To Till and to Tend

Homes and offices that run on the sun’s rays. Trucks and buses powered by used grease from the local McDonald’s. Cars that plug in like kitchen appliances to a cell phone provider-like network.  All of these ideas may sound as futuristic as the time traveling DeLorean but, in fact, all are possible with current technology. Innovators around the world are taking action to solve the climate change and energy crises one step at a time and, in the process, changing the way we live.

One especially exciting innovation is the next generation of plug-in hybrid automobiles. We have all grown accustomed to the Prius, but these new cars are different. The Chevy Volt, which is predicted to be “fully charged” by 2010, will run entirely on battery power for the first 40 miles, will plug into a conventional outlet to charge, and will get the equivalent of up to 150 miles per gallon in optimal conditions. Yes, 1-5-0. Forget the 35 miles per gallon CAFÉ standards that Congress passed last year. Forget the 50 miles per gallon range of current gas-electric hybrids. This is real progress.

The major obstacle for the truly electric car is infrastructure; without a network of stations to charge cars during long trips, hybrids must revert to gasoline power after traveling a certain distance. Not to worry. Shai Agassi, an entrepreneur from Israel, is currently touring the world to promote his BetterPlace project—an initiative to establish a global grid of plug-in stations that will allow hybrids and full electrics to completely replace the traditional automobile. Israelis have long understood the intersection between energy, security, and economics. Now, it seems Americans are beginning to see it too; the economic bailout passed last week includes $25 billion dollars in loans for Detroit to spur the next generation of cleaner, more efficient cars. Auto- and policy-makers hope this money will provide an impetus for real and rapid progress. As one Chrysler exec explained, “It’s a way for us to accelerate technology so you can get it in the hands of people faster and so they can afford it.”

In this country, one third of our carbon emissions come from transportation. It is unlikely that Americans will stop driving anytime soon, though we can and should drive less. However, the plug-in hybrid and other projects like it can take us on the path to a cleaner world and a more secure energy future without requiring revolutionary changes in the way we live. This is innovation at its best, and technology to keep an eye on as these new cars roll off the factory floor and onto our roadways.

As Al Gore and friends remind us, working together “WE” can solve climate change. And when I see innovations like the Volt, I believe it too.

I have an exercise bike in my basement.  It has sat idle for months – years even.  It’s not that I don’t exercise – I go to the gym regularly. However, I find it difficult to motivate to ride a stationary bike in the solitude of my own home.  But take me to a gym – and I’m in the front row of my spinning class.  These “peer pressure” exercise classes appeal to my competitive nature, I suppose.  I work out better when surrounded by others who are also working out.  This same philosophy, I’m afraid, extends to more than just exercise.

My husband first noticed my “competitive environmentalism” when we bought our hybrid a few years ago.  For months, he refused to drive if I was in the passenger seat – because I would badger him incessantly about his mileage stats.  Whenever his fuel economy “plunged” from 45 to 44 miles per gallon, I’d tell him to slow down.  If we drove fewer than 550 miles on a full tank, I’d make him recount everywhere we drove that week to figure out where the missing gas had gone. 

A few months ago, a colleague referred me to a passage, which convinced me that I’m not alone.  In an article titled, “My Mileage is Better than Your Mileage,” Bill McKibben writes:

… [Do] I pay inordinate attention to the gas gauge? Absolutely. And is it because I’m obsessed with global warming? Not really. True, that’s why I bought the car in the first place…. But if you thought about global warming all the time, you’d be nuts. When I’m behind the wheel, I’m an American—competitive, score-keeping, out to win.

And this competitive streak does not stop with hybrid cars and fuel economy.  In fact, a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research reports that only 37% of hotel guests choose to forego a fresh towel when their hotel bathroom simply urges them to “help save the environment,” while 49% of guests make the “green choice” when confronted with a customized sign indicating how many previous guests had done the same.  Another article in the New York Times reports that people dramatically reduced their electricity use when their electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood – and included a frowning face on households with an above-average bill. 

Jewish tradition offers some insight for these behaviors.  As Ira Stone explains in A Responsible Life, human beings live in a constant struggle between the “evil inclination” (in Hebrew, yetzer hara) and the impulse to do good (yetzer hatov).  Humans are inherently competitive. We must strive, however, to transform the evil inclination to do good.  As Jeffrey Spitzer writes, “[w]hen properly controlled by the yetzer hatov, the yetzer hara leads to many socially desirable results.”

Herein lies the future of the American environmental movement: we must look at pride and vanity, competition and shame – and redirect these values to reduce our impact on the Earth.   Can peer pressure really be the answer to climate change?

I’d love your thoughts about ways public scrutiny can inspire green behavior.

