GOING GREEN

Electric Cars…………. 21 Reasons why You should Own One Now

May Memorial is a sustainable green leader in our fleet of Green Prius cars. But now it’s time that we became a leader in Green electric cars. Every major car manufacturer—Ford, GM, Mini, Honda, VW, Fiat, Nissan, Tesla and others as of 2015 has an electric model. I just bought a BMW I3 all electric. Check out the really cool new electric Kia Soul EV that gets over 100 miles on a charge; available in NY soon.

MMUUS Green Sanctuary will be starting a list of folks interested in the Kia Soul EV so we can approach a dealer about getting them here and a discount. Email davidcashley@gmail.com to express interest.

Here are 21 reasons why YOU should go electric now:

1.    Never have to stop at a gas station again

2.   Get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gas

3.   Emit six tons average less Climate Change causing CO2/ yr*

4. Save at least $1,000- $3,000/yr in fuel & maintenance costs

5. Brakes almost never wear out--regenerative braking

6. Starts instantly in cold weather

    

7. Never have to change the oil again

8. Never have to get a tune-up

9. Never change carburetors, fuel pump, radiator, spark plugs

10. Never again replace a muffler or catalytic converter

11. Hear your radio or hands free phone-- no engine noise

12. Motor stops instantly when you stop.

13. Emits no polluting fumes

14. Almost instant heat and cooling-- uses a heat pump

15. Great starting and passing acceleration with electric motor

16. *Charge at night and use no fossil fuel electricity

17. Be part of our coming Smart Grid system

18. Soon, get preferred parking next to buildings and plugin spots

19. Every family with two cars should have at least one electric

20. Lower total cost with $7,500 tax credit

21. Be really Cool and Green

Don’t wait, do it now!  

Dave Ashley    davidcashley@gmail.com

ZERO WASTE, MAKE HASTE

We ran out of mouthwash and it gave me a great opportunity to replace it with a homemade one.  It did require a quick trip to NatureTyme but I’m sure I’ll be using these essential oils for other DIYs.  This anti-bacterial mouthwash is very easy to make and my mouth feels extremely fresh and clean.  I took 1 cup of distilled water (or purified), and added 4 tsps. of baking soda.  I stirred it and dropped in 4 drops of tea tree essential oil, as well as, 4 drops (or more) of peppermint essential oil.  I placed these back into the empty mouthwash bottle, gave it a good shake and was ready to go. 

It is NOT a  good idea to double this recipe since the flavors of the essential oils can change over time.  Both oils have antibacterial properties which will keep away the bad breath.  Be sure you give your bottle a shake before using it since the baking soda will settle on the bottom.  If you’d like the mouthwash to have a sweet taste, they recommend that you use Xylitol which is proven to have a positive effect on tooth and gum health.  I will try this next time.  You add two teaspoons of it to this recipe.

Warning:  Xylitol can be very toxic to dogs.  Keep it stored away from your canine friends : )

HOMEMADE ANTI-BACTERIAL MOUTHWASH

1 cup of distilled or purified water

4 tsps. of baking soda

4 drops of tea tree essential oil

4 drops of peppermint essential oil

**optional:  2 tsps. Xytitol

Judy Antoine  

May 23, 2015

MMUUS Earth Day Service The Water

Earth

Day

Water

1

1

MMUUS Earth Day Service     The Water

Every year in September at our homecoming service here at May Memorial we celebrate

chapters in our lives using water as a universal element. It connects us together with a

common bond. Some religions have what call Holy Water, which is water that has been

blessed by a member of a clergy or religious figure. Water is considered a purifier in

most religions. Faiths that incorporate ritual washing include Christianity, Hinduism,

Islam, Judaism, the Rastafari movement, Shinto, Taoism, and Wicca. Immersion of a

person in water is a central sacrament of Christianity, where it is called baptism. It’s also

a part of the practice of other religions, such as Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. In addition,

a ritual bath in pure water is performed for the dead in many religions including Islam

and Judaism. In Islam, the five daily prayers must only be done after washing the face,

hands and feet using clean water, or sand if water is unavailable. In Shinto, water is used

in almost all rituals to cleanse a person or an area.

As with air, water is taken for granted in our society. When we turn on the faucet to

bathe, wash, use the toilet or cook, water comes out which we take for granted is potable.

But in reality what we have just done is start a journey of water from 20 or 40 miles

away, Skaneateles Lake or Lake Ontario, though an elaborate system of pipes, electric

pumps, filters, treatment systems with chlorine or ultra violet light added to kill

pathogens and fluoride added to reduce tooth decay and then maybe to a local storage

reservoir high enough above where we live to create enough pressure to operate our

fixtures and even our garden hose.

