Sustainability this July
Celebrating 4 Years of Oxford Sustainability Newsletter!
Happy July! Our northern hemisphere town of Oxford, OH has tipped as far toward the sun as it will get this year, and is slowly easing back, our days getting imperceptibly shorter with each spin of our planet. We are celebrating July 1 with cooler weather and a nice opportunity to cast our minds to the bigger picture of our solar system and our incredible universe. Check out this cool webpage from JPL/NASA that shows the positioning of our planets each day.
When you re-center yourself to our small place on our blue green planet, here are some of the sustainability-related opportunities this month:
Sustainability-Related Activities for Kids
Enjoy Oxford has gotten really good about listing the wonderful summer offerings of Hueston Woods State Park and the Oxford Museum Association on their calendar. These are great, FREE ways to get outside.
Great Parks Cincinnati has a fabulous array of activities for those willing to travel a little farther, including an Outdoor Expo in Winton Woods on July 19-20. Check out the list here.
STEM Camp for High Schoolers at THS, now July 8-11.. Learn about the amazing underlying physical principles of the universe from Ms. Schran! email schranh@talawanda.org to register.
Creation Station Sunday School @ Oxford Presbyterian Church. Sundays at 10am in July and August. Sunday School will focus on restoring ecology and creative expression. Please contact office@oxfordpresbychurch for more information.
7/7/24 Postcard Writing with Citizens Climate Lobby, Miami Valley
Citizens Climate Lobby Miami Valley is working with the Environmental Voter Project to send postcards to voters encouraging participation this coming election season. Here’s more info from the Environmental Voter Project:
"We estimate that over 8 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 presidential election and over 13 million skipped the 2022 midterms. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on a simple, high-leverage solution to this problem: with an 8-year track record of success, we are accurately identifying these non-voting environmentalists and efficiently converting them into a critical mass of consistent voters that will soon be too big for politicians to ignore.”
Postcarding parties will take place 7/7 1pm in Kettering, Monday July 8th at 7pm in Springfield. We are looking at scheduling an Oxford Postcarding party. If you’d like to participate, please email annkweb@gmail.com to get involved.
7/15/24 7pm Screening of “Cooked”
Hopedale UU is hosting a special screening of Interfaith Power and Light’s video Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code. It’s the story of the worst heat disaster in U.S history. In 1995 Chicago, 739 residents—mostly elderly and black—died over the course of one week. The film links the deadly heat wave's devastation back to the manmade disaster of structural racism, shining a light on the issues of poverty, race, class, and education that underlie how natural disasters take lives. Childcare is provided.
Thread Up Oxford - Join Us in Preventing Textile Waste!
We need your help! Our community is coming together to sort clothes and other fabrics to better prevent textile waste. Volunteering your time will make a big difference in reducing landfill waste and supporting sustainable practices. Whether you have a few hours or a whole day, your efforts can help us create a cleaner, greener future. Open volunteering Tuesday-Friday 11am-4pm at the Thread Up Oxford location at 5156 College Corner Pike in Westgate Mall. Call/text 513-273-1701 with questions.
7/18/24 6pm Summer Reads: Elizabeth Rush on The Quickening
Creation Justice Ministries Book Club meets on Zoom to explore the sacred act of creation through Elizabeth Rush’s "The Quickening." This book recounts a pioneering expedition to the thawing realms of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, paralleled with Rush's contemplative narrative on the ethics and implications of motherhood in an era of environmental uncertainty. This discussion will foster a deep reflection on our stewardship of the Earth and the sanctity of beginning new life amidst ecological upheaval. Register here.
7/29/2024 6:30-7:30pm Wild Ones Miami Valley Pop-up Wild Garden Tour
Wild Ones Miami Valley has another Pop-up Wild Garden Tour on July 29 at the garden of Hank Stevens and Nanci Ross. Stop by 558 Melissa Drive 6:30-8:30pm to see a re-wilding project taking place in a suburban framework. Bring a lawn chair if you want to hang out.
