Monday, October 17, 2011

The Greening of LTSP Continues

For a number of years now the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia's Green Team and Environmental Stewardship Committee have worked to ensure that future church leaders know about and have experience in caring for creation.  This year, we've been focusing on supporting our learning community in caring for creation "from a free and merry spirit," and boy, we've had a lot of success!


To get new students interested right from the start, we organized a service project at Philly's Morris Arboretum during orientation week.  Despite the hot weather, six folks from our community showed up, and we had a pretty epic time.  Since the arboretum was still cleaning up after Hurricane Irene, we spent most of the day clearing out plants that had been damaging by flood waters.  We finished up by taking a few minutes to haul out a couple tree stumps, we got a "behind the scenes" tour of the arboretum's maintenance and office buildings.  The buildings all had a number of innovative green friendly features, of which the green roof was most notable (check out the picture).  After the tour was over, we were able to head back to LTSP with a stack of free arboretum tickets for our efforts.

We've been organizing a number of other fun events as well to gain interest, like touring the fully wind powered Yards Brewery and hiking around Fairmount Park with LTSP's Professor Emeritus of Liturgy, Dr. Gordon Lathrop (that event deserves it's own forthcoming blog post).  Outside of the events we've been doing a lot more behind the scenes work to green the LTSP campus.  Most notably, we've expanded our compost program to serve not only the refectory but also the Holy Grounds Cafe.  We're also in conversation with GreenFaith about how their "green congregation" certification process could be adopted to fit a seminary.  If it's work out, the certification process will provide us with a solid framework to continue green LTSP for years to come!  If you're interested in hearing more about what the the LTSP Green Team and Environmental Stewardship Committee are up to in the coming months, please 'Like' our Facebook Page or check out our website.  Thanks so much!

God's peace,
Dustin

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