Reimagining Eden

19.7 cubic feet

Try as I might, I could not muster the time or energy to blog on Passover. Much like our ancestors, my experience of the holiday began with the food preparations. Thursday before the holiday was devoted to purchasing. I went from store to store to find all that I needed for the three day beginning (Shabbat and the first two days, including the two seders) and all the family I was truly delighted were coming. My seemingly, out-of-character, apparently indulgent - not to mention expensive - food shopping spree so alarmed my credit card company that they froze my card temporarily, not for lack of funds but for suspicious activity.

Thursday night was devoted to the final marathon cleaning, putting hametz dishes away and bringing down the passover ware.

Friday was devoted to cooking. And more cooking.

Friday night, we were off and running.

Between exhaustion, guests, work and the incessant cycle of cooking/cleaning/cooking/cleaning, there was little time to blog. For the reality of a home that that is the hub of Passover is that for a whole week, every morsel of food that we eat has to be prepared from scratch, by hand in one’s kitchen that very week (unless you are really good and either transform your kitchen weeks earlier or have the indulgent luxury of a separate kitchen. Or I supposed you could hire someone to cook for you, but now we trespass in the territory of make-believe.) No eating out, no buying prepared food, no dipping into the freezer for food you cooked weeks earlier for such a occasion.  The constancy of the kitchen, for those of us who ordinarily spend as little time as possible there, is all-consuming.

But that is not the point of this blog. Just an explanation for the blog blackout period.

The point of the blog is this: a month before Passover, I disconnected our second refrigerator/freezer. It has become de rigueur in the burbs to have two, sometimes three, refrigerators and freezers. But that appliance is one of the greediest power eaters in our homes. A 20 cubic feet refrigerator/freezer (roughly the one I have and most likely you too) uses 2700 KW a year.  That annual usage is exceeded in most typical homes only by the water heater and air conditioner. (To check out typical home energy consumption rates, go to http://www.oksolar.com/technical/consumption.html)

We too have two r/fs. And that was perhaps, maybe, somewhat defensible when my children were smaller and thus the household larger. But today, there are three of us in this large home. So a month before Passover, I determined, by fiat, that we were going to reduce our cold food storage to what we could fit into one unit, our 19.7 cubic foot refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen.

biofuels, environmental degradation and world hunger

We now know that the very thing we hoped would become a multifaceted solution has, like Frankenstein, become a multifaceted nightmare. The real-world experience of biofuels has shown us that biofuels: ratchet up prices for basic food staples which they are displacing or diverting exacerbating world-wide hunger; they are driving increased destruction of virgin rainforests to create yet more farmland so more folks can capitalize on this windfall (an area the size of Rhode Island was cleared in the Amazon in the second half of 2007 for this very purpose!!); the US continues to subsidize the growing of these biofuel crops thereby artificially deflating the cost of this “fuel” when compared to alternative, renewable and clean fuels, thus delaying and suppressing investments in renewable energy research and installations.  CBS reports that there have been food riots in Bangladesh, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. And most recently Haiti where a UN soldier was shot and killed trying to deliver food! (check out New Era of Hunger on http://www.cbsnews.com).

When all is accounted for, including the loss of world forests, the increased use of fertilizer, the run up in food prices, the civil violence and unrest around the world spurred on by long lines and short supplies, the social injustice (the poor around the world now spend 75% of their income on food alone), the diversion from areas of real energy advancement, biofuels become a culprit, not a savior. 

We must limit their development and use and devote our land and our financial resources to those areas that can provide real solutions.

around the birdfeeder

It no doubt seems odd to set up a birdfeeder in early spring, just as the trees begin to flower, just after the birds successfully scraped and foraged their way through long winter’s barrenness. But even as the earth was rousing itself from a chilly slumber, so was I.

My son and daughter-in-law were house shopping and invited me to come along. (I am always eager to see how other folks live.) One house they looked at had a village of birdfeeders out on the deck beyond the breakfast room. The flittering and flattering of feathers and beaks was incessant. And irresistible. I wanted such a menagerie outside my window too.

So in the better-late-than-never mode, I bought a stand, a gracious feeder, lots of seed and settled down to enjoy the show.

And indeed I do. True, without a birder to tell me exactly who is coming to dinner, I cannot be certain about identifying my feathered friends. But so far it seems that we host a constant cacophony of cardinals (of these I am sure); chipping sparrows; brown-headed cowbirds; titmouses (titmice?) and sometimes woodpeckers. (I welcome and invite corrections on these observations.)

The choreography and pecking order of those who visit our hanging restaurant are endlessly fascinating. The sparrows and the cardinals seem to get along just fine. And cardinal couples seem to share the feed nicely. But rarely do two male cardinals alight at the same time. Although as many as 6 or more sparrows share a common table. But everyone leaves when the cowbird comes.

What no one told me was how hard it is to fill this feeder. Like most, it is top-loading, made of metal mesh that holds the seed like a silo. The seed slowly empties into a dish on the bottom as the birds empty it out. The problem is, that as I pour the seed in from the top it bounces out through the sides of the mesh and spills all over the ground below. I was unhappy about this, but it seemed to be nothing more than a nuisance, and a waste.

But today, it proved to be deadly. Working at my desk this morning, I noticed a cinnamon-colored animal stealthily creeping to my pachysandra, near where the feeder resides. At first I thought it was my cat, who is remarkably the same color. But he was snoozing on my sofa. Peering out the window again I saw that it was indeed not the cat, but our fox, whom we have taken to calling Charlie. Odd, I thought for him to be out this time of day. And so evidently in the open.

And what, I began to tense up, was he doing? It didn’t take a naturalist to realize he was stalking - eyes and ears trained on prey that was hidden from me by the cover of the undergrowth. But now, following his gaze, even I could see the leaves of the pachysandra under the birdfeeder shaking by the movements of an animal exquisitely oblivious to all but gorging on the unnatural bounty created by my sloppy pouring. In a moment, the fox pounced and after but one or two attempts, emerged with a female cardinal in his mouth.

I felt that I had clenched the bird in mine - felt the pulsing, dry feathers on my tongue. It was my fault the bird was caught. For a moment I tried to console myself by taking the fox’s side: he too needs to eat and no one puts carrion feeders out for him. This is nature tooth and claw, the way it is meant to be.

But in truth it felt more like a fixed hand, a rigged game, like shooting fish in a barrel.

My next effort at consolation was that perhaps the cardinal was ill already - else why would it not have perched on the feeder, safely out of harm’s way, as the other birds do? But then, I cannot really see if other birds feed below the post, feasting on the flotsam that sails from the feeder.

So now I simply wonder, without consolation: Is it too early for the cardinal to have laid her eggs? Are there fledglings somewhere now without a mother?

The chattering at the feeder continues - no mourning is evident there. But I wonder who, besides me, is missing the cardinal.

on the trail of an owl

So there I was, in a huff and a snit and an altogether foul mood (yes, even I get that way sometimes) when my husband called from the driveway (he was on his way out to pick up our son, not to get a safe distance away from me) telling me that the owl that occasionally serenaded us with its nocturnal chantings was perched ever-so-clearly in the tree not 40 feet from him. It was six o’clock, Eastern Daylight Time. Sunset was still an hour away so despite the overcast, drizzly day, I had a date with a diffident neighbor.

I put on my shoes, my coat (it was cold), and slowly went outside, careful not to shut the door and thus scare away the bird. As I gingerly began my walk down