Take a look at a → preview of the EMERGE booklet.
The premise: Quakers are already equipped to dismantle the drivers of our climate and biodiversity crises.
The query: How do we become a catalyst for a cultural shift?
To open this discussion, members of the Radnor Friends Meeting Climate Action Committee were led to produce the above-linked booklet, and the “living” website you’re exploring at this moment.
The SPICES testimonies, which many Quakers believe summarize our core values, are: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship (or Sustainability). A testimony calls us to act outside our personal comfort zones. It calls us to take up the hard work of challenging the comfort zones of others. We can apply this understanding to a quest to let go of practices and conveniences that cost the Earth, and that artificially separate us from the plight of a long unheeded planet.
Could a new set of values help restore our right relationship with Earth and its living communities?
Inspired by the Quaker tradition of the familiar acronym SPICES…
EMERGE may guide transformation—from our current state of coping with crisis, to a new way of living, as we take each letter and progress…
From Empathy, Mindfulness, and Ecological Integrity…
to Right Action, Growth, and, finally, Endurance.
UPDATE: The EMERGE booklet is now en route from its eco-friendly print shop, just in time for its debut, in actual booklet form, at the Friends General Conference (the Gathering) in Haverford College, opening on the 30th of June 2024.
Thanks for additonal support from the Steere Trust empowering the Climate Action Committee to be present at the Gathering. We’ve received financial support for the booklet printing from the Outreach Committee at Radnor Meeting.
The Climate Action Committee at Radnor Meeting gratefully received input from members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Eco-Justice Collaborative, and too many other contributors to name. We hope you who are reading this today will become yet another contributor.
Photography: Michael Zager (Read more about the photography for the EMERGE project.)
Design: Kathy McLaughlin, idesign communications
Website Team: David Castro, Lee Hall, Kathy McLaughlin
Planning Team: The Climate Action Committee at Radnor Friends Meeting, clerked by Burt Dallas