Happy Happenings in Sustainability
OAT Phase 3 Opened
Congratulations to the many leaders and contributors who helped to get Phase 3 of the Oxford Area Trail Completed. This beautiful new path extends from Pfeffer Park to Talawanda High School, and will ultimately connect to Talawanda Middle School, providing an important safe route connector between the campuses and surrounding neighborhoods. We are fortunate to have these paths in our community.
Oxford Residents Lobby for Climate Action on Capitol Hill
Oxford residents Ann Webster, Carla Blackmar and Olive Rice joined volunteers from around the country to lobby congress for action on climate. From Ann Webster, “Ohio presented our concerns about climate to the Legislative aide of the OH8 Congressional office. It was a good meeting. We advocated for support of the PROVE IT Act (S.1863), Permitting Reform, the Increased Technical Service Provider Access Act of 2023 (S.1400 / H.R.3036) and Seedlings for Sustainable Habitat Restoration Act of 2023 (S.1164 / H.R.5015), Your letters were also hand delivered. In addition to your individual letters and a Resolution in support for climate legislation from the Council of the City of Oxford, we shared a copy of the Miami University Climate Action Plan.”
If you are interested in participating in future Citizens Climate Lobby efforts, please contact Ann Webster at annkweb@gmai.com
Re-wilding the Miami Valley
Congratulations to Wild Ones Miami Valley for becoming a fully chartered chapter of Wild Ones. Now, when you join or renew your membership, a portion of your dues will go to our local chapter and can fund re-wilding projects and opportunities. We will celebrate with a member picnic this month. Join here for more information.
New native landscaping projects are popping up here, there and everywhere. Check out photos here:
Community Park Pollinator Garden Project (thanks Peggy Branstrator)
New Butterfly Garden Plots at the Knolls (thanks Joy Russell)
New Pollinator Garden at Oxford Presbyterian Memorial Church
Green Energy Transition in Ohio
Last month, New York became the first state to get its Inflation Reduction Act-funded energy efficiency rebate program up and running. There is a deadline of August 31 for states to indicate that they will apply for these funds. This is one of the many things we can encourage our legislators to do for the climate and climate justice– it would make the IRA benefits available as rebates rather than just as tax credits, helping with up-front costs of energy improvements.
Ohio’s Community Solar Pilot Program HB 197 is a bill worth supporting– it would empower local communities to own their own power generation.
A more depressing development for local climate action is that our Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives (including our local Butler County Rural Electric Cooperative) have doubled down on their reliance on coal in recent years, including issuing a statement against new EPA rules that would require coal generation to produce 90% fewer emissions by 2039. Buckeye Energy, the energy supplier for the cooperatives, owns the Cardinal coal plant (purchased from AEP energy in 2018) and an 18% share in the OVEC plants that were bailed out by HB 6. By going ‘all in’ on coal for their base load generation, the cooperatives put their members in a precarious position as climate protection necessitates an end to coal-powered generation, and will require further bailouts from Ohioans and further retrenchment from Ohio politicians (Sherrod Brown has committed to vote against the new EPA rule on coal). While some energy experts have celebrated the potential of rural electric cooperatives to be an organizing unit in the “bottom- up green energy transition,” Ohio cooperatives seem to view renewables as window dressing rather than a workable source of electricity.
Ohio’s rural electric cooperatives are so entrenched in coal that it will be unlikely for them to try to reverse course, even if a large number of their members asked them to. To send a message that you’d like BREC to invest in renewables, it would be good to ensure that their current community solar program is always oversubscribed with a waitlist. You can sign up or get on the waitlist here: https://butlerrural.coop/community-solar
Welcome, Oxford Free Press!
As one of the digital media sources that has attempted to provide information in the journalistic vacuum (this issue marks 4 years of Oxford Sustainability Monthly), we are delighted to welcome the Oxford Free Press to town. You can find Jim Rubenstein’s local food column in the paper. We hope to partner to ensure that our local coverage of sustainability reflects our town’s tremendous work in this space. To help us celebrate, share the newsletter with 4 friends and encourage them to subscribe!
If you have events you’d like to cover in the future, please email oxohsustain@gmail.com