Welcome to Rory Short

Welcome to Rory Short, who has kindly agreed to contribute to the SAFCEI blog.

Rory also has his own blog, Sustainable Communities, which is also worth reading.

I (Steve Hayes) started this blog about a year ago to try to demonstrate to SAFCEI members and the SAFCEI committee how blogs could enhance communication among SAFCEI members, and between SAFCEI and the outside world, but to be effective it needs to be a corporate effort. So thanks to Rory who has agreed to contribute -- you can see at the bottom of each post who contributed it, even if they didn't write it all.

My personal blogs Khanya and Notes from underground deal with more general topics, and not only the environment, but some may find something there to interest them.

It would be good to have two or three more contributors to the SAFCEI blog, preferably from different religious backgrounds. Rory is Quaker/Buddhist, and I am Orthodox Christian.

My other proposal to the SAFCEI committee was that we should start an interactive mailing list. Perhaps I can move on to that now that more people are beginning to participate in the blog.

Calling all SAFCEI members

Calling all SAFCEI members

This blog has been running for nine months now.

Its purpose is to facilitate communication between SAFCEI members and other people interested in the environment (if you are not a member of SAFCEI, and don't know what SAFCEI is, you can go to the main SAFCEI web site to learn more).

I started it mainly to show how a blog can aid communication for a group like SAFCEI.

Up till now, I have run it by myself. I've taken communications from the SAFCEI office, and other environmental news items and posted them on the blog.

But for it to achieve its full potential, the blog needs to be supported by more members of SAFCEI. It should not be a one-man band, but a community effort.

For a start, you could contribute by making comments on some of the posts. Anyone can do that, whether they are members of SAFCEI or not.

But it would be better still if SAFCEI members by contributing to the blog posts. Ideally there should be at least one contributing blogger for each faith community represented in SAFCEI. So this is a call for volunteers -- I'm a Christian, but there are also other varities of Christians. How about a Hindu contributor, a Buddhist contributor, a Muslim contributor, a contributor from the Bah'ai faith? These could then contribute environmental news from each of these faith communities.

How do you become a contributor?

You should be a member of SAFCEI, and then have a Google Id. If you have a Goggle e-mail address, you automatically have a Google Id, which you can then use to log in to Blogger (which yopu need to do if you want to make comments on this blog. If you don't have Google e-mail, it is easy enough to apply for, and useful if you are travelling, because you can use it anywhere there is an internet connection.

If you would like to help by contributing to this blog, please leave a comment on this post, telling a little bit about yourself, your faith community and your environmental interests and activities, and how we can contact you.