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NY Times article on IHMs and Care for Creation
The New York Times published an article on October 15, 2006 called “Citing Heavenly Injunctions to Fight Earthly Warming” by Neela Banerjee. In the article, the writer talks about the IHM motherhouse campus in Monroe, Michigan and our committment to caring for the earth. Here’s a clip from the article:
The Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a Catholic religious order for women, used an opportunity to renovate their 73-year-old mother house in Monroe, Mich., to create a model of sustainable energy and water use.
The 376,000-square-foot building is heated and cooled by geothermal power, provided by some 240 wells dug on the order’s property. Water from sinks and showers, or “gray water,” is fed into a natural filtration and treatment system in a series of ponds and then recycled for use in toilets. Some lawns have been given over to natural meadows to reduce watering and mowing. Insulation is made of recycled materials. The building now saves $200,000 annually in energy costs.
Some neighbors find the shaggy meadows unsightly. The city had to be persuaded to allow the gray water scheme. But the order, the average age of whose members at the mother house is 86, is also asked regularly to advise other groups, religious and secular, on building energy efficient facilities.
“We are recreating the monastery of old, where people come to learn how to live into the next century,” said Sister Janet Ryan, a member of the order’s leadership council. “Our dream is that the mother house serves as something of an ecological lab. For a bunch of elderly women, we have a huge agenda.”
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I think it’s strange how some people don’t believe in global warming or even care about conservation.
Someone should write to HGTV and see if they want to do a segment of the building. They often have shows with unique houses, and I bet they’d like this idea, too.
=)
I’ll have to check into that … Thanks. It truly does boggle the mind that people don’t believe in global warming or other environmental tragedies … even simply from a self-preservation perspective let alone from the perspective of conservation, morality, concern about our children’s future or care for the beauty of God’s creation.