Sandra Eckert

St Marys Harvest Festival  May 2010

So here we are again at Harvest Time: What are we harvesting?

In the beginning, the Bible says, God created the Earth. He gave it to us to care for and yet we often treat it with contempt.

For most of history most waste was organic and either rotted away to become nutrients again, or in the case of metals was re-fashioned into something else.

But in modern times, the Earth can't reclaim and reuse the natural resources used to create the machinery, medicines, fertilizers, chemicals, and plastics we have come to rely on. You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.

International agencies have documented that antibiotics, contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other substances pass through the sewage system into waterways. What goes down the drain has to come out somewhere.

Where before, wastes would be  absorbed and cleaned by the land and waterways, now they just accumulate. Both on, and in the land, and in the water.

Every month in NZ we throw away enough waste to fill a 30-story building as big as a Rugby field. Almost half of this waste is organic, compostable, material but in a landfill it does not compost, but becomes the toxic leachate and methane that poisons God's gift to us.

Vast amounts of rubbish ends up in our waterways, lakes and oceans.

Have you ever dropped a cigarette butt, or a plastic drink bottle, or a lolly wrapper on a hard surface, like a footpath or a car park, or tipped a used chemical down a drain? 

Well, next time it rained, all that rubbish washed down the storm drain and into the nearest river or the ocean.

In Auckland alone, 25 million cigarette butts wash into the harbor every year. Each one of them containing dozens of poisons.  

The world's largest rubbish dump is the Pacific Ocean. There are two huge joined areas of slowly circulating plastic debris drifting in the northern Pacific. It's boundaries are always changing but it stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the Pacific to the coast of Japan. These areas are called gyres.

 

The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such  zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own Rubbish Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents.

Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface.

Some of this plastic has been in the ocean for over 40 years. One sea bird dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic, eaten after being mistaken for food..

The islands of Hawaii are right in the middle of the two Northern gyres, so piles of plastic regularly wash up on some beaches there.

More than half of the world's major rivers and many of it's harbors are heavily polluted,

(Picture) creating scenes like this, where  men, women and children scavenge for a few items of minimal value. They're harvesting what others ( maybe us) have sown.   

China's Yellow River, which is more than 5000 kilometers in length, supplies water to more than 150 million people and irrigates 15 percent of China's farmland, but it has lost a third of its fish species and is 70 percent unfit for drinking or swimming.

Many of the children living in towns along it's banks and eating it's fish have no hair and bad teeth. What kind of harvest do they have to celebrate?

The polluters have little incentive to curb effluents. For companies that pollute, it is cheaper to break the law and pay the fine than it is to abide by the rules.

New Zealand is not immune.

The Manawatu River is clean and clear as it flows thru the Manawatu Gorge. Forty kilometers later, after collecting Palmerston North's storm drains, farm effluent, fertiliser runoff, and factory discharges, it's dead, and so are the fish that tried to live in it.

All the pollutants wash out to sea in a plume, and with the next tide much of it is thrown back up on the beach. Is this what our “Harvest from the Sea” is coming to mean?

So how much water is there in the world and why should we be worried?

We can survive for 2-4 weeks without food, but we can only live for 4-7 days without water. If all the water in the world is represented by 1 liter...(CHART)

More than half of the world's major rivers and aquifers are drying up from overuse.
New Zealand is not immune to this either.

It takes 1000 liters of water to produce 1 liter of milk. Christchurch residents are already feeling the effects of the huge increase in dairying in Canterbury. Their water is metered and expensive.

The rest of new Zealand can eventually expect the same. We have some of the best water in the world, but for how long if we continue to abuse and waste it?

Someone said to me last month, “ Well, it's always going to rain.” and I said, “ Tell that to the farmers in Northland or parts of Australia.”

Here are some facts about global water scarcity, according to the World Health Organization.

* Water scarcity affects one in three people on every continent and is getting worse as water needs rise with population growth, urbanization and increased usage by households and industry.

* Almost one-fifth of the world's population lives in areas where water is scarce.

* Poor water quality can increase the risk of cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery and other infections.

* Water scarcity encourages people to store water in their homes, which increases the risk of contamination and provides breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which carry, malaria and other diseases.

*A lack of water has increased the use of wastewater for farming. More than 10 percent of the world's people consume foods irrigated by wastewater that may contain chemicals or disease-causing organisms.

*Over half the world's hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from illnesses linked with contaminated water.

In parts of the world, God-given ingenuity has overcome the lack of clean water.

Lima, Peru, gets only a few drops of rain a year and the poorer areas overlooking the city are beyond the reach of utilities, but thick fog from the Pacific blankets the coastal hills for eight months a year.

Using nets similar to those used in volleyball, residents condense fog, drip-by-drip, into drainage pipes running down the hill into tanks that store hundreds of liters of water for irrigation, bathing and cooking. A Harvest indeed.

We need to look at the healthy, nourishing food and clean water we take for granted here in this place, and ask ourselves:

Am I wasting a rapidly-diminishing resource God trusted me with?

When I brush my teeth with the water running and use a liter of water instead of only turning on the tap when I need to and using 200mls. am I wasting my share of that one drop of clean water per liter?

What about when I peel potatoes under running water and use a liter of water instead of peeling first and then washing which uses half as much?

How can I justify using 11 liters of water to flush away a bug or a tissue, instead of putting it in the bin?

If I ignore a dripping tap and waste 1500 liters of clean water a year, or take long showers, am I being a faithful steward of God's scarce resource?

When I wash oil spills off the driveway instead of absorbing the spill with sawdust, am I abusing and polluting my environment, and decreasing someone else's chance of a healthy harvest?

As we celebrate another Harvest season may we thank God for all his blessings, and remember that just as the seeds we sow in the ground, He brings to harvest, so too does he bring to harvest the deeds we have sown in our lives.

May we become more aware of how much future Harvests depend on our present care for our natural resources .

Amen