A page of resources connected to our Earth Day Celebration event on Sunday, April 24

SCHEDULE
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Align Your Money with Your Values – individual divestment from fossil fuels workshop with Michael Richardson (Rivers & Mountains GreenFaith Circle)

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM | Plant pigment painting workshop / knotweed experiment with Basilica’s Hudson As Muse Artist in Residence Ellie Irons 

12:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Food by Local 111, brunch to-go

12:30 PM – 1:00 PM | Remarks from City of Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson 

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Green the Grid and Electrify Everything Teach-In with Betta Broad (New Yorkers for Clean Power)

1:00 PM – 3:00 PM | No Spray (and anything else you want to make) sign making workshop with Ramiro Davaro-Comas and Grace Lang of Super Stories

1:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Between Two Paw-paws with Inclusive Ecologies, in conversation at the Basilica Paw paw patch.  Companion native plants will be on-hand for any wanderers looking to participate in the live-planting and consecration of the paw-paw patch.  Topics of discussion are open and will include pollination, Mastodons and the Pleistocene in Hudson, N.Y., seed sovereignty, botanical sexism, and rising tides. 

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Explore Outside Your Door youth science activity with Dr. Leonisa Ardizzone and Environmental Justice students from Vassar College

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM | Live music from Brasskill

Divestment Workshop:

“Align your money with your values” is an interactive workshop on how individuals can move their personal finances away from funding fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution… and instead see their deposits, premiums and investments used to fund local businesses and farms, affordable housing, and the development of regenerative clean energy.

https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=0f8b9d1fa40c088e4384005d4&id=741b5b

Composting:

The EPA has a straight forward, simple post on compost & it’s importance: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reducing-impact-wasted-food-feeding-soil-and-composting

ILSR composting page, but defer to Cassie for best links for this purpose: https://ilsr.org/composting/…

Community Composting 101 Online Certificate Course https://ilsr.org/community-composting-101-certificate-course/

New Yorkers for Clean Power:

New Yorkers for Clean Power (NYCP) is a statewide collaborative campaign to rapidly shift to a clean energy economy. Through education, advocacy and organizing, the campaign engages the public, local governments and businesses to advance a range of renewable energy, energy efficiency, heat pumps and clean transportation solutions. NYCP is focused on advancing solar, wind, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, renewable heating and cooling, as well as creating jobs in these industries for all communities in New York. https://nyforcleanpower.org/

Teach-In Archive

Explore Outside Your Door:

The Reverend Doctor Leonisa Ardizzone is a multi-disciplinary and integrative thinker; a Unitarian Universalist eco-minister, a musician and songwriter, a writer, a devoted activist, and a peace and science educator.

https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/lardizzone
https://www.leonisaardizzone.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ExploreOutsideYourDoor/

Workshop with Ellie Irons:

Feral and Invasive Pigments Walk & Demo / Knotweed Experiments

Meet some of the spontaneous and weedy plant-life of the Basilica Campus through this hands-on walking tour and demo, as we collect pigment-producing plants and use them to make handmade watercolor paints. Then stick around to see how one year of solarization with black plastic has impacted a robust patch of knotweed (Fallopia japonica) thriving on Basilica’s grounds, and help Ellie put a few sculptural remediation experiments in place for the next growing season.

Inclusive Ecologies Fruiting Bodies

https://www.inclusiveecologies.org/fruiting-bodies

Fruiting Bodies is ongoing project of Inclusive Ecologies of Pratt Institute, and Basilica Hudson is the generous host of one of three living pawpaw classrooms built over the past year.  The pawpaw, a tree which is native to the eastern us,  is the only “truly extratropical” plant within a family of tropical trees with oddly shaped, fragrant and edible fruit with large seed. It was a valued food source for indigenous peoples living along eastern rivers and creeks and enslaved Africans in the American south. Its range is only increasing in the northeast, with the increasing temperatures brought about by climate change.  Inclusive Ecologies asks the question: How have pragmatic reasons for not planting fruiting trees in the public realm reflected larger cultural anxieties about the body, about control, about decay and mortality?   We are also addressing the topic of botanical sexism, where male trees are planted in cities to avoid fruit, with the unintended consequence of exacerbating seasonal allergies. This misunderstanding causes us, rather unhelpfully, to anthropomorphize the sex lives of trees.  Fruiting Bodies imagines participatory rituals of cultivation and care, to relish the messiness of fruit, and fruiting bodies, including our own, to examine how stories about, and perhaps communication with, plants can illuminate previously marginalized and new unexpected narratives. 

Letter Writing Campaign:

Despite the climate crisis, our biggest banks are huge funders of coal and gas and oil companies. In the years since the Paris climate accords, they have given more than three trillion dollars in loans to these companies, even as scientists have told us we must stop the expansion of this industry.

During a Pathway to Paris event at COP26, Bill McKibben led the audience in handwriting a letter to Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase Bank, the largest lender to the fossil fuel industry in the world.  These letters were collected and sent directly to Mr. Dimon. 

In partnership with Pathway to Paris, we are inviting you today to take a moment and write a letter to Mr. Dimon to support this effort.  We have a very short sample letter that you can copy, but please feel free to include anything else you wish, about why this is important to you, lending funds instead to 100% renewable energy, etc.  We will collect these letters and send them to Mr. Dimon for you.

As Bill said onstage, these exercises work!  This couldn’t be more true and we have seen the changes that arise from writing letters and taking similar actions (e.g. New York pension fund divestment).  As Bill said, “write [your letter] with a good heart, write it confident that we will be able to build the groundswell we need in short order to bring these people where we need them to be.”  As he reminded us, governments and banks are not the only powers of the world.  People also have the power!

Please encourage your friends and family to write these letters and take action. Please go to Third Act to get involved with their Bug the Banks initiative.

SAMPLE LETTER

[Date]

Jamie Dimon

CEO JP Morgan Chase

383 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10179

Dear Mr. Dimon,

I am writing to ask you to please stop lending any money to the fossil fuel industry, including to coal, oil and gas.  

Sincerely,

[Your Name]