We will be so much better off psychologically when we give up our dreams of mastery
and come back to living within nature.
2010
Naturalism as Mastery?
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Traditional environmentalists’ “humility” is overrated: we have all too often made the world’s
poor and powerless pay for our environmental progress.
2010
Humility in a Climate Age
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Can the ambitious new environmental geo-engineering be suffused with a humble
awareness of our place within nature’s complexity?
2010
Introduction to Special Section
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For the scientifically well-informed, there’s a seriously bleak quality in the air around global warming and other environmental threats. To avert the multiple foreseen catastrophes will require heroic measures. But which measures have a chance of working?
2009
Conversation on Vegetarianism
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An exchange between Tikkun reader Ruth Eisenbud and Michael Lerner, in response to Daniel Brook’s article “The Planet-Saving Mitzvah: Why Jews Should Consider Vegetarianism” in the July/August 2009 issue of Tikkun. magazine.
2009
The Planet-Saving Mitzvah: Why Jews Should Consider Vegetarianism
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God’s original plan for how to be kosher.
2007
Carbon: Tax Not Cap-and-Trade
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A May headline in the Chicago Tribune says it all: “The First Refugees of Global Warming: Bangladesh Watches in Horror as Much of the Nation Gives Way to Sea.” Each day’s news brings more reminders of the harms that global warming is already causing to people, communities, and nature throughout the world. From Hurricane Katrina and the inundation of island nations to heat waves in Europe and drought in Australia, climate change is wreaking horrific damage.
2006
A Meaningful Democratic Platform on Climate Change
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When John Kerry was asked about environmental issues in the second presidential debate leading up to the 2004 election, he initially changed the subject. Kerry has one of the strongest environmental records in the Senate, but instead of highlighting his environmental commitment, he chose to talk about welfare reform, supporting a balanced budget, and his commitment to national security.
2006
Environmentalism as Spirituality
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Excerpt from A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future by Roger S. Gottlieb. (June 2006, Oxford University Press)
2005
Hinduism and Ecology
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The word “Hindu” derives from a Persian way of characterizing the variety of traditions and cultural practices that can be found on the other side of the Indus River, the great Himalayan cascade that now bisects Pakistan. “Hindu” describes persons practicing Vedic ritual or worshiping Krishna. “Hindu” also describes the shared customs of Jains, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians.
2005
The Air We Breathe…
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There is yet more for us to fear. The burden that debt puts upon the developing world endangers us all in an even more fundamental way. It threatens the air we breathe, the food we eat, the survival of our species. It poses a threat to our very planet.
2005
The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology
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The strong and vocal presence of the religious Right, with its emphasis on family values and sexual politics, and the virtual absence of any discussion of the environment in the recent U.S. elections, causes one to wonder how much importance religions place on the environment as a moral and spiritual issue. The reports keep pouring in that we are altering the climate and toxifying the air, water, and soil so that the health of humans and other species is at risk.
2004
From Waste to Wonder
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Not long ago, as I was composting the rinds and peels collecting in my kitchen, my mind wandered to the words of a mystic rabbi who claimed that whenever any event happened in the world, it surely has a reason for existing—that it is up to us to find the spark of holiness even in our greatest mistakes. Those things that we’d like to hide from, tuck away, and forget, he said, must be held up to the light, because there is something in them, some energy which could hold the key to our happiness and fulfillment, that is calling to be redeemed.
2003
Food for Thought
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For three days in June, the Bush administration, the State of California and the City of Sacramento collectively spent millions of dollars pitching genetically engineered foods and industrial agricultural methods to some of the world’s poorest nations at the Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology, June 23-25.
2001
Economic Globalization and the Environment
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Among many preposterous claims, advocates of economic globalization argue that it increases long-term environmental protection. The theory goes that as countries globalize, often by exploiting resources like forests, minerals, oil, coal, fish, wildlife, and water, their increased wealth will enable them to save more patches of nature from their ravages and they will be able to introduce technical devices to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of their own increased production. There is ample evidence, however, that when countries increase their apparent receipts in a global economy, most of the benefit goes to global corporations who have little incentive to put their profits back into environmental protection. Instead, they plow them back into further exploitation, or they just take the money and run, right out of the country. This is normal corporate behavior in a global economy.