Eco Blog - St. George's Berlin

Christopher's sermon this morning mentioned the sight of small plants pushing up through the asphalt (he said tarmac) or in between slabs of concrete. He paused to admire this phenomenon of nature struggling to renew itself. We see such signs every day, and yet in many buildings a vigorous gardener will pull the plants out because eventually the plants will break down the hard barriers we humans have erected. The earth is struggling to renew itself, and our human desire for control fights against it. Our church has an asphalt driveway far in the back to give access to the recycling containers. People say is in bad shape and needs renewal. What are the environmental consequences of putting in a new driveway? Every time we cover the earth with something solid, we prevent plants from taking advantage of the soil. We also force the water to run off to the sides rather than sink into the earth. We talk about capturing rainwater from the with the roof of the church in a responsible way t

The Diocese of Europe asked that parishes calculate their carbon footprint.  Our eco-committee has worked on a carbon footprint analysis in answer to that request.  Please note that most of the work was done by an engineer, Martyn Maguire, who was working with numbers from the various Berlin utility companies supplied by the church office. The bottom line is that St. George's church in Berlin has a carbon footprint of 35207.33 kg  CO2 emissions or 35.2 Tonnes .  The details are complex. The sources of total carbon emissions were: electricity 1133.30 kg,  gas heating 33929. 57 kg,  drinking water 5.07 kg, and  wastewater 139.39 kg.  The conversion factors come from the UK government, and are based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  For these number to make sense, we need comparison data, ideally from other parishes. Those data will be posted as soon as we have them. Obviously there are significant contributions to our carbon foo

  Microplastics are an invisible problem that is becoming part of the marine and human food chain. The University of Michigan has a new technique for tracking the pollution: "An estimated 8 million tons of plastic trash enters the ocean each year, and most of it is battered by sun and waves into microplastics—tiny flecks that can ride currents hundreds or thousands of miles from their point of entry The debris can harm sea life and marine ecosystems, and it’s extremely difficult to track and clean up." ( SOURCE ) On 5 August  Joey Grostern wrote in a Guardian article with the title " Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’ " "The research is the first of its kind and examined the impact of bottled water in Barcelona, where it is becoming increasingly popular despite improvements to the quality of tap water in recent years. ...  In the US, 17m barrels of oil are needed to produce the plastic to meet annual bottled water d

  How much bad news is needed to make people aware of the climate change crisis? There have been extreme temperatures in the Northwest part of the United States and in Canada. There have been floods in Germany with many lives lost. Will it be necessary for one of the US states to sink beneath the water before climate change is taken seriously? This may actually happen.. The Guardian writer Oliver Milman reported on 30.072021; "Greenland’s vast ice sheet is undergoing a surge in melting, with the amount of ice vanishing in a single day this week enough to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water, researchers have found." ( SOURCE ) and the article goes on: "This rate of ice loss, which is accelerating as temperatures continue to increase, is changing ocean currents, altering marine ecosystems and posing a direct threat to the world’s low-lying coastal cities, which risk being inundated by flooding. A 2019 research paper found the Greenland ice sheet could add any