DEN Enews

DEN’s mission statement is the same as our baptismal covenant:

" to strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation and respect, sustain, and renew the life of the earth."

It is our prayer you will respond with an overwhelming

" I will, with God's help." 

Genesis tells us God spoke the world into being. Christine Sine from Walking in Wonder with Christine Sine writes of the Australian aborigines whose:

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A statement from the Organizers:

From all over Mi’kma’ki and Nova Scotia we will stop the destruction of our lands and waters.

We stand together in solidarity with land defenders and water protectors at Tqamuoweye’katik -- Hunter’s Mountain -- and all resistance movements in Nova Scotia. Tell Tim Houston to stop selling our futures. Demand that he respect the Treaties, our democratic rights, and our community voices! 

If you live, work, play, or pray in Nova Scotia, we want you there. We want to hear your voices. -- Mi’kmaw land defenders Michelle Paul and Glenda Junta

Bring your community banners, signs, flags and regalia. Bring your drums, songs and prayers.

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Development & Peace – Caritas Canada is planning a walk on November 16^th, the Jubilee of Social Justice.  We will walk from St Thomas Aquinas Church courtyard (Good Shepherd Parish) to St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica. We will have short reflections and prayers along the way. For those who cannot join the walk, you can go directly to St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica for 5pm Mass, with Bishop Dunn presiding.

 “If Rain or Snow, the walk will be CANCELLED and we will just meet at  St Mary’s Cathedral Basilica for the Special 5pm Mass.”

 Meet:   St Thomas Aquinas Church courtyard (Oxford and Jubilee) at 3:30pm on Sunday . The walk will travel            Oxford St. to Coburg Rd. then continuing down Spring Garden Rd. to St Mary’s Cathedral Basilica

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Important to pay attention to what is happening here.

This petition from the Council of Canadians asks the NS government to pause uranium exploration and reinstate the Uranium Exploration and Mining Prohibition Act. Also it  asks to defend our democratic process, uphold environmental and health protections, and help ensure that decisions about Nova Scotia’s future are made with the people, not despite them.  Once you put in your name and postal code, the letter is addressed to your MLA as well as to the premier and minister of Natural Resouces (recently changed). Click where it says start writing and a letter comes up which you can use as is or edit. I suggest you change the Minister of Natural Resouces to Kim Masland.

_{25% of Ontario’s electricity supply in 2030 will be produced by burning fossil gas – up from only 4% in 2017.  Ramping up gas power is bad for our climate and bad for our health. The pollutants released by these gas plants contribute to lung and heart diseases, Alzheimer’s and other neurological risks, asthma, cancers, birth complications and premature death. Wind and solar are now our cleanest and lowest cost sources of new electricity supply. Off-shore wind power in the Great Lakes alone could meet all our electricity needs. Also, solar panels on Toronto’s large parking lots could produce 2.5 x more power than the Portlands gas plant on Toronto’s waterfront produced in 2023. 85% of electricity supply added worldwide in 2023 came from renewables. Ontario needs to embrace the target set at the COP 28 climate summit and triple our wind and solar electricity capacity and double our energy efficiency which will •Lower electricity bills • Phase-out polluting gas power • Create good jobs• Provide clean power for Ontario’s manufacturing & mining industries • Protect our health • Help us meet our climate commitments • Reduce the need for more costly nuclear reactors}.

Adani is the world's largest private coal developer. They have violated environmental regulations, been fined for environmental breaches, and have left their destruction and coal spills across our planet. They are attempting to silence journalists reporting on fossil fuels and corporate corruption. There have been multiple fraud charges against them in just the last year, along with their legal bullying making headlines. Adani has a history of deception, bribery, human rights and Indigenous rights abuses, child labour, and more. They are fast becoming one of the most controversial companies in the world. And yet, banks keep funding them. This petition is going to a series of powerful banks and investors and is about cutting off Adani’s money supply! Help push for accountability and an end to financial bankrolling this unethical company.

Woolly Bats are characterized by their distinctive soft fur and their agile flight. They help control insect populations, including agricultural pests, and they are an integral part of their ecosystems. They are sadly being taken from the wild, killed and sold - pinned in display cases or crammed into tiny fake coffins. The United States is the largest known market for trade in these unique orange-and-black bats, even though the bats are native to South and Southeast Asia. A recent study found that in just 12 weeks, 215 listings for painted woolly bats appeared on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy alone. This issue isn’t new; researchers have been raising conservation concerns about the hunting and sale of taxidermy bats as decor for almost a decade. With the extinction crisis worsening every day, the world can't afford to lose this or any other irreplaceable species. Painted woolly bats are especially vulnerable as they only have one baby bat at a time. Etsy and eBay have already barred the sale of bats. Please join in telling Amazon to step up and stop selling painted woolly bats! Let's push to help these amazing and needed creature flourish in the wild, where they belong.

Every minute, Starbucks uses more than 8,000 plastic cups and plastic-lined paper cups. According to their latest reports, Starbucks distributes as many as 6 billion single-use cups each year. Most of this ends up in landfills, the environment, or is incinerated. Since the cups are made or lined with plastic, they are not designed to be recycled. 98.4% of drinks that Starbucks sells are consumed in these disposable cups. This means the majority of Starbucks cups end up as trash the world has to deal with. This company has made several commitments to reduce their waste, allow for customers to use reusable options, and make their packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable. Help give Starbucks a wake-up jolt to follow through by promoting and incentivizing customers to bring their own cups, and by effectively implementing their commitment to reduce their plastic pollution impact.

