End Dogfighting in Atlanta

In the city, I stood at a press event with a dear brother, Ralph Hawthorne of the Humane Society of the United States, and his colleagues from animal stewardship organizations, to draw attention to an Atlanta program that aims to end dogfighting by helping urban youth train and care for their pit bulls, preparing them for showing instead of fighting. Professional dog-trainer Amber Burckhalter and a team of volunteers work with kids to learn wise animal stewardship, compassion, and responsibility. Weekly classes help young people develop a relationship with their pets, and to learn about the dangers and cruelty associated with dogfighting. There’s a video about the dog-training program online and a CNN newstory about reformed dogfighter Mark Lockhart, who grew up fighting dogs, and who now helps Amber show kids how to treat dogs as friends, not fighters.

Urban ministry folks know that animals are often mistreated in cultures that tolerate cruelty and crime. Ralph Hawthorne, himself an urban minister who has in the past taken on gang violence and drug culture, now also pushes back spiritual darkness by fighting animal cruelty. He works to recruit young people and build neighborhood support and relationships, creating grassroots community while educating about the danger dogfighting poses to that community. He has traveled with former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, connecting the famous football player with young people who need to hear his story of repentance from a life of abusing animals. The stewardship mandate of Genesis surely extends to the pets under our care.

Youth Birding Competition

Immediately after leaving the End Dogfighting Atlanta press conference, I packed the car, my three kids and three of their friends, and headed out for 24 hours of birding (bird-watching and also finding birds by ear). Our team of five friends (plus Beatrice, our 2 year old) has competed for four years running, dashing from one natural area to another from 5 pm Friday to 5 pm Saturday on a day in late April, trying to rack up a long list of Georgia bird species.

The Georgia Youth Birding Competition sponsored by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources program in Non-Game Wildlife, is an amazing assemblage of kids of all ages, their mentors and parents, criss-crossing the state during the spring migration season, when North American birds that overwintered in Latin America are headed back to their nesting grounds up north. The kids spend weeks training and planning their routes and strategies (the winners tend to start on the Georgia coast spotting shorebirds and gulls, then head inland at night to pick up owls and nightjars, get a few winks, and then work their way up the state). Our team mostly stayed near Atlanta and Macon, and saw an impressive 80 species, including a few to add to their “life lists” of birds (full list here), and the winning team in our elementary-school age group saw over one hundred!

Kids, the Creation, and the Creator

Our boys know more Georgia birds, by sight and by song, than they do Pokemon characters or celebrities. (We’re hoping that that fact, combined with violin lessons, will mean we don’t have to worry about them dating until they’re in their twenties.) Their brains are designed to respond to biodiversity by learning it. Romans 1:20 means more when you pay attention to creation. It is, as the writer of the reformed Belgic confession tells us, the first means by which we know God, since the universe “is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”

God gave humans an amazing ability to relate to animals. Dominion (not domination) and Sabbath appreciation expressed in Genesis 1, relationship (Adam seeing, naming the animals) and responsibility (tending and keeping the garden) in Genesis 2.

You see this in kids, as the image of God bubbles upward and outward. They wonder and delight in creatures, and they have the innate ability to classify and remember them, as Adam did. When kids’ brains are filled with biodiversity instead of corporate-logo-diversity, they have the chance to think God’s thoughts after him. When kids learn to love and train their pit bulldogs, they learn something about wise dominion and stewardship of the Creation. These are all signs of the life of God within them.

N.T. Wright has said that the human condition, holding the image of God, is like being an angled mirror, reflecting, from creation, glory back to the Creator, and reflecting, from God, his wise sovereignty, love, and care for creation. These programs show both those dimensions of the human experience, teaching kids in a modern, violent, and hypercommercial empire something about what it means to be truly human.

