The Earth Ministry Group is working in a variety of ways to evaluate our parish use of the earth's resources, to provide education and tools for expanding our stewardship of the earth, and to take action for change where it is needed.

During the past year, the Earth Ministry Group's work has included:

• Evaluation of our institutional recycling practices and educational needs;
• Provision of additional blue recycling containers for the building, along with active encouragement of better paper recycling;
• Providing parish-wide recycling education on July 20 by Esther Moberly of Bluegrass PRIDE, an organization contracting with LFUCG to provide community-wide environmental education;
• Official designation by Bluegrass PRIDE as a "Waste Buster" organization;
• Purchasing Bishop's Blend fair trade coffees for use at parish hospitality events (including Sunday coffee hours), as well as sale of Bishop's Blend to individual parishioners;
• Site evaluation of the detention basin for its potential as a rain garden;
• Planting the basin with member-donated native plants to decrease rain runoff rom the parking lot and grounds;
• Establishing a procedure for recycling used fluorescent light bulbs;
• Arranging for a formal energy audit of the church building on June 12 by Josh Stegall of E-Max, a company contracting with KU to do institutional energy audits;
• Retrofitting all old Exit signs with LED fixtures;
• Soliciting a bid from the church’s electric contractor, David Muse, for replacing the fluorescent lights in the Chapter Room and in the EFM Room with more energy-efficient T-8 lamps;
• Organizing two group hikes at Floracliff Nature Preserve;
• Writing book reviews, published on our bulletin board and our website, about environmental issues, broadly conceived;
• Ongoing environmental education and parish news.  Keep your eye on the Earth Ministry bulletin board in the hall outside the office, check the St. Michael's Web site (Earth Ministry news is under Stewardship), and watch for regular reviews of books related to environmental stewardship.

This year the Earth Ministry Group will continue to work on upgrading our building systems to increase their energy efficiency.  We are also planning a number of parish-wide activities for Earth Day which falls on April 22.  There will be a fundraiser for our Earth Ministry projects on April 19; we will be selling earth-related items and services at church.  We will also organize some work projects on our grounds, most especially completing the planting of the detention basin.

In addition to the nature hikes that we organize for parishioners, we are posting the nature related outings of other organization on our bulletin board.  We hope that all able members of our parish will be able to go on one wildflower hike this spring.  We also welcome book reviews written by our parishioners’ on ecology-related topics, and we will post these on our website.

And, of course, we encourage all parishioners to join our group and help with its work.  The Earth Ministry Group typically meets about once a month; meetings are announced and publicized on the church website, on our bulletin board opposite the mailroom door and in St. Michaels Matters.