirits were uplifted and I spent the rest of the day on a high. This morning I came downstairs and felt compelled to go out into the garden. It looked lovely.”

Start a Grow Zones Team

Would you be interested in starting a group in your area? You don’t necessarily need to have any gardening experience, all you need is to be good at organising and encouraging people. If you can gather a group of people together, the Grow Zones Kit will provide the help and resources to get you growing for your first season.

Grow Zones is a national project - supported by the Local Food fund - and a series of Christ and the Earth retreat days supports the programme. To book a retreat day and find out more about the community behind Grow Zones visit http://www.earthabbey.com/.

Case study: One person’s story

I have longed to do something really positive about caring for creation. As part of the Grow Zones pilot in Bristol, and being introduced to Permaculture, I have been set on a fascinating journey that has transformed my view of the world we live in and resulted in my becoming involved in a whole set of community growing projects here in Bristol. It seems to me that reconnecting with the land, and with growing our own food, is an extraordinarily powerful means to help us reconsider how we are living and to build fresh expressions of community life. There was a sort of implicit and deep spirituality that pervaded our experience of Grow Zones here in Bristol, as if God was there among us as we worked together. As a Christian minister, I have also been concerned to express concern for creation in a way that is more than theory, or just ‘doing without’ something. It seems to me that the great biblical hope for peace and harmony in creation finds real expression in the hearts of those who join together in a project like Grow Zones.

Budapest Call for Climate Justice

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Delegates of churches from 32 European countries, with participants from churches from all over the world, met in Budapest from 8 – 12 November 2010 for the consultation “Poverty, Wealth and Ecology in Europe”.

The consultation was part of a broad ecumenical process initiated by the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre in 2006.  It was organised jointly by the Conference of European Churches and the World Council of Churches.

In a preamble to their statement, the report makes the following points about the experience of the consultation:

• In visiting local communities, we have been faced with the impacts of the economic crisis in Hungary.
• We have discussed widespread poverty in the rich continent of Europe, worsened by the present financial collapse.
• We are concerned by growing injustice, social polarization and sharpening regional disparities of Europe.
• We note the broad social and economic gap between old and new member states of the European Union.
• We recognize that great sections of Eastern Europe and many in the Western parts in the present situation are confronted with the suffering of people living under abject poverty, and that this is therefore a priority of the churches concerned.
• We acknowledge that we are part of societies which are obsessed by the ideology of growth and consumerism.
• We demand that people should be in the centre of economic policies.
• We have criticized the primacy of economy over people and creation as a whole.
• We as the people of God are called to participate in the work of God in this world, extending God’s love and care to all human and non-human members of the ‘community of creation’.
• We recognize that unsustainable methods of wealth creation and the adherence to unlimited growth impoverish communities and harm creation as a whole.
• In the light of these insights, which we identify as signs of a profound spiritual crisis, we, the delegates of European churches released the Budapest Call for Climate Justice – addressing poverty, wealth and ecology.

This is followed by their Call for Climate Justice.  They argue the great challenge of climate change calls for a great transition and that God's promises encourage the churches to make a start.

Ekklesia have posted a useful summary of the background to the consultation, wherein they quote  Dr Rogate Mshana, director of the WCC programme on Justice, Peace and Creation, who says: "The meeting in Budapest showed the importance of international ecumenical cooperation on the issues of poverty eradication and care for creation.  Christians have an important message for today's world: we are all responsible to advocate and work for systems that eradicate poverty and must not let our lives be defined by systems of greed.  The churches in the different countries and regions can make this message heard in different places and can hold each other accountable."

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Churches Tell World Leaders to Create Low Carbon Economies

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The Joint Public Issues Team released the following on 26 November 2010:

Cancun Conference – 29 November to 10 December

Churches are urging political leaders to lay out plans for low carbon economies at the Cancun follow-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.

The Methodist Church, The United Reformed Church and The Baptist Union of Great Britain have stressed the importance of new sources of finance in closing the global climate investment gap. They have called on the Cancun Conference in Mexico to support duties on aviation and shipping and to allocate revenue from carbon allowance auctions to an international climate finance depository. An international bank levy is also among the measures recommended to raise the $100 billion a year needed to tackle climate change.

Steve Hucklesby, Policy Adviser for the Methodist Church, said: “The Copenhagen Conference established that developing countries will need $100 billion dollars each year to help develop low carbon economies. This is a huge challenge but it is achievable. We need sources of grant finance which are predictable and sustainable. We can’t rely on loans when so many countries are already struggling with debt. At Cancun we must start to lay down the financial architecture to support that goal.”

Climate finance will also help countries adapt to the impact of climate change. Cyclone shelters, rising tube wells, floating gardens, raising and strengthening homes are among the climate adaptation measures being used in Bangladesh to cope with rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers and increasingly powerful cyclones.

Commenting on the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit to agree globally binding emission targets, Frank Kantor, Secretary for Church and Society of the United Reformed Church, said: “Europe has a chance to rebuild trust with poorer countries at Cancun but this will require EU countries to deliver on their three year pledge of €7.2 billion fast-start finance to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to climate change between 2010 and 2012.

“The EU has a unique opportunity to gain significant investment in renewable energy technologies by upping its carbon reduction target from 20 to 30 per cent by 2020. According to a new study compiled by think-tank e3g, a fall in carbon prices would reduce investment incentive in renewable energy projects. As Churches we urge EU leaders present at Cancun to increase the EU carbon reduction targets, and thereby send out a clear message to other developed countries that raising carbon reduction targets to more realistic levels will contain the rise on global temperatures to less than two degrees.”

Revd Graham Sparkes, Head of Faith and Unity at the Baptist Union of Great Britain, said: “Developed countries have to recognise their role as historical polluters. They have to bear the burden and cost of building a clean-energy future.”

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