Learning for Climate Action

Morning folks

This week, I want to tell you about one inspiring way the United Nations is helping address climate change, through education. The UN does so much that it’s impossible to name it all, but one of their most powerful tools is teaching people like us.

Recently, I received an email inviting me to “Join us in the Climate Classroom at COP30.” The topics were fascinating:

Climate Change and Human Rights

Gender and Climate

Green Skills and a Just Transition

Learning for Climate Action
…and more.

Wow! The UN wrote to me! What a thrill! But it wasn’t my first time hearing from them. The UN offers an entire suite of free online courses on climate and the environment through UN CC:Learn . Once you do one course you are IN, part of their knowledge system and email list.

As a lifelong learner, I’ve taken many of them, enough to have a thick spot in my certificate binder. The courses are short (some take only a couple of hours), yet they open your eyes to the global picture of climate change. My favorite so far? Climate Change and Gender, it was a real eye-opener.

Here’s what amazed me: UN CC:Learn has 143 courses, over 1.1 million users, and just under 600,000 certificates earned. That may sound like a lot, but it’s really a small number for a world of eight billion people. Imagine if we each of us completed one course and told one other person. That simple act could ripple through our networks — doubling, tripling, multiplying awareness and action.

So here’s my challenge:
Visit https://unccelearn.org/.
Take one course — just one.
Then tell someone about it.

Better still, how many of you, are in other organizations that put out an e-news? Include this information there and tell more people.

That’s the power of one. Small steps that, together, move the world. Let’s rumble!

Craft.

Remember that DEN doesn’t publish in December, so November is my month of Christmas Crafts. I try to get the Grandbabies to make a whole bunch of these bags, back in the summer on a rainy day. We use these bags for their birthdays but they forget Grandma uses some at Christmas. These are my “so tired” and still need to wrap 4 more gifts, life saver.  Ran out of bags and patience but here sits the newspaper bags, kept in an airtight bag so they don’t yellow.

If you have time, save your big chip bags. Carefully turn them inside out and wash with soapy water on a cloth. Fold top and add ribbon handles and you have a re-purposed SILVER bag to slip a gift inside.

Christmas Gift Bags from Old Newspapers

Grandma loves Christmas — the lights, the music, and yes, the gift wrapping! But with all that paper flying around, it’s nice to find ways to save a few trees (and a few dollars). Making gift bags from old newspapers is one of my favourite holiday crafts. They’re simple, creative, and kinder to the planet.

You’ll need:
 Two full sheets of newspaper
 An empty cereal box
Tape
A one-hole punch
 Ribbon, yarn, or twine

How to make it:

Wrap the cereal box in newspaper, leaving a bit of overhang at the bottom.

Fold that extra paper under the box and tape it securely.

Tape the long side where the paper ends meet.

Gently pull the box out — you’ve got your bag shape!

Fold the top edge inward to make it tidy and strong.

Punch two holes on each side and thread through ribbon or twine for handles.

Now decorate! Use coloured markers, stamps, stickers, or even old Christmas cards to make it festive. Add a sprig of evergreen, a candy cane, or a paper snowflake to the handles.

Slip your gift inside with a bit of reused tissue paper, and you’ll have a handmade bag that looks charming and saves waste. Grandma says, “That’s the kind of Christmas spirit that lasts all year long!”

Cookbooks

In our little village, we have one of those “take a book, leave a book” libraries, a small wooden box fastened to a telephone pole by the community centre. It’s become quite the busy spot! Folks drop off books they’ve finished, and the rest of us can’t help but stop to peek inside to see what treasures might be waiting.

Grandma always heads straight for the non-fiction, especially the cookbooks.

This week, someone must have been cleaning out a kitchen shelf, because there were several canning and preserving books waiting for a new home. The true gem was a 1933 Preserving and Canning book by the Dominion Glass Company. What a treasure trove of old-time recipes! I’ve already decided I want to make Piccalilli next year, it’s a mix of cabbage, cauliflower, celery, peppers, and cucumbers in a tangy sauce, a lot like mustard pickles but without the mustard.

The book also had recipes for rhubarb marmalade, succotash (corn and lima beans), steamed puddings, and my new favorite, Pandowdy.

Pandowdy is much like a fruit crumble, only instead of an oat topping, you cover the fruit with tea biscuit dough. Since I found a bargain on pears this week, I just had to try it out. The original 1933 recipe reads:

Pandowdy
Fill a greased baking dish half full of peaches, pears, or other fruit. Sprinkle with nutmeg or cinnamon, add a little fruit juice or water, and cover with baking powder biscuit dough rolled ¼ inch thick. Bake in a hot oven.

Old recipes often assume you already know how to make biscuits, and how “hot” an oven should be! So, here’s my mother’s tea biscuit recipe, the way women of that era did it:

Tea Biscuits
2 cups flour
Dash of salt
½ cup shortening (butter or margarine works fine)
2 heaping tsp baking powder
Cut together until crumbly, then add just enough milk or water to hold it together. Roll ¼ inch thick.

Cover your fruit with the biscuit dough and bake until the top is golden and the fruit is bubbling at the edges. Any leftover dough? Just pat into biscuits and bake alongside, they won’t last long!

A bit of history for you, the Dominion Glass Company, based in Montreal, was proudly Canadian. They made those wonderful thick preserving jars many of us still recognize. The company even marked their bottles with special symbols to show which plant made them. Sadly, Dominion Glass closed in 1997, but this 1933 cookbook is a little window into a time when people cooked with what they had, and did so beautifully.

Maybe that’s why I love these old books so much. They remind us that good food, like good stories, always stands the test of time.