Grassroots Plant With Purpose

Learn more about today's guests and their work:

Aaron Rogers | Millennial Mystic
Faith For Justice
Ben Sanders
World Renew
Tears on Red Soil: Navajo Evangelical Leader Hears Her Homeland ‘Crying Out’ (Christianity Today on Carol Bremer Bennet)

Grassroots is a Plant With Purpose production. To learn more about our work in promoting environmental justice in the most vulnerable communities around the globe, and to see where you can plant trees for $1 each, visit plantwithpurpose.org.

Thanks for tuning in to this important discussion about The Ecology of a Pandemic. Here are a few links related to worth checking out from this episode:

- Learn more about Peru and María Laura Vargas Valcárcel on the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative website.

- Purchase This Is God's Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls by Anna Woofenden.

- Here are some more articles by Shannon Osaka. 

- Lastly, Check out Plant With Purpose's COVID-19 Readiness & Resilience Fund!

Keep practicing resurrection, friends! See you next week.

A lot has happened since our last episode of the Grassroots Podcast. A pandemic. A reckoning with racial justice. A tumultuous year overall.

Processing all of this is a lot. While we hunger for hope, it is completely appropriate, and even necessary, to lament. Lament is something the default posture for believers when looking at many matters of justice, in particular environmental justice. Peter Harris, from the international Christian conservation organization, A Rocha, to talk about the role of lament in our faith and environmental restoration, drawing deeply from a tragic personal loss. On this episode we also explore the theme of vulnerability—how the world's vulnerable are impacted by recent events and how connecting to our own vulnerability can help us love others in these positions. Kayla Craig from the Love Anyways Podcast and the Upside Down Podcast joins us as well. Plus: we hear an update from Plant With Purpose's programs around the world, including one member in the Dominican Republic who has seen her plot of land turn into a space of safety from the pandemic.

Check out Plant With Purpose's COVID-19 Readiness & Resilience Fund: https://plantwithpurpose.org/readinessandresilience/

Grassroots Podcast is a production of Plant With Purpose — an international organization that works with communities to restore their ecosystems through the lens of faith. To learn more about how Plant With Purpose is preparing and responding in the wake of COVID-19, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Also, sign up for our email newsletter on our website.

We'll be back very soon with more podcast conversations just like this one. Stay tuned! 

Much of what you hear about the environment these days is not encouraging. One million species face possible extinction. We have until 2030 to avoid unprecedented catastrophe. The poorest of the poor are the ones who will suffer the most.

So, is there a case for hope?

It's a question worth asking. Without hope, how can we even move forward?

We explore the case for hope with Plant With Purpose's executive director Scott Sabin. Birori Gaparani, from Plant With Purpose's team in the Democratic Republic of Congo also joins. We learn from Kent Annan, author of the book You Welcomed Me and cofounder of Haiti Partners. And we talk to our previous guests from throughout this season about what gives them hope.

Welcome to the Grassroots Podcast, a Plant With Purpose production. This show features global conversations about the environmental challenges we’re facing and what ordinary people are doing to in response.  We’re going beyond doom-and-gloom. We’re looking at root causes, talking to people on the frontlines, and asking ourselves what we can do. There are reasons to be concerned, but there is also a case for hope.

71% of all carbon emissions are caused by just 100 companies.

In light of statistics like these, do our small actions really matter? Will cutting meat from our diet, biking to work instead of driving, or growing our own food in the backyard actually have much of an impact on the state of the planet? If our actions are quite small in comparison to these much bigger actors, is there any benefit in doing them? Why not just focus on the large systemic changes needed to change our current situation?

To answer these questions, we talk to Christian writer and activist Shane Claiborne. Shane is the founder of The Simple Way and the author of numerous books including The Irresistible Revolution, Follow Me To Freedom, and Beating Guns. We also talk to Nick Laparra, who you may know from the podcast Let's Give A Damn. We talk to Tui, a farmer in Thailand, about what small actions look like for refugee farmers around Chiang Mai, and we hear from Richard Lee at IJM about what day-to-day work with small actions look like.

Welcome to the Grassroots Podcast, a Plant With Purpose production. This show features global conversations about the environmental challenges we’re facing and what ordinary people are doing to in response.  We’re going beyond doom-and-gloom. We’re looking at root causes, talking to people on the frontlines, and asking ourselves what we can do. There are reasons to be concerned, but there is also a case for hope.