Young birders atop an Indian mound at Ocmulgee National Monument near Macon, GA

On Friday and Saturday, my boys Angus and Ewan joined their friends Meggie, Patrick, and Eric, as a team competing in the Georgia Youth Birding Competition, in which teams try to spot (or hear) as many different bird species as they can in a 24-hour period. They started at 5 pm on Friday. All the teams converge on the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center near Mansfield, GA,to turn in their lists at 5 pm Saturday and to enjoy an awards banquet immediately afterward. There were lots of teams competing this year, in four age brackets.

Kids have to spot, identify, and record their sightings without adult help (except for driving!). Our team had 80 species, and placed third in the elementary group. The top team had just over a hundred birds!

Here’s our list from the 24 hour big day (birds added to the  life list of someone in the group are in ALL CAPS):

1. Canada Goose
2. Wood Duck
3. Mallard
4. Blue-winged Teal
5. Wild Turkey
6. Common Loon
7. Double-crested Cormorant
8. AMERICAN BITTERN
9. Great Blue Heron
10. Great Egret
11. Little Blue Heron
12. Cattle Egret
13. Black Vulture
14. Turkey Vulture
15. Osprey
16. Cooper’s Hawk
17. Red-shouldered Hawk
18. Red-tailed Hawk
19. Common Moorhen
20. American Coot
21. Killdeer
22. GREATER YELLOWLEGS
23. LESSER YELLOWLEGS
24. SOLITARY SANDPIPER
25. Rock Pigeon
26. Eurasian Collared Dove
27. Mourning Dove
28. Barred Owl
29. Chimney Swift
30. Ruby-throated Hummingbird
31. Red-headed Woodpecker
32. Red-bellied Woodpecker
33. Downy Woodpecker
34. Northern Flicker
35. Pileated Woodpecker
36. Eastern Phoebe
37. Eastern Kingbird
38. White-eyed Vireo
39. Red-eyed Vireo
40. Blue Jay
41. American Crow
42. Fish Crow
43. Purple Martin
44. Tree Swallow
45. Northern Rough-winged Swallow
46. Cliff Swallow
47. Barn Swallow
48. Carolina Chickadee
49. Tufted Titmouse
50. Carolina Wren
51. Marsh Wren
52. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
53. Eastern Bluebird
54. Wood Thrush
55. American Robin
56. Gray Catbird
57. Northern Mockingbird
58. Brown Thrasher
59. European Starling
60. Cedar Waxwing
61. Yellow-rumped Warbler
62. Palm Warbler
63. Common Yellowthroat
64. Hooded Warbler
65. Eastern Towhee
66. Chipping Sparrow
67. Field Sparrow
68. Song Sparrow
69. Swamp Sparrow
70. Dark-eyed Junco
71. Northern Cardinal
72. Indigo Bunting
73. BOBOLINK
74. Red-winged Blackbird
75. Eastern Meadowlark
76. Common Grackle
77. Brown-headed Cowbird
78. House Finch
79. American Goldfinch
80. House Sparrow

Antique dealers may respond hopefully to dusty bits in attics, but true cooks palpitate over even more curious oddments: mushroom and tomato skins, fowl carcasses, tender celery leaves, fish heads, knucklebones, and chicken feet. These are just a few of the treasures for the stockpot–that magic source from which comes the telling character of the cuisine.

In my family, I’m in charge of stock-making, providing the raw material which is the secret reason why Joanna’s soups are so good (I’ll ask her to post our best soup recipes soon, but don’t tell her I’m claiming credit for their goodness). Whenever we’ve got a turkey or chicken carcass leftover from a big meal, or from grabbing one of those whole roast chickens from the deli at the grocery store, we don’t throw away the bones and skin–we make stock. Then we freeze it, or turn it directly into soup, or use it for making rice (it makes rice taste really good).

It feels kinda old-fashioned to get all the good out of what would otherwise be thrown away. Your great-grandparents would be proud.

Here’s my modification of the Joy of Cooking recipe for “Light Stock from Poultry”.