[for more on the power of public opinion, read "On Dolly Parton and Climate Change" and "Visualizing a Changing Climate: How to Know when You've Used 'Enuff'"]

Jews – especially observant ones – are particular. Dietary laws of kashrut require that we eat certain foods prepared in certain ways, we require a quorum of ten adult Jews when we pray, and we send our children to special schools to receive Jewish education. This requires a lot from a community. As a result, Jews moved to live near Jews so that all of life’s essentials could be nearby. The shtetl was born.

Beyond the convenience, the rabbis understood the value of shared physical space. To this end (or so that’s how I’m interpreting it), they formed laws that essentially required Jews to settle within established communities. According to the 39 law of Shabbat, Jews are not supposed to carry outside their homes. For a variety of reasons, the rabbis established the eruv, a physical enclosure that extends the marks the entire community as “home.” Though challenging in a modern lifestyle, this rule can be understood to reinforce the spiritual community with physical proximity.

When I was younger, I observed the laws surrounding eruv – even when my family went camping over Shabbat, we enclosed our campsites with twine. Since, finding an apartment within an eruv has not been my priority. Rather than searching for a kosher butcher, I sought the local health food store. Rather than worrying about a mikva (ritual bath), I found a home close to Central Park. Still, I think the rabbis were on to something and they’re not the only ones.

Realtors, city planners and environmentalists are examining the “walkability” of a city. Walkscore.com just came out with a report that rates cities and neighborhoods by how easy it is to walk to the basic necessities of life. In other words, they’re rating whether a neighborhood’s eruv can sustain the community within. Though it’s so “easy” to hop in a car to drive the 10 miles to the grocery store or movie theater, functioning within a walkable eruv provides wonderful spiritual, environmental and health results.

Check the score for your neighborhood by putting in your address – I hope you “do well.” It’s ok if you didn’t – America wasn’t built with eruvs in mind. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t start thinking about the wonders of 21^st century eco-shtetl.

How many of us have ever given thought to what our Shabbat candles are sourced from?  I’ve been working at increasingly my lifestyle sustainability for years and never thought to ask.  I work for an organization, GreenMicrofinance, which brings green energy to those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; without access to grid electricity, people rely on kerosene lamps and parraffin candles.  And yes, parraffin candles – examples of which are the old familiar Shabbat candles – are sourced from fossil fuel.  I just reasearched this and came up with a wonderful post at Canfei Nesharim’s site – they provide an Orthodox perspective on environmental responsibilty and have a very comprehensive post on just this question which you should definitely check out.
So what to do?  One simple, but expensive, solution is to switch to naturally sourced candles, soy or bees wax.  That way we can all keep on using our beautiful Shabbat candlesticks.
Another route would be to return to our ancient, pre-candles ritual of burning olive oil in shabbat lamps.  Pictured above is a modern version, which is quite lovely, designed by Israeli artist Nathanel Putnam.  Then there is the arts and crafts project approach.  My own personal experiment failed, so I put it out to all of you out there to share your more successful attempts.  I did find a totally neat web site which demonstrates how to recycle paper into oil wicks.  This would be a great project for educators to work on.  We really need to figure this out! Can you imagine how much fossil fuel is consumed by all the shabbat candles each Friday night?  Contributing to global warming is definitely at odds with welcoming Shabbat.
To all you problem solvers out there: the best solution would be a shabbat lamp shaped to fit INTO a shabbat candlestick, since those are the ceremonial objects we all own.  That way we don’t need to all go out and buy even more stuff.  Let us share our wisdom about this.  ASAP!

David Elcott’s farm has started to produce its bounty. Through a guest-blog partnership with Jcarrot.org, we are excited to share David’s second piece on sustainable local farming with you.  To read the first post, click here.

I couldn’t write this past month. Too nervous. The temperature dipped, I read up on all the pests and bugs and germs that could kill the seeds. The little seedlings looked so vulnerable. When it looked like the temperature would hit the low 40’s I panicked and ran out to Home Depot, bought some metal to make hoops and heavy plastic and actually hid my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants in their own private green houses. The days between Pesach and Shavuot are for counting the Omer – fifty days that according to tradition are anxiety producing because the dry winds or heavy rains could wipe out the crops and people would starve. I certainly identified with that anxiety even if I knew that the green grocer was open and waiting for my business. So, as I said, I could not write.

