Environment

Sad Day in Wisconsin, Sad Day in US

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It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money.

Culture

Separation, Connection, and World Transformation

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On Monday night I saw the movie I Am by Tom Shadyac. In case you don’t know – Tom has been a writer and director of numerous comedy films which have netted him millions of dollars. In the course of the last number of years he has been on an incredible journey of shifting his values from success and consumption to simplicity, love, and compassion. He sold his mansion and established a foundation with the money. Here’s what his website says: “Ultimately, the goal of The Foundation for I AM is to help usher in a more loving, kind, compassionate, and equitable world for all.”

Environment

Discovering a Jewish Environmental Ethic During Tu B’Shvat

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by Peter D. Goldberg
The Obama administration appeared serious about confronting looming environmental crises, especially global warming and resource depletion. With the new Congress challenged by science doubters and industrial supporters, the prospect of critical reform is considerably compromised. But political and technological adjustments may well not be enough to confront humanity’s ecological challenges anyway. Fundamental personal lifestyle changes, particularly in our Western materialistic values and consumer-oriented ways, may be necessary. Judaism has much of relevance to say on this.Such profound changes, whether dictated by prudence or disaster, will ultimately prove as much spiritual in character as political and economic.

Environment

Where are the Jewish Greens?

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By Devorah Brous
Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B’Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B’Shvat – the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant. In advance of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) tree planting activities this Tu B’Shvat, the Bedouin village of Al Arakib was once again demolished. For the ninth time. This time, rubber bullets and batons were used by Israeli police in riot gear.

Culture

The Politics of the Present Imperfect

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It is a time of year when many of us take special occasion to reflect on whether we’ve been living our lives the way we mean to, whether our communities and our society as a whole have become a little more sane-minded, more sustainable, more beautiful, a little more just in the past year. In my experience this exercise often leads to heartburn and nausea: the gap between the way things are and the way I hope for them to be is so vast as to seem impossible to bridge.Health care reform didn’t turn out nearly as well as many of us hoped. The DREAM act failed for unconscionable unreasons. Climate legislation isn’t even on the table. The Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy were extended, at the expense of desperately needed social services.

Christianity

Requiem for a Holy Tree

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The veneration of trees pre-dates Christianity and no doubt all organized world religions. The tree is a source of life, offering shelter, food, habitat, fuel, soil preservation and enrichment—not to mention breathable air.

Culture

Reddit: Being Touched by My Home Base

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A person reveals a lot by the website they choose for their home page. Some people want to have their own blog; others have Google news. There have been times when I’ve had both of those, but for the past four years I’ve been firmly linked to Reddit. Reddit is a community forum on which people post, either their own comments or links to sites, news, pictures, whatever. Users can comment on these posts, and discussions, sometimes heated ones, follow.

Environment

The Yes Men's brilliant campaign against Chevron's greenwashing

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In case you haven’t been following the Yes Men’s  latest expose of corporate misinformation check out their recent press releases. The first one was on October 19:

Massive Chevron Ad Campaign Derailed, Media Slapstick Follows
News outlets, citizens duped by web of deceit – but whose? A day-long comedy of errors began Monday morning when the Yes Men, supported by Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, pre-empted Chevron’s enormous new “We Agree” ad campaign with a satirical version of their own. The activists’ version highlights Chevron’s environmental and social abuses – the same abuses they say Chevron is attempting to “greenwash.”
“Chevron’s super-expensive fake street art is a cynical attempt to gloss over the human rights abuses and environmental degradation that is the legacy of Chevron’s operations in Ecuador, Nigeria, Burma and throughout the world,” said Ginger Cassady, a campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. “They must think we’re stupid.”
“They say we’re ‘interrupting the dialogue,’” said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, referring to Chevron’s terse condemnation.

Environment

The Body Shop Drops Daabon — An Encouraging Step

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The Body Shop recently announced its decision to sever commercial ties with Daabon Organic, the British cosmetic company’s main supplier of palm oil, one year after learning about Daabon’s involvement in a consortium that displaced Colombian farmers. The announcement — which offers a glimmer of hope that the expectations of “conscious consumers” actually do affect big corporations’ behaviors, at least a little bit — comes in the wake of an exposé published last year by The Observer, which exposed Daabon Organic’s involvement in a consortium that succeeded in expelling over 100 families from the estate of Las Pavas in the district of Buenos Aires — located in Bolivar, Colombia­ — for additional space to harvest palm. A report that The Body Shop and Christian Aid jointly commissioned reveals the complexity of the dispute between the Consortium and the displaced families, which is, according to The Body Shop’s official statement, not close to being resolved. While these displaced farmers may not have legally “owned” this land, the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA) ceded it to them, and it has been their home for years. The palm harvest is detrimental to the inhabitants of this region in general because it strips the land of its nutrients — a problem compounded by the fact that the industry lacks a “solid, comprehensive, strategic and regionalised environmental policy.”

Education

Ecosocialism: Not Your Father's (or Grandfather's) Socialism

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A Rip Van Winkle Experience
When you have lived more than six decades, it is possible to have a Rip Van Winkle experience. Life may have assigned an aspect of the social universe you once followed closely to the bare horizon of your awareness, where it may have lurked for decades, and then events occur that make you again pay attention to it. When you do, it may seem that, like the fabled Van Winkle, you have been asleep and things, though not entirely different from what you once knew well, have substantially changed. The “Death” of Socialism? Not long ago socialism, especially in its Marxist varieties, was widely declared dead.