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

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Seamus the Cat and I have always agreed to peacefully share our apartment’s bedroom/office space in the morning. I sit at the computer and work, he sits on the bed and sleeps. And we do pretty well, too. If either one of us needs to get up for a stretch, we usually even stop by and wish one another a quick hello.

But yesterday, it all fell apart.

You see, I got up to play the mandolin for a few minutes of break. Upon hearing the very first note, Seamus grumpily glared at me, got up, did a little yawn, slumped himself out of the room and found somewhere more quiet to sit.

I’m sure you can appreciate that it did not make me feel very good.

On the other hand, though, there’s the world.

You know, the world, us, you, everyone- people in general, who are doing pretty good, I think.

I spent a few hours yesterday sifting through a list of 50 environmental blogs, in order to create our Suggested Links column on Jewish Climate Initiative’s Climate of Change. And I encountered some pretty unbelievable sites and people and solutions:

There was The City Fix, a blog that explores sustainable solutions to urban mobility. I read about Kilmarnock, Scotland, which is instituting public buses that run on biodiesel made from used cooking oil.

How do you think passengers will pay for their bus? This is true- they will pay by bringing their used cooking oil. Had a stir-fry for dinner? Well you just earned yourself a bus ride. Cool, no?

Other favorites of mine included the high school kid that figured out how to biodegrade plastic bags, the Recycle This blog that tackles reusing/recycling things like old carseats and breadmaker pans, and the EcoGeek blog for EcoTechies.

An important blog, I thought, was the Climate Debate Daily, posting arguments both for and against combating climate change. It’s always valuable to learn from and engage with the other side, right?

For more great environmental blogs, click here for Climate of Change, and check out the column on the right labeled Bloggers Fixing the World.

No doubt that our potential as humans to harm the world has gotten bigger- Nukes, Climate Change, Global Food Crises- we can do more serious damage than ever, and we can do it very fast.

But like a pendulum, the farther we go down, the farther we can go up. And the truth is really that there are a lot of people out there coming up with creative solutions to help us all do Earth better.

And so, if this list of blogs is any indicator, then I’d say we really are in okay shape. Yup- I really think all the bad stuff is gonna have a very happy ending after all.

And as for Seamus and me? Well, I give him food. He’ll have to warm to my mandolin some day…

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