Break up your chicken bones, skins, and leftover pieces. Don’t leave anything out. Put them in a pot with about two  quarts of water, and bring them to a boil. Add:

• 6 peppercorns (screw open your pepper grinder to get some, or just put in plenty of pepper)
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 4 whole cloves
• 4 sprigs fresh parsley or plenty of dried parsley
• 1 small diced onion (or half a big one–a great use of leftover onions you might have saved)
• 2 sticks of celery, diced up,  if you have them
• 1 medium-sized carrot, diced or sliced thinly

if you don’t have something, leave it out! It’ll be fine. Don’t add salt.

Reduce the heat, and continue to simmer uncovered or partially covered on a very low heat, for about two hours, or until the liquid is reduced by half. If some scum (frothy bubbles) float to the top, you can spoon them off. Then strain it into a storage container, and put it in the fridge overnight. (Throw the bones and solids away; you’ve got all the good out of them.) There may be some fat that solidifies at the top, and you can just lift it off and throw it away. Then put it back in the fridge until you want to use it (in a few days), or put it in a ziploc bag and freeze it for up to a couple of months.

If you have a chicken or turkey for dinner, this takes very little time, because you get it going while you do the dishes, and strain it and store it before you go to bed.

What to use it for? Recipes coming up soon!

You’ll be tempted to start buying those roast chickens at the grocery store just to get the bones for stock soon! Be sure, if you can, to get free range chickens. This is a way to get all the good out of the added expense.

Photographer James Gathany--CDC Judy Schmidt

A: Good question. Ok, it’s not really an “environmental” issue, but it does concern our physical bodies (and those of our children) so it is a “creation care” issue. The underlying real connection is whether we are willing to trust scientific consensus on some issues but not others. Hint: if you wear a seat belt but also believe that thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism, you may be inconsistent. Similarly, if you buckle your kids up but don’t believe people are causing global warming, you may be inconsistent in your attitude toward expert opinion.

A strong scientific consensus exists that says seat belts save lives, a strong scientific consensus says that people are causing global warming, and a strong scientific consensus exists that thimerosal preservatives in vaccines are safe . Why trust one and not the other?

You didn’t answer the question: Should you worry about mercury in swine flu vaccines?

I’m not a doctor (well, actually I am, but a Ph.D. doesn’t qualify me to give medical advice). So the first caveat is, you should ask your own doctor about the swine flu shot (H1N1) and the safety of vaccinating your kids.

Joanna and I vaccinated all three of our children (ages 2, 6, and 9), because the risks from seasonal and swine flu seem so much greater than the risks from the mercury in the vaccinations. The swine flu injections they received contained thimerosal (although not all do). The amount of mercury in the vaccinations was about the same as that contained in a  six-ounce can of chunk light tuna (25 micrograms in the vaccine, versus 20 micrograms in a can of chunk light tuna). It’s much LESS mercury than in a can of albacore tuna. So we could simply cut out tuna for a week and make up for whatever mercury they were exposed to in the vaccine.

In addition, the form of mercury in thimerosal is ethyl mercury, which is excreted much more quickly than methyl mercury, so the actual exposure is much, much less. So we’re not worried at all about that mercury exposure.

Wait, there’s mercury in tuna?

Yes, and THAT’S the kind of mercury exposure we should all be much more worried about (because most childhood vaccines no longer contain mercury as a preservative). Methyl mercury levels in many kinds of fish are high enough to cause harm when consumed regularly. Fish is good food and should be a part of a healthy diet, but because of the world’s dependence on coal-fired generating plants, we put a lot of extra mercury into the environment, which ends up in the fish and shellfish we eat.

The biggest anthropogenic source of mercury in the environment is pollution from burning coal to produce electricity, and that pollution gets into our bodies. If you have kids, you should feed them chunk light instead of albacore tuna (or tuna steaks) and limit the amount to a six ounce can a week or so. There is a joint FDA/EPA advisory about mercury in various kinds of fish, which everyone should read.