Without that water, we could only survive about two weeks. Not only that, but all of our

food—in grain, vegetable or meat form—also must have fresh water to survive and grow.

We have only to open up Google Earth on our computers and spin the earth around to see

that vast portions of our land masses, including this country, are brown or yellow

meaning they devoid of a supply of sustainable water. At least from the air. But then

often to one's surprise flying in an airplane bright green patches will occur in the midst of

the yellow and brown--irrigated fields from diverted river water or electrically powered

pumps from deep aquifers in the ground.

We are fortunate in central New York not only to have some of the purest lakes in the

world, but also to receive about 34 inches of rain every year; while more than a fifth of

the world's seven billion people live in areas of water

scarity, where there is not enough

water for sanitation and agriculture. Global warming will only make that worse.

Our plentiful supply of rainfall and moderate climate may become even more important

to central New York in the future. More than half of all the fruits, vegetables and nuts

grown in the United States come from California. But California’s climate is changing

with climate change and they are facing a multi year drought in which 82% of the state is

in extreme or exceptional drought.

Our ample rain--and interestingly enough, the Internet--has allowed Community

Supported Agriculture, CSAs, to flourish in central New York. For example, there is one

called Early Morning Farms--that’s their web address also--which for about $20 a week

delivers a half-bushel of fresh vegetables to 40 locations in central New York for pick up

Earth

Day

Water

2

2

for 23 weeks of the year. And our Farmers Markets and home based growing has

expanded. The Farmers Market at the Regional Market gets an average of 39,000 people

on Saturdays in the summer.

We are finally recovering from having the most polluted lake in the country, Onondaga

Lake, after Honeywell—under a federal EPA mandate---spent a half billion dollars

cleaning it up. And Onondaga County has instituted a remarkable plan called “Save the

Rain” to reduce storm water runoff into our combined sewers. Hopefully, some time in

the not too distant future, Onondaga Lake, which is sacred to the Onondaga tribe, will be

fishable again and even suitable for swimming.

And here’s an interesting idea to contemplate. We could free ourselves from water and

sewer connections here completely if we really wanted to for non process water users like

residences and even May Memorial if we had a rainwater collection and storage system,

composting toilets and a grey water treatment and recycling system. Of course in rural

areas people have been utility free for centuries using wells and septic systems. Food for

thought.

We

give

thanks

for

and

celebrate

our

pure,

fresh

water

that

sustains

us.

MMUUS Earth Day Service The Sun

MMUUS Earth Day Service      The Sun 

Today we are celebrating and giving thanks to the sun on our Earth Day service. In ancient times many cultures considered the sun to be a deity. Worship of the Sun was central to civilizations such as the ancient Egyptians, the Inca of South  America and the Aztecs of what is now Mexico. In religions such as Hinduism, the Sun is still considered a God. Many ancient monuments were constructed with solar phenomena in mind. For example, stone megaliths such as Stonehenge, accurately mark the summer and winter solstices. Some of the most prominent megaliths are located in England. Newgrange, a prehistoric human-built mount in Ireland, was designed to detect the winter solstice. The pyramid of El Castillo at Chichén Itzá in Mexico was designed to cast shadows in the shape of serpents climbing the pyramid at the vernal and autumn equinoxes.

But today we have a tendency to take the sun for granted. It comes up every morning and goes down every night, and it's nice to have some warm sun when we have weather like it is now. That's all most people think about the sun.

However, it's far more important than that. Our one and only sun is the center of our universe about eight light minutes away and we and the other planets revolve around it. The important thing to remember about the sun is that it provides all of the energy to sustain all of human, animal and plant life on the planet other than a finite amount of nuclear energy. It gives us the energy for photosynthesis and plants to grow which provide all of the food that both we and the animals eat.

The sun also creates all of our weather. It warms the oceans, lakes and earth, which gives us our wind.  And the warming produces evaporation that then can fall as rain and snow. The sun also heats up the earth every day. Our cold-blooded friends, the reptiles, relish the sun even more that we do to warn their bodies.

For millions of years before us, the sun provided the energy for photosynthesis to grow the billions of tons of trees, bushes and plants that fell down and eventually consolidated to create all of the oil, coal and natural gas in the earth which we are now extracting to generate our electricity and run our vehicles. Since 1857 when oil was first discovered, we have used more than half of the oil deposits in the earth. So now we are realizing that we need to seriously look at what we need to do when all of those hydrocarbons are gone. But how do we do that?

