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Hard to imagine that at exactly this time last year, I drove off with the family to the neighbouring county for an Easter break and coincided our holiday with an absolute blinder of a heatwave.
The normally pallid writer who blinks mole-like in the daylight returned a week later a bronzed sex god.
A handful of major religious institutions have made environmental statements recently. The Vatican added pollution to the list of the new seven deadly sins. Southern Baptists compare destroying the planet to tearing pages out of the Bible. Mormons are reminding followers that their original founders were early environmentalists.
In light of these statements, Easter celebrators might want to reflect on how the story of Easter relates to the environment.
Theologian Herman-Emiel Mertens writes,
“Those who do not understand the link between the Easter message and ecological problems, do not understand anything of either. Environmentalism in itself is of course no utterance of Easter faith. Many non-Christians are concerned about this. That is only right and proper. A monopolizing of these earthly cares by Christians is out of the question. There is environmentalism without Easter faith, but no Easter faith without environmentalism.” (Not the Cross, but the Crucified, 207)
Easter is upon us again! This year, why not say goodbye to those prepackaged kits and dye your eggs with vegetables? For fantastic intructions to make beautiful eggs like those in this photo, please visit Billi-Jean of My Bountiful Life!
Photo copyright Billi-Jean.com. Used with permission
Beautiful green and brown eggs are dwarfed by the huge goose eggs. Some farms also offer duck eggs for interested buyers.
Want some of the most beautifully colored eggs this Easter, but don’t have time to dye them? No problem, you can get eggs in all colors from soft, warm brown to light sage, blue-green and olive or even pink. The best part? The chickens do all the work.
Different breeds of chickens produce different egg colors. This shell color is a result of pigments that are secreted by the hen and deposited on the eggshell’s outer layers during formation in the chicken’s oviduct. Brown eggs are from the pigment protoporphyrin, a breakdown product of hemoglobin. Blue and green hues are caused by the pigment oocyanin, a by-product of bile formation.
I was a bit skeptical of some of the information I found from the Egg Nutrition Center. The Center reported that the color of the eggs a chicken lays is related to the species of the chicken and the color of the chicken’s earlobes. Chickens have earlobes? (Tips on buying eggs and what the labels mean after the jump).
Whether you are Christian or not, children love to hunt for a basket full of goodies on the springtime holiday of Easter, which this year falls very close to the spring equinox. My childhood memories of Easter are filled with fake, green plastic grass, gross gooey marshmallow bunnies, and of course, the ubiquitous chocolate bunny. My children’s Easter gifts are a much more eco-friendly than those of my youth. Here are a few ideas I have come across this year for an eco-friendly Easter:
In my earliest memories, I was already recognizing excessive packaging. An experience that stands out was my love/hate relationship with Paas Easter egg coloring kits.
I would ask my grandmother, “Why do those tiny dye-things need such a big box? I don’t even use the rest of the stuff, and I have my own crayons.”
To which she replied, “So people don’t steal them.”
Consequently, that answer was given to me many times over during childhood, yet I noticed rolls of breath mints and tubes of lipstick eluded this logic. Nevertheless, I was optimistic each year that my eggs would be just as bright and blemish free as those on the box (they never were), and continued to wonder what would happen if I ate one of the tablets. Odds were that it would not taste like a SweeTart, turn my mouth blue for a week, and could even lead to possible gene damage. Such is the industrialization of a holiday.
Fish burgers are back on the restaurant menus. It must be Lent again.
Marking the beginning of the Easter season, worshipers go to church on Ash Wednesday (often still recovering from Fat Tuesday) and get ash spread on their foreheads. The ash is a symbol of contrition and repentance. Then everyone is expected to give up meat and beer and act gloomy for the next 6 weeks. Sound like fun? No wonder Mardi Gras is so popular!
But when you think about it, a collective confession can be incredibly meaningful in light of our complicity in greenhouse gas emissions. The tradition of Lent has potential for inspiring action. In addition to repentance, the ritual of smearing carbon on faces can visually represent the carbon we are contributing in our daily lives. The following are some reformulations of the elements of Lent with a green focus. (These principles are intended to be helpful to people of any faith background or none at all.)
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