Should you get the swine flu shot if you’re pregnant?

Almost certainly. Both seasonal flu and H1N1 pose serious risks to pregnant women and their babies. It appears to be much more dangerous for a woman and her unborn baby if she gets the flu. You may be able to get a thimerosal-free formulation, but in any case the CDC recommends that pregnant women are vaccinated–they’re near the top of the priority list for H1N1 vaccination. Talk to your doctor, or read the CDC guidance on H1N1 vaccines and pregnancy.

Life is complicated, and requires that we weigh risks carefully, and that we rely on good science and not rumor, conjecture, and pseudo-science. Sometimes we avoid one risk and

inadvertently put ourselves in danger of much greater problems. Whether it is people refusing to buckle their seat belts for fear of being trapped in a car crash, people in high risk groups avoiding the flu vaccine, or people who fear environmental regulation but don’t worry about the dangers of unmitigated climate change, we need to take a deep breath, ask for wisdom, and act accordingly. Buckle up, fight climate change, and follow your doctor’s advice on the flu shot.

“You and I are trash machines.  We each generate nearly one ton of garbage each year.  The nearly 250 million tons of garbage we produce in the United States would fill Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands in New Jersey 737 times each year.  That’s twice a day, every day.  That’s a bunch of rubbish!

So, for the month of November, Vicki and I are trying a little experiment.  We are going to strive to produce no garbage for a month.  Our compost pile and recycling bins will be our friends.  Admittedly, we will have to make some serious choices about the purchases that face us the next month.  Instead of just shopping for price, quality and convenience, we are going to be thinking about packaging, utility and reusability.  We are going to refuse to make refuse.

So, for the next month, I will be talkin’ trash!  Daily, I will write about our successes and failures, the things we learn, and the things we regret.  The goal: keep the trash can empty!  Keep up with our progress here, and join us in this effort.  Let’s do what we can to keep from throwing things “away”.

After all, away is not just some imaginary neverland – it is an actual place on our planet. Garbage just gets moved from my house to another place in God’s creation that we collectively decided it would be OK to trash.  It can be nearby, or it can be thousands of miles away, messing creation by spoiling the land it is placed in, fouling the air through incineration, and by polluting by transporting it.  Can we make these places smaller, more local, less frequent and less degrading to Creation’s natural systems?

So, go ahead and jump into the waste stream with me.  If you want to read more about the impacts trash has on our planet, read Gardening Eden, pages 207-217.”

Michael writes about his family’s effort in terms of its effect on the creation. I’ll bet the bigger result will be the effect on him and his wife, ask they’ll be demonstrating with their actions what kind of people they want to be–responsible and careful rather then reckless and careless.

Gardening Eden is available at the Flourish online bookstore .

Gardening Eden: How Creation Care Will Change Your Faith, Your Life and Our World, by Michael Abbate, published by WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, 2009.  ISBN  978-0-30744-499-8.   For more info: www.michaelabbate.com

Kids need knives.

I still get a laugh when my family goes to a sit-down restaurant, to see servers putting out silverware and carefully making sure that the table knives don’t go anywhere near my kids. This at ages up to nine…!

Those servers would have been shocked to see my six and nine year-old boys at home, sitting on the back deck, whittling away for hours, making their own bows, arrows, and spears, and eventually making even elaborate little boats and toys.

I’ve been on camping trips with other families whose own kids were kept far from knives. Their children were warned not to interact with nature.

“Don’t go off the path.”
“Don’t play with the fire.”
“Don’t pick up insects.”
“Stay away from snakes.”
“Watch out for poison ivy.”
“Don’t play with knives.”
“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.”

