Recently in Judaism and the Environment Category

 Professor Gordan Wenham:

It was over 30 years ago that I visited Israel for the first time, and I remember how it transformed my reading of the Bible. Up to then I had never paid much attention to the place names in the text: I just focused on the characters and their actions. But after visiting many of the sites mentioned in the text my reading of the stories changed: I picture them taking place in the specific places mentioned in the Bible.

Something similar happened to me some fifteen months ago, when I was asked to read a paper to a conference of environmentalists on The Old Testament and the Environment. Though I was quite familiar with many of the texts in the Bible relating to environmental issues, I had not asked myself how the biblical writers regarded the environment. But once ask the question and you will soon realise it has a lot to say on this topic. Mind you I could find little help from modern biblical scholarship. They tend to share the blind spots of modern city dwellers and not address these issues either.

He does a great job of un-blinding those spots.

A must read, and prob'ly worth a bookmark.

Jerusalem Post:

Each episode of Wa$ted! tasks Gurwitch and her cohost, actor Holter Graham, to audit a household and encourage it to become greener and more cost-efficient. A recent edition put the spotlight on Reuben and Belinda Ehrlich and their four children - a Modern Orthodox family from West Orange, NJ, who sought out the show after seeing it advertised on Craigslist. "They take the idea of tikkun olam very seriously, as I do, too," Gurwitch told JTA, using the term for "repair of the world." "What greater way to express that than by leaving a smaller footprint on the earth?"

Another review on the show here. From the comments:

Sure, the financial incentive is a practical way of encouraging people to change their bad habits, but it also sends the message that people should be interested in reducing waste primarily because of what it costs them, rather than what it costs the planet.

If you don't think teens don't care "what it costs them" you probably don't have any of your own. That whole disconnecting-ecology-from-economics theory is going to come crashing down here pretty soon.

Jerusalem Post.

Can Judaism provide a solution to global climate change? Jews have tackled many challenges over the past millennia, but none quite as titanic as this. This week, 55 select experts in a variety of fields kicked off their first session in Jerusalem, with the aim of drawing up what has been called a "Seven Year Plan for the Jewish People on Climate Change and Sustainability." The initiative is being spearheaded by the New York-based Jewish Environmental organization, Hazon ("vision"), and the Israel-based Jewish Climate Initiative (JCI). The goal is to have a plan with accompanying educational materials and strategy in place by September 2015, when the next shmita cycle starts and, according to Jewish law, all agricultural activity is prohibited.

Seven years. Fascinating. [AP Photo]