Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (In case the title of this piece wasn’t clear enough).

A crazy thing, life.

So I know, it’s been a long time since posting last. Gee whiz- I miss writing for Unpacked!

My sister Liron just got married and well things have been more than a bit nutty around here. Happy as ever, but a good lot nutty, too. But it sure is nice to see my little “Write a Post” screen in front of me.

I’d like to link you to a post I wrote for Climate of Change, our Jewish Climate Initiative blog, entitled Calling all Voices. I’ll give you a little chunk of it here, but give a visit to our site to read the whole thing (not that long, don’t you worry).

So a very major Congratulations and Mazal Tov and Happy Happy to Liron (and her husband, Eliyah), much love to you, and I hope to be in touch very soon!

Here’s some music with which to Unpack the week and a peaceful soundtrack for the Climate piece: The Be Good Tanyas, and their MySpace page.

And here’s the start of Calling All Voices:

“For the Jewish community to make a difference on environmental issues, we need brutal honesty to begin with. Jews are now roughly 0.2% of the world’s population; less than the margin of error on the Indian census. If all the Jews in the world recycle their newspapers it will make… pretty much no difference whatsoever. Nor if we put a solar-powered ner tamid in every synagogue, nor, more radically, if every Jew in the world swapped their existing car for a hybrid.”

-Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon.

“Our home planet Earth is undergoing rapid and sustained destruction of its eco-systems… Muslims comprise at least one fifth of the human community and they can contribute much to the thinking that is vital to re-evaluate the future direction of the human community and save its home for itself and other life forms.”

- The Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES)

What a difference one fifth of the world could make!

And us Jews? We sure are a little nation, but as history tells us, we have tremendous power to inspire ethical behavior, mobilize social change and spearhead the technology with which to bring that change about.

Click Here for the Full Article

Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Hi Everyone,

A happy week to you!

I am doing some work for a new project called Jewish Climate Initiative- a non-profit dedicated to developing a Jewish response to the global climate crisis by consulting ancient Jewish ethics, mobilizing our nation’s passion for social action and directing our abilities in science and technology toward solutions in sustainable living.

I’d like to refer you to a post I just wrote for the initiative’s blog, Climate of Change, called “Don’t Fall into the Doomsday Trap.” I’d really like your feedback on this one- sometimes I write something and am not super positive I agree with it (odd as that might sound). So check it out and let me know! (You can leave me comments here on Unpacked (if your comments are bad) or at Climate of Change (if your comments are good.) (Just kidding- you can leave me any type of feedback anywhere).

Also- I highly recommend subscribing to Climate of Change-the founders of Jewish Climate Initiative, Rabbi Julian Sinclair and Michael Kagan are pretty brilliant guys with credentials up the wazoo, and they always have interesting, creative (and well-written) things to say- so have a look! (As a by-the-way, “Wazoo” originally meant trap door. It’s also a nickname for Washington State University. Just thought you’d be interested…)

The post begins like this:

Environmental sensitivity has a trap: Actions too often become a “Fight Against.” I stop acting “in order to,” but rather, “to beware of”- whether that “Beware of” is carbon emissions, pollution, pesticides or the like.

Not that caution is a bad place from where to act- crises like climate change give us the urgency that (hopefully) makes us change. But that urgency should not only encourage us to ward off disasters, but to re-examine our experience in this world and discover what it is we are missing that brought about these crises in the first place.

Let’s take eating local foods as an example: Click Here for the Full Article

I look forward to hearing from you,

Yannai