Fortunately, we do know what we should be doing and in many cases we have started. We need to transition all our energy sources to renewable ones like solar and wind. But we need to get going; time is short to make the transition. Bruce and Lee Macbeth, long time May Memorial members, already have solar panels on their house, but all of us would have been well advised to apply for solar panels under the recent Solarize Syracuse program. Please consider doing that if the program starts up again. We applied for May Memorial, but they haven't gotten back to us yet.

In order to reduce our use of precious hydrocarbons, starting 10 years ago many of us at May were a pioneers in switching to hybrid gas saving Priuses; but now with every manufacture offering electric cars, it’s time to be a leader again. An electric car charged at night when electricity from renewable energy like water and wind power are available, can make an amazing six-ton reduction in the amount of yearly climate change causing carbon dioxide compared to a gasoline car.

But before we leave the sun, we should think about some of its pleasurable, therapeutic and spiritual benefits. If there is a spot of sun coming into your house on a cold day, like we are having recently, we all know that a pet cat or dog will find that spot and revel in an enjoyable sun nap. We too enjoy the warmth and spiritual upliftedness of the sun shining upon us. The bright light has a magic quality that can dispel winter blues and depression. And it is such a joy to wake up in the morning and see that wonderful yellow ball in the sky shining down upon us.

So with that, we celebrate and give thanks for our one and only sun.

MMUUS Earth Day Service The Air

MMUUS Earth Day Service      The Air

On this Earth Day service, we give thanks and celebrate the life-sustaining air that surrounds us. We live in an extremely thin layer of air surrounding the earth no thicker than a coat of paint compared to the size of our earth. Only a few miles above us in space, there is no air and the temperature is close to absolute zero and a few miles into the earth, temperatures are thousands of degrees hotter.

Ancient people were very aware of all of the things that happened or were carried in the air like clouds and rain and snow and, of course, the violent weather when great storms and lightning occurred, presumably caused by angry gods. Or times when there was no rain and droughts withered away the crops.

An often underappreciated quality of air is its ability to carry sound by allowing waves of energy to be transmitted by vibrations in the air. Imagine a world where you couldn't hear speech or music. Evel Knievel is quoted as saying, “I decided to fly through the air and live in the sunlight and enjoy life as much as I could.”

And today, of course, we know about the important life-sustaining qualities of air and the oxygen we must have to survive. But lately we have also become aware of many other things in the air, most of which we are responsible for. One of the consequences of becoming an industrialized society is that much of our industry sloughs off vast quantities of byproducts into the air many of which can be quite harmful. One of the success stories in our world society is that we collectively became aware that refrigerants from air conditioning equipment were endangering the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that protects us from dangerous ultraviolet rays and we collectively came together, in what is called the Montréal protocol, to reached an agreement to stop using those materials.

And now we, as a society, are taking action to deal with the harmful effects of many other things that we, and our chimneys, vehicles and industries, are putting into the air. History is replete with stories about cities where the air became so polluted it seemed like it was almost nighttime and people could hardly breathe. Our own Pittsburgh was like that decades ago and many cities in China are currently in a desperate situation to control their own air pollutants and have a proliferation of “Oxygen Bars” where people go because of potentially harmful reduction in oxygen levels.

Along with many other countries, we became concerned enough about what we were doing to the air, that, in 1970, President Nixon proposed and Congress passed an act establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. Since that time our air has in large measure improved but with one notable and serious exception: we finally became aware of the devastating effects that burning vast amounts of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and natural gas are having on our atmosphere. The huge volume of carbon dioxide they create is causing our entire Earth's atmosphere to overheat in a process referred to as the greenhouse effect.

So we are starting to address that concern and that the typical American family creates an average of 48.5 tons of carbon dioxide every year, five times that of the rest of the world. Most of us are aware of the problem, the consequences of inaction and the need to take action. So it’s a little ironic that with the coming sea level rise, Beacon Hill in Boston, where the UU headquarters used to be, will, in time, become Beacon Island, and the new UU headquarters in the tidal flats below will eventually be underwater and abandoned.

Not to be out done by the Italians--who produce only 22% of the carbon dioxide per person that we do--our Green Sanctuary Committee is starting a program using a website called the “Cool Climate Calculator” to help us learn what our individual carbon use is—it’s called a carbon foot print---and, importantly, the site has an interactive list of actions we can take to reduce our carbon foot prints including for each action, the cost and any cost savings. We will start soon; so look for an announcement in the newsletter. There will be a table in the Social Hall after the service to help people get started

We give thanks for and celebrate our life-sustaining air we live in and breathe.