My own kids were of course the ones catching snakes, licking slugs, picking up bugs, climbing trees, leaving the path, carving things, and getting the other kids into trouble. They (mostly) don’t get poison ivy, because they know what it looks like. They don’t pick up poisonous snakes because they know what they look like. They know that Florida green anoles (lizards) will bite your earlobes and hang on until you take them off, making great temporary clip-on earrings. They have a lot of fun. Unsupervised fun, for the most part, which is what kids lack these days, according to Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and the person who coined the phrase “nature deficit disorder.”

Why the worried parents? Many are themselves uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the outdoors, find camping to be a genuine novelty, and spent more time in malls than outdoors as a child. But I think less is personality and more is culture.

It’s the culture of childproofing and child safety run amok. These parents seem to have the belief that their main responsibility is to deliver their children to college having never been injured in childhood in any way. Of course children seem to have the opposite goal, but without ever encountering danger, they never learn how to handle themselves in the face of it.

It’s also the “Take only pictures; leave only footprints” culture, carried almost to its logical conclusion. Nature is a museum (a dangerous museum), and combining people with nature is a recipe for someone to get hurt, either nature or the intruding human. What we really need is more people in creation, learning to love it and use it and protect it.

Kids need knives. They are one of the most supremely useful tools for interacting with creation. They’re an important part of moral and creative development. And they let kids harvest their own raw materials and modify them for creative play.

Richard Louv writes about the theory of “loose parts” that has begun to influence child-play experts and landscape architects. The originator of the theory is a well-known British artist named Ben Nicholson, who died in 1990. Nicholson contended that: “in any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” Playing with “loose parts” is far different than the scripted play that goes along with so many modern toys with commercial movie and cartoon tie-ins. Up and down the toy aisles of Target and Wal-mart you don’t find much in the way of raw materials. You find products that require you to buy accessories designed to go with them, which are hard to incorporate with toys in other product lines.

Loose-parts play is open-ended; requiring far more creativity and imagination, and developing far more skill and competence, than most modern plastic toys allow (and certainly more than is found in computer games). As Louv writes: “a typical list of loose parts for a natural play area might include water, trees, bushes, flowers, and long grasses, a pond and the creatures in it, along with other living things, sand (best if it can be mixed with water), places to sit in, on, under; structures that offer privacy and views. Go beyond that play area, to woods, fields, and streams, and the parts become looser and even more potent to the imagination.”

Having and knowing how to use a knife gives kids power to transform materials in useful ways. We designate certain weedy shrubs and fast-growing trees in the wilder areas of our small urban yard as permitted source materials for the kids, and keep them around for just that purpose. They learn to use it responsibly. They know there are consequences to their actions with a knife, for nature as well as for their fingers! And they know that their tool needs care, sharpening, and protection from misuse. They also become firm believers in private property when their brother tries to poach their prized possession.

We started the boys off making soap carvings at ages three and four, on Ivory soap, with “knives and chisels” I whittled out of wooden popsicle sticks. They loved it. We started letting them whittle with a knife, under close supervision, seated with a parent and with no other kids around, when they were about four-and-a-half. The rule was that if anyone else approached, they put down the knife.

The best starting “real” knife is a fixed blade knife with a wooden handle and short sharp blade (like the Murphy knife; all the knives mentioned here are available from the Flourish store). At age six they got their own folding-blade pocketknife. Some people like lock-back blades (like the Victorinox Sentinel, a great knife), and we got one for our first son, but I seriously don’t think it’s necessary. The French-made Opinel is beautiful (and cheap), has a single folding blade that sharpens really well and has a lovely pearwood handle—my nine-year old loves this knife. My six year old has never folded the blade onto his fingers (yet).

To see the knives mentioned above, along with soap carving kits and woodcarving kits, go to the Flourish store and in the “Browse by Category” section on the right click on “Children and the Outdoors” and then on the subcategory “Knives and Whittling.” And you must learn to sharpen well! Whether you have kids or not, you should get a strop, a good knife, and the “Little Book of Whittling.”

Originally posted on Sustainlane.com.