Readers Write: August 2024

Preparing for post-collapse limits

In a recent article, Miles Wiederkehr notices that it is only after you start doing experiments in sustainability that you learn about certain laws that stand in the way of an energy-and nature-conserving culture (“The long road to freedom,” June 2024). Miles wrote about the legal obstacles to bringing multiple families together to do small-scale agriculture on a single title of farmland. I am reminded of farmer-author Joel Salatin’s book, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

I have recently returned from Weierhof, Germany, a village that Mennonites were invited to settle after the devastation of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). There, farm “hofs” (farmhouse, courtyard and barn combos) are convivially clustered together within walking distance of outlying fields. Today those fields are worked by very few farmers with large machines. Most of the villagers have non-agrarian livelihoods. But when the present cheap energy bonanza burns itself out, I imagine that this village will have an easier time of re-organizing a land-based culture than the places that were designed around the car and the Costco store.

A time comes when things that can’t go on don’t. Empires collapse. Our faith contemplates the plagues of Egypt, the fall of Babylon, the end of Rome. How many of us will make an exodus into real sustainability voluntarily? Who knows. But we will all hit limits. And those who had the moral courage to renounce the promises of empire pre-collapse will have a way of seeing and a way of living in its ruins that will help many of their neighbours find their way back to a culture that lives within limits. It so happens that “Wiederkehr” means Return. How apt.

- Marcus Rempel, Beausejour, Manitoba (St. Julian’s Table)

Palestinian prisoners

I was heartened to read that Mennonites in Winnipeg had organized a service on Nakba Day to lament and pray for the people suffering in Gaza (“Winnipeg churches hold Nakba Day service,” June 2024). Palestinian Christians and Muslims have suffered tremendously with numerous forcible displacements since 1948. We do well to show our solidarity and our hope for a just peace for both Palestine and Israel.

In the last paragraph, Mennonite Church Manitoba executive minister Michael Pahl’s statement appealed for “an immediate ceasefire and the immediate and safe return of all remaining hostages,” but what I felt was missing was a call to also release the estimated 9500 Palestinians in Israeli jails, many of whom have been held for many years under brutal conditions.

Have we, like much of the press, also made these Palestinian prisoners invisible?

- Barbara Martens, Leamington, Ontario (North Leamington United Mennonite Church)