Environment

Airmageddon: The Case Against Constructing a New Airport in Northern Israel

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by Hadas Marcus
Around this time of year, many Jews worldwide conduct their own moral inventory with the hope of accomplishing more and becoming better people. I too want to make a meaningful contribution…if it is not too late. This is a period of uncertainty as we await a kind of verdict – not related to Yom Kippur – but rather one that is nonetheless crucial to the people of Israel, particularly residents of the North. On October 23, the Israeli government will announce its final decision on whether or not to erect an enormous international airport next to the Megiddo Junction. That announcement will greatly impact not only me, but the whole surrounding area.

Environment

Eco Al Cheyt: Atoning for Our Environmental Sins

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by Dan Brook

The Al Cheyt is a traditional part of the Yom Kippur-Day of Atonement liturgy, in which Jews publicly confess our individual and communal sins, our going astray, literally our missing the mark, each of us alone and all of us together. We are not necessarily personally at fault for each sin, yet we are all responsible for all the sins. There are 36 sins listed below divided into two sections of 18. In Judaism, the number 18 is associated with life, 36 with justice; a sin means missing the mark; and it is a mitzvah-holy deed to both “remember” and “not forget”. Please feel free to adopt or adapt this Al Cheyt, which is neither comprehensive nor perfect, for your personal, professional, spiritual, or religious practice.

Environment

Wangari Maathai, Hummingbird, Dead at 71

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Yesterday the planet lost a great champion: Wangari Maathai, hummingbird and planter of trees. The video clip below is what I think of when I hear her name. [youtube: video=”IGMW6YWjMxw”]
I love the way she tells the story there, of the hummingbird fighting the forest fire while the rest of the forest creatures look on and do nothing. That hummingbird carries water, and won’t stop even though the odds aren’t in its favor. It is hope, it is the thing with feathers.

Environment

Pirket Avot and the Tar Sands Pipeline (Why I'll Be Risking Arrest at the White House)

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On Thursday I announced my intention to join the civil disobedience against the Tar Sands XL Pipeline in a Listserve post to fellow congregants at Temple Rodef Shalom, the Reform Jewish congregation I belong to in northern Virginia. I wasn’t sure what people would make of it. There is a certain reticence in our community about overt political engagement on controversial issues.

Environment

From Above, You Can See That it is Broken

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When it is winter in Chicago – as it will be again after the long and perfect fall is finally over and gone – I know that I will crave that best of all Chicago winter moments:  when I pull back the heavy doors of the Garfield Park Conservatory’s main entrance, pay my donation, give my zip code to the desk clerk for her records, and open the interior doors that lead into the soaring space of the Palm House. There, in a hot and sultry instant, my dried-out lungs fill with green, delicious green, and some part of my hibernating spirit picks up again where it left off, in a conversation with plants. I will need that place.  I will be sitting in my radiator-heated apartment, I will be looking at my pretend, eco-friendly fire, I will be eating too much in the way of baked goods, and I will need to walk in the half-sunlight of a mid-winter, mid-western day, where the reflected light from the palm trees coats the sallow of my skin.  I will need to feel lit – not full of the vitamin D of a real summer sky, not able to pick fruit off the trees as if it were really the tropics, but soothed in some unaccountable way, and made better. I am not wealthy, and so, finding the time and money and the costly leisure to make a trip out of the city during the winter as friends of mine do is not within my reach. You have to leave town in February, they say, how else can you make it through?

art

A Visible Island in the Invisible Sea

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I have just come home from an island. It is small and magical, and set 12 nautical miles out into the Atlantic, and I have been returning there in the summers since I was a teenager. I have been drunk on its landscape since I first set foot there, seasick and naive, and trailed behind my parents through the cathedral woods and stumbled onto a marsh awash in wild iris that I followed to the shore. I was hooked then. I was in sway to the place.

Empathy

And Then the Twister Came

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This weekend I ate lunch with a woman who grew up in Joplin, Missouri. It was not yet a week since the tornadoes, which we had not met to discuss. We wanted to talk about other things, and we spoke for two hours about what we’d meant to say to each other: about being our fathers’ daughters, navigating the tricky terrain of dating art-making men, the ways that we make things ourselves, stage fright and good music. But the thing that we couldn’t avoid in our talk was her news of home. Her sister had called crying the day before.

Environment

Frog Spring

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It is a cold spring here in Chicago, all rain and anticipation, and, like everyone in the city, I am still pretending that eventually things will change, that if we hope hard enough, and have enough faith, the world will warm up and bloom. Our good intentions haven’t brought it yet. But, I’ve lived here for sixteen years of cold springs. And, as you might notice from that history, I am happy here among my neighbors waiting for flowers — partly because I adore people of good intentions who believe fervently that they are capable of making the world a better place. I love the Shakers, whom my father revered.

Environment

Japan's Crisis: Nuclear Power and Methadone

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There is no doubt that nuclear power has some real advantages over coal and oil. In the short run it probably has fewer toxic emissions (mercury from coal fired plants is a significant health problem, for example). Mining uranium, while implicated in toxic waste, probably has less damaging effects than the large-scale land and ocean pollution from oil (oil tankers routinely take more cargo than they can handle and if the weather acts up, they simply jettison it). Though a Native American, with cancer rates eighteen times the national average from uranium mining on Indian land, might disagree. As well, in the long run, nuclear power produces far less in the way of Greenhouse gases.