The Landscape of Urban
Farming: EPA Testimony on Carbon Regulations
August
1, 2014
This past week the EPA held public
hearings in Pittsburgh, Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. on the proposed
regulations to reduce carbon pollution by 30% from new and existing power
plants by 2030.
You can read about the EPA’s proposed
regulations here.
These hearings are an impressive
process. A name is called, each person has 5 minutes as 3 EPA staffers listen
intently and take notes. You are timed with a cute little green/yellow/red
timer. The hearings last all….day….long. I can’t imagine being an EPA
staffer and listening all day long. Hopefully they take yoga breaks.
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| Ashley Goff testifies before EPA. Picture by Joelle Novey. |
When I think about what’s going on in
Gaza and the Ukraine, this is an incredibly well-organized, non-violent
democratic process to garner feedback from the public.
I was asked by Joelle
Novey of GWIPL to give a testimony. I had the 10:20 slot on
July 30th.
Here is my testimony, lengthened by 2
minutes from a testimony I gave earlier this year when the EPA was gathering
initial feedback prior to the now proposed regulations. Here
I am giving my EPA testimony–I’m at the table on the left.
Environmental Protection Agency
Testimony July 30th, 2014
My name is Ashley Goff and I’m a pastor
at Church of the Pilgrims, a
congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) in DuPont Circle, Washington,
D.C. 60,000 honeybees call the backyard of Church of the Pilgrims home. Four
honeybee hives are part of our urban garden called Sacred Greens.
Our honeybees pollinate the vegetables and fruits of our garden, the forest
oasis right next to us, Rock Creek Park, and the flowers, fruits and trees of
our DuPont neighbors.
If you are within 3 miles of Church
of the Pilgrims, there is a good chance our honeybees have
transformed the flowers of your tomato plants to a tomato fruit.
The eggplants, green peppers, basil,
beans, butternut squash, and carrots we grow for Sacred Greens, our urban
garden, goes to create meals for Open Table,
our lunch every Sunday afternoon for 30 or so hungry neighbors.
Our newly planted apple and pear trees,
and fruit bushes, or permaculture, will soon offer a free healthy snack for
anyone walking past our garden.
On Sundays our garden is poignantly
alive—honeybees buzzing around seeking pollen and nectar and hungry neighbors
sharing in casseroles of fresh eggplant, tomato sauce, and basil. In that
moment, our backyard is host and home to living beings our society thinks are
disposable: honeybees and hungry, homeless folks.
Honeybees are the most vulnerable of
insects threatened by colony collapse disorder—an ecological crisis created by
human agency with pesticides and climate change. Hungry people are the most
socially vulnerable of humanity, starving off the lack of access to affordable
and healthy food.
Since 2006, commercial beekeepers have
lost 30% of their hives each year. According to your friends over at the USDA, about one mouthful in three in our diet directly
or indirectly benefits from honeybee pollination.
According to DC Hunger Solutions, in 2008-2012, 30.5
percent of households with children in the District of Columbia said they were
unable to afford enough food. This is the second worst rate in the nation,
exceeded only by Mississippi.
Climate change suffocates God’s
planetary design.
We designed our backyard because of our
trust in the Holy one and in a Christian Ethic with a moral vision: our garden
symbolizes how we are to live as people of God’s Way and shows our intention
for living. Psalm 104 states we are to renew the face of the planet.
And right now the planet is poor from
climate pollution impacting humans and an insect like the honeybee.
Oikos is the Greek work for house or household. Oikos is
also root for the words ecology and economics. For Christians of the ancient
Church, Oikos was not limited to the private home but was
referring to the planet itself as the World House, God’s home.
Oikos sets Church of the Pilgrims intention in how to be a
sacred neighbor; that we are a shared household where all who are born belong
and all who live co-habitat; where humans and all of life live into each
other’s life and die into each other’s death in a complex pattern of relationships
that can nourish, or destroy, creatures like honeybees and vulnerable humans.
There is no way around our
inter-connnectedness. We are of one household and tethered across inhabited
landscapes. It’s the Way of God and Life.
Oikos, the household, also assumes limits. The well-being of
the planet doesn’t come from a short-term vision of life with a never-ending
inhaling of goods, services, and energy. Oikos demands limits on how we as
humans live on the planet.
Oikos demands a long-term vision that incorporates what we
can imagine to be of future generations, particularly the future generations of
honeybees and folks who are starving. A long term vision of life calls for us
to live as part of the web of life: prophetically reduce carbon production that
exacerbates climate disruption that impacts the life of insects, food
production, health, and the sheer beauty of nature.
The role of the EPA is to regulate the
commons. At Church of the Pilgrims, we are doing just that—tending to our
eco-location with intentionality to reflect our place in society and God’s
home. Church of the Pilgrims charges the EPA to care for the household,
the World House, by requiring a 30% reduction in carbon pollution from power
plants by 2030.
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Click
here to see Sojourners’ Flickr of the Hearing Day in DC.
