All Comments (8)

Oooooopppsssa. Correction on that Mass Hamas-ian EXODUS: This is a blessing, so to speaketh! This is your opportunity iSRAEL. Let them leave , do not ever let them Multitudal Mass Murdering Terroristin! Keep them out of All Gaza!

Do not live on that G-d forsaken hell hole. Justly Make it the biggest parking lot on Earth! And for 2000 years if need be!

So PUSH PUSH in da BUSH! Ya Ya!

"... YOUR "Hashem [G-D]" is hintinting you. And Their "Allah" [G-D] too!

We do not need to back to Jewish traditions to set our priorities. The ancient Jews did not have the same pollution and waste problems we have. The Jews were and are humans and as humans they tried to find solutions to the social problems of their times, some of which were to write them into scriptures and put words into the mouth of an idol they called Yahweh. After the scriptures were completed the idol Yahweh speaks no more as the scriptures have silenced him. The scriptures cannot be revised or another scripture written to address the problems of our times. It is a blessing that the idol yahweh has been rendered mute. Now we can look to our own solution without looking over our shoulders wondering what our idol may be thinking.

Are trees more important than famished children in Gaza? Are trees more important than Palestinian homes demolished upon their occuppants' heads by JEWS in the West Bank? Are trees more important than Lebanese orchards and fields "littered" with "intelligent" grenades sown by JEWS?

http://www.aljazeeratalk.net/english/content/view/91/1/

Well written, good concept.

I say we round up all the Indians we locked away in concentration camps and have them teach us how to be one with nature. I will happily go back to the teepee if it means saving this big, blue beautiful planet.

Excellent article, though I am admittedly biased as an observant Jew and active member of Canfei Nesharim.

Ultimately there can be no contradiction between Torah-based values and protecting the environment, if only for the sake of mankind's present and future welfare. To the extent that religious Jews display indifference or even animosity towards environmental causes, it is because they have not learned what our tradition has to say on the subject, and because they are turned off by what they perceive to be radical left-wing politics and environmental messianism. Hence the important role that organizations like Canfei Nesharim can play. I dare say that many religious Christians would have similar comments regarding Christian faith-based enviornmental groups.

One more point. If a person supports environmental causes for reasons of personal ethics rather than a religious mandate, she is less likely to make the sacrifices in personal comforts that may be called for.

I agree that a "problem to solution" paradigm isn't the answer - it addresses the symptoms but provides no cure. However, although it's good that religious organizations are promoting environmentalism, they cannot be trusted to have a reasonable agenda. As a case in point when a religious person learns that, for ethical reasons, I don't eat animals, the response is often, "But that's what they're FOR."

Instead, the problem is ultimately political, and a new political ethos is called for. I propose a stance of LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM!!! This philosophy is rooted in a view of man's relationship to the physical world that has two poles. On one end is INDIVIDUAL OWNERSHIP, where a man has a right to the products of his own labor. That's the Libertarian part. On the other end is COMMUNAL STEWARDSHIP, in which the environment is fundamentally un-ownable - it is a legacy that we, as a community, are responsible for sharing justly and leaving undiminished to posterity. That's the Socialist part.

As an example of the implications of this philosophy, consider taxes. We currently tax income. But what right does the government have to take a big slice of the fruits of OUR labor? LITTLE OR NONE!!! However, what if our income didn't come directly from labor, but came from selling off a natural resource like gold or oil? The resource didn't exist as the result of anyone's efforts - it was there all along as part of our shared inheritance. As the steward of that shared inheritance, the person developing the resource should effectively have to "buy" the resource from the government, but pay little to no taxes on the value his efforts have added. Thus my utopian taxation fantasy is this: TAX THE DEPLETION OF NATURAL RESOURCES. This would naturally stimulate conservation. Environmental degradation is a form of depletion, so it would stimulate green technology too. It might even help curb corporate corruption, since there's nothing more tempting than "found money", and if there's one thing that's "found", it's the environment.

"Perhaps a values-based approach would help us avoid the squabbling among industry, activists, scientists, and politicians that obscures and confuses so much of the environmental conversation today."

Gods know we could use the help. If all the Pagans in the country went off and farmed potatoes with sticks, it still wouldn't make up for the megawattage some people seem to throw at calling environmentalists 'Pagan heretics.'

It's with a bit of pique that I throw up my hands about certain religious people suddenly claiming their religions *invented* environmental responsibility, after all the years and centuries of supporting rapaciousness and 'dominion over the world,' but I do it with a smile.

Whatever it takes. Really. :)

A whole lot of my co-religionists have gotten pretty good at this stuff, and we generally have a pretty good time about it, too. Glad to share. :)

(Actually, sharing really helps. SUV's are kind of symbolic, but they're just the kind of thing a lot of people can have access to for use-at-need if they get together on one, instead of driving all that tonnage around individually in traffic for the sake of a rare occasion (or hope) they'll need it. I used to be sort of the vehicle-stablemistress for one of the little tribes I lived with: we coordinated our vehicle choices so that the commuters had little commuter cars, and we could all pile into the working truck (generally used by the groundskeeper and handy-person, (me,) who rarely went far except to actually haul stuff,) for trips and the like... There was even a cool old sports car in the stable which someone got while on the waiting list for a hybrid, which got passed around. Something which no one of us alone could have really considered remotely practical. They weren't really communal property, in this case: just organized with a modicum of coordination, cooperation, and sharing: everyone had, well, the use of anything, instead of individually driving around a bunch of poor compromises. :) )

I think it's a nice example, how with a little bit of a different spin on our culture, (in this case, the 'individualistic and competetive about vehicles' bit,) 'environmental ethics' don't even have to suck. :)

So many of the things people have to do and have and get (and go get) individually result in huge inefficiencies, both in time and effort and travel and expenditure: (can you believe people *pay to exercise?* Ha. :) ) ...people work overtime to get their own house to spend hours-a-day commuting from, then find all their friends and live a substantial drive away from all the others... they don't even know their neighbors cause they don't even have time to mow their own lawns, ...they pull into heated garages and go fire up their individual microwaves and big-screen TVs (more overtime and debt for those) ..and wonder why everyone's so overstressed, overweight, and *lonely.*

It's not something you can just undo, but we certainly have the brains and resources to *modulate* it. To do positive things.

ov

Absolutely. The issue at hand is not something that will simply "go away" after we have devised one particular technology. But it is an issue that requires continuous care to create a new way of seeing things and a new way of seeing ourselves. Every thing in our lives requires resources and energy and what is taken in its original form is almost always more valuable than the end result. Yet, we in the West have "perfected" our capitalist system and in the process, established an empire built upon toasters, cars, and warheads. It is not enough to simply say that we should buy differently - while purchasing local, sustainable, and fair trade is better, our world is not prepared to give us what we need according to these principles; not with our current ethos and rate of consumption. We need to think differently and act differently and live differently if we have any desire to pass on the world to future generations. That is where my hope is - it is in creating something entirely new where everything we have is valued for what it is and everything we don't have is not really necessary. We need simplicity as much as we need an ecological transformation of our economy - but both require a long-sighted commitment from the global community.