Resources. Guides. Nature. Biodiversity. Gardens. Habitat. Pollinators. Vegetables. Community.
Biodiversity Day: Building a shared future for all life. Living in harmony with nature.

We have been trained to think about energy efficiency best practices for buildings in terms of improving insulation. It’s an easy enough concept to understand because we can experience heat loss personally. For example, on a cold day, if  you don’t have a thick enough coat, you feel cold. It follows that more insulation will keep us warmer in colder weather. However, we often overlook other influences that affect energy efficiency, such as air leakage.

Native Plant Garden Guide

Resources. Guides. Nature. Biodiversity. Gardens. Habitat. Pollinators. Vegetables. Community. Living in harmony with nature. Biodiversity Day: Building a shared future for all life

At FCG, we routinely reflect on the many ways gardens can go beyond our personal spaces to serve our neighbourhoods. Faith groups often have outdoor properties and these can be sacred green spaces for all the community to enjoy and benefit from.

Our Greening Sacred Spaces Certification Program Gets an Update Just in Time for Earth Day! 

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

- Genesis 2:15

Earth Day is an annual event where we step back, acknowledge local and global environmental protection efforts, and show our love for our common home. Many people celebrate this day by enjoying the great outdoors or sharing memorable photos of trips, encapsulating Earth’s breathtaking landscapes. This year’s Earth Day theme is ‘Invest in our Planet’ because the state and health of our shared home are under extreme threat. What used to be well-functioning ecosystems, providing us with services are becoming degraded, losing their integrity, or quickly disappearing.

In this guest post, Brad Lennon and Elizabeth Nyburg of Christ Church, Toronto, share their experience participating in FCG’s Green Audit of their faith buildings. This is FCG’s first walkthrough Green Audit since the pandemic began.

Key words: Green Audit. Energy Conservation. Faith.

Climate Action Team on the Green Audit Tour of the Church

Our Climate Action committee at Christ Church Deer Park Anglican in midtown Toronto began its work about eight years ago. It has sought to promote climate-friendly actions by its parishioners in their own homes and to reduce the environmental footprint of the church buildings and the groups that meet there. 

We had already worked through a diocesan checklist on Creation Care about how we might reduce our buildings’ carbon consumption and output and to boost their energy efficiency. 

Through that self-audit we had discovered new opportunities for initiatives for recycling and waste reduction. In collaboration with Faith and the Common Good’s Energy Benchmarking program, we had also recognized what our Director of Parish Operations, our buildings’ staff, and our volunteers in the kitchen and elsewhere had already accomplished. For example, we were already using reusable dishes and silverware and had reduced much of our lighting to higher-efficiency LED bulbs.

We found ourselves in the middle ranking of the other congregations and worship groups that had also participated in the Benchmarking Studies. We had worked with the Property Committee to evaluate our heating system and alternatives to our gas boilers. Our Climate Action group and our Property Committee wondered what further steps we might take through retrofitting to improve our standing from where we already were.

We had secured funding several years ago to obtain the consulting services of a building specialist to enable us to be better informed in our decisions about managing upgrades. 

We returned once again to Faith and the Common Good to do their comprehensive environmental and energy audit. It involved a day-long walk-through with Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant Stephen Collette.

The FCG network is stronger because of our partners. That's why we will be writing regular features on this blog that highlight the work of collaborating groups or individuals to show our appreciation for all they do for our communities towards a more sustainable future. This month, to launch the series, we invite readers to learn about the work of Shoresh, an Ontario, grassroots Jewish environmental charity.

Awe and Wonder

Sabrina Malach is Director of Engagement at Shoresh, a grassroots Jewish environmental charity that operates through various locations across Southern Ontario, as well as schools, synagogues, camps, and community organizations in the Greater Toronto Area. 

Since 2002, Shoresh has been bringing awareness and stewardship of the natural world around us through Jewish experiential education and action, ‘because you can only protect what you love,” Sabrina says.

While their audience is primarily the Jewish community, “we are radically inclusive,” Sabrina says. “We are open to others.”

To this end, Shoresh offers a diverse array of programs including the Shoresh Outdoor School, an after-school program bridges meaningful Jewish learning with hands-on, nature-based experiences in the Toronto's parks and ravines as well as habitat restoration, pollinator conservation and community supported beekeeping. In 2017, 11,000 trees were planted at Bela Farm, Shoresh's 100-acre rural home in Hillsburgh, Ontario to provide habitat and help sequester carbon, “Planting trees is a long-term project. We want people to act for the future. Planting trees is an act of hope and belief in the future.”

Six years later, Shoresh is now focussing on tending the forest as well as their 20-acre bee sanctuary at the farm. More broadly, their focus is on leading, inspiring and empowering their community to become protectors of the earth, a task mandated to Jews in Genesis. Shoresh also has an online shop where they sell sustainble ritual objects, mostly made by bees and local artisans, including beeswax candles for the sabbath and Chanukah and honey from their hives at Bela Farm.

Children at Play	Offerings on sale.

Light Emitting Diodes, also known as LED lights, have become commonplace at home, but not so much with houses of worship. It's time that this changes.

For a bit of history, LED lights have been around for almost 100 years, however it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that we started to see them really being used. Where did we see them first? Christmas lights of course! The use of LED Christmas lights drove the cost per bulb down dramatically enough that the economy of scale picked up and we were spotting them more and more in fixtures of various kinds. Since then, incandescent bulbs are hard to get, and hazardous, mercury-containing compact fluorescent bulbs are on their way out. LED lights have been filling all the gaps within the lighting world today.