But now I can. It is approaching the advent of the summer, the sun is warming the earth, the rains keep the Farm, the Cornfield and the Potato Patch generously moist. The vegetation is luxuriant and lush. My son took one look at the rows of colorful lettuces, micro-greens, red rocket lettuce and a variety of multi-colored munchables whose name I do not know, and declared, “This looks just like the finest salad bowl.” Just sitting happily on my little farm, providing fresh salads – meaning about five minutes from earth to plate! I throw in cut herbs – the herb garden is growing like wild – and even a few nasturtium and broccoli leaves. I was showing Liore how the peas are starting to bloom when we both kneeled down and realized that the vines were already resplendent with edible snap peas. The watermelon radishes are sharp and tangy and look just like, well, miniature watermelons. And who would have guessed that by June 16^th we would harvest our first tomato, sliced thin for sharing and sprinkled with top- grade olive oil, Portuguese sea salt and fresh ground pepper? It is a beautiful sight. And if the corn is not as high as an elephant’s eye, the stalks are growing nicely.

The rabbit. He hopped into the garden, through the mesh fence or under the buried black mesh or somehow got in. I ran out – as my wife said, it was a good thing we do not even allow toy guns in our house since she was convinced my eyes gleamed with murder. But when I got out there, he had nibbled a few leaves and bounced happily away. If I am planning to share with my neighbors, why not allow the rabbits a bit to eat as well. A bit, okay. We will see.

Other dangers lurk. I know all about the slimy squash vine borer who waits patiently until the flower blooms and the cute little squash begins to grow. Then it pounces and you come out the next day to see mush in your field. And when I asked Liore to tell me the name of a pretty orange and black beetle, she said that you call it, “Kill on sight!” So I did. To be a farmer is to be vigilant and steadfast, like the colonists fighting the Revolutionary War, like the Israelites in the desert. Up at 6 and out to see whether everything vanished during the night. So far so good.

When Noam and Julie had their first pea or radish – don’t remember what – they recited shehechiyanu, the blessing that celebrates a wondrous new occasion, and then borey p’ree ha’adamah – blessing the vegetables that grow and flourish out of the soil. I love saying blessings, but they sound different when recited over the earth that I tilled and watered, the furrows that I hoed, the seeds and seedlings I planted, and the plants that I nurtured. Along with the rain and sun and wind and pollinating birds and bees. Vaya’ar elohim ki tov—and God saw that it was very, very good. And tasty, too.

I wore a six-year old two-piece dress with a seafoam scoop-neck top to the weddings of my two older sons. I wore the same dress to my two youngest children’s bnai mitzvah celebrations just a few years earlier. I am hoping for more summer simkhas so I can get additional mileage out of it.

I know it is part of the American cultural ritual to buy something new for fancy events, each special occasion occasioning an expansion of the wardrobe.  I could justify my recycling of the dress by arguing that with all the money we were already spending, why unnecessarily spend more?  Truth be told, though, I liked wearing a previously worn dress.

I liked opening the school books at the beginning of the year and discovering the students from the grades above me whose karma now infused that book, binding me to them and the learning enterprise. I liked it when library books came with cards stamped with due dates that showed how often and how recently a book was taken out. I like buying used books from Amazon’s marketplace, pages smoothed and a little dog-eared by previous readers. Most of our family’s best children’s books are library discards – books once held on the laps of countless parents and children in the most tender moments of discovery. I like buying used wooden furniture studded with round water stains from iced-tea glasses accompanying long summer visits with dear old friends. I like old houses, old handbags, old chinaware.

If I could, I would live in a converted train station – imagining the people, the stories, the hellos and goodbyes, the tears and the pacing, the grumbling and the jokes that people would have told waiting for life’s little adventures to unfold. I would conjure up their voices at night and feel the vitality of life’s tidal forces.

I don’t quite understand the lust for new. New feels incomplete to me, possibilities without the wisdom to guide and temper it.  The Old gifted as New seems to me the best of all worlds.

I recently heard of an e-establishment from whom you rent toys instead of buying them. You go on line, choose age-appropriate toys for your kids from this enterprising entrepreneur, use them for however long you want and then return them and get new toys. Kind of like Netflix for toys.

And there is an outfit that rents handbags for a night.

I was talking with a potter who says that when she is stuck for a gift, she chooses a bowl from her home pottery collection,  washes it off, and Voila, instant gift. I thanked her, for she had liberated my desire to do the same.

Imagine how rich we would be if the stuff we owned was coated with a patina of lives lived fully; if the gifts we gave were crowded with our stories, our memories, our blessings. Imagine if our daily acts were added, layer by layer, onto a tel of tales, a mound of memories captured and held by the stuff of our lives.

Describing old-fashioned normal utensils – silverware, plates, glasses – as “reusables” does tell us something about our material culture.  Last week I wrote about my minyan’s low-tech efforts to be more sustainable, buying kiddush glasses and plates and creating a volunteer rotation for washing them.  Nevei Kodesh in Boulder, Colorado, shares that they purchased metal “sauce cups” which are very distinctive, non-breakable, and easy to clean.  They cost less than $1 a cup in bulk. 
There is a third way between “washables” and disposables, and that’s compostables, a product with expanding choices, some of which are pictured.  They are more expensive that petroleum based plastics, but are made from vegetable products, so they decompose.  Fortunately they don’t decompose when you use them; they take a month or so to accomplish this task.  Their first major advantage over conventional plastic is that they are manufactured from a renewable source.  Their second advantage is that they decompose, but of course this advantage is only achieved if a community actually composts.  Throwing them in the garbage, as a friend reported was the norm in an eco-concerned, non-composting institution where she works, only addresses half of the environmental equation.  Throwing compostables in a landfill has no environmental virtue, since they won’t break down.
If there’s no on-site composting, one solution is to collect the compostables and find a volunteer who does compost and is willing to take them.  (Of course starting a composting system at the synagogue is an even better idea.)
While this is all important, both actually and symbolically, we are missing the forest for the trees here.  One commenter points out that the carbon footprint of driving to shul is bigger than the kiddush cup.  So the real campaign is to encourage folks to walk, carpool, or take public transit to synagogue.  Here are the numbers provided by our commenter who didn’t include a name, unfortunately:

The analysis below was done for Congregation Tifereth Israel . We have 320 member units, a 57,000 sqft 60 year old building. While the numbers are specific to us, the should hold in general for other congregations. [it looks like there are 0 added heating costs in winter; I would question that, but that's a minor point]

I have made some rough estimates on the energy cost of a typical Shabbat, and translated them into pounds of carbon dioxide (lbs CO2).

Extra building heating costs winter — minimal
Summer cooling for the sanctuary 600 lbs CO2

6 lbs of plastic plates and utensils. — 30 lbs CO2
1 pound of unrecycled aluminum pans 25 lbs CO2

A typical car emits about 1lb CO2 per mile (Prius owners stop smirking ).
I estimate that on each Shabbat about 70 cars travel 14 round-trip miles to take us to the service. -1000 lbs CO2

Summary. We can recycle the aluminum pans, wash dishes instead of using disposables — but these are are semi-symbolic. If we want to do something that counts, carpool, walk or bicycle to Shabbat service. Maybe we can teledaven?

So let’s brainstorm about the transport of the dovveners.  Orthodox congregations win the prize here, big time, for zero to very light Kehillah-wide carbon foot prints on shabbos.  In the liberal world, what can we do to promote less driving, especially in the face of inaccessible suburban synagogue locations ?  I have only heard of one synagogue policy which addresses this, at Adat Shalom in Rockville, MD.  They are short on parking, so hybrids get parking spot preference.  Please share any ideas or policies!

The seventh night of Passover, a full chag with no particular commonly observed ritual, is begging for a food do-over. The crossing of the Red Sea is celebrated on the 7th day of Passover; in some communities they spill water and recreate that great event through song and dance, but beyond that, it’s an open canvas.
About ten years ago I decided to appropriate two “seven” connections and recast them as a ritual vegetarian meal, giving 7th Night Passover a special identity. The first inspiration was the Italian Feast of Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve which I’ve read about and sounds fanciful and fun. The other was (non-Pesadik) seven-vegetable couscous. I found that having a positive food focus during the week of Passover, with all its prohibitions, was a great energy director. Also, since most every vegetable is allowed on Passover [consult the authorities on this!], it is a nice psychological flip from scarcity (no chametz) to abundance (so many vegetables!). I have a nice big list of vegetable dishes in my Passover file.
The focus on vegetables of this made-up ritual has taken on more urgency over the years, as the immense environmental costs of poultry and redmeat production become better understood. This knowledge has been around since my young adult days, when Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet was on the shelf next to Moosewood in most progressive households, but measuring the carbon load of our foods is a relatively new concept. Essentially this is tracking the emissions generated by growing, processing, packaging and shipping our food. A really fun new website, CarbonCounter, is devoted to measuring the impacts of our food choices. You literally move your food into the frying pan and see the counter register its carbon measure. While the specifics are debatable, the relatives are visually clear – the counter drops when you put in vegetarian foods. Among vegetarian choices, it drops further if the food is less processed, a very graphic way of making the point that eating lower off the food chain decreases your ecological foot print. One unfortunate discovery for me is the surprisingly high carbon load of all those soyburgers, hot dogs and nuggets, with their many processed ingredients and excess packaging. Formerly they were a staple, but now they will be considered a treat…. Bummer!
So what to make for seventh night Passover? In keeping with the Red Sea Crossing, perhaps start off with borscht. Artichokes, potatoes (there are so many kinds now you might consider a feast of seven potato varieties!), mushroom pate, eggplant, and add some yams for beautiful color, especially with the beets – maybe you even have some Pesadik marshmallows for topping them, to make the kids happy. And what a chance to use up any leftover parsley and dill, in a lovely kugel or frittata. An incredible bounty of options.
B’taiavon – happy feasting!