Katrina Martich

I live on a collector street for my neighborhood, which means I’m continuously picking up litter from the street and my yard. Mostly it’s drink bottles and fast-food waste. I first assumed it was all discarded by people walking to the bus stops or tossed out car windows. Then, I kept finding some things over and over again, week after week, like cigarillo wrappers and single-serve Chardonnay bottles. I began to wonder if these were from my neighbors. I got a surprise answer t

The US generates more municipal waste per person than any other country, and the amount increases during holiday season. That makes December a good time for the spiritual discipline of Living Connected to focus on waste. Today’s blog post reflects on what’s in our trash and recycling bins and offers practices for changing their contents. For more waste-related practices, follow my Facebook page. I’ll post a Living Connected Practice of the Week each Tuesday in December. Also

My first of the month blog posts are dedicated to the practice of Living Connected. This month we focus on the connections made by our cell phones. Notice Look at your cell phone; not the screen, the phone itself. Consider what it’s made of. Notice the different materials that you can see. What other materials might be inside of the phone, and where in the world do they come from? Give thanks for the many gifts of creation that make a cell phone possible. Connect Cell phones

In the Living Connected project, I talk about everything we have as being a gift of creation. It’s easy to see the plants we eat and the water we drink as a gift, but I receive funny looks when I call waste a gift. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has many definitions of waste. The one relevant to Living Connected is, “refuse, such as garbage and rubbish, from places of human or animal habitation.” By definition, refuse is the worthless or useless part of something. This

I knew shelter-in-place was getting to me when dumpster diving started to seem interesting. The official engineering term for it is “waste audit.” Businesses and organizations do this audit to reduce the amount of money they spend on waste disposal. It’s also an essential step when you want to move toward zero waste for environmental reasons. If you don’t know what’s going into your trash, then you don’t know what to do to stop it from being trash. My first waste audit was as

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. One reason is their all or nothing nature. They seem to be a set-up for failure. Being human, it’s inevitable that I’ll break my resolution at some point. New Year’s resolutions also seem to discount the new start I get each and every day of my life. A bad day doesn’t mean a failed resolution for the year; rather, it’s the opportunity to repent and start over with the grace of a new day. This perspective is rooted in my Lutheran th

This blog was born in my struggle to find a place where I fit into the existing dialogue on environmental issues. I hear passionate, and sometimes strident, voices on all sides. People are advocating for one policy or another, fighting to “win” on their issue. I hear environmental doom preached with no gospel of hope. What I find lacking in all of it is a holistic, reconciling approach that acknowledges the relational complexity of life on this planet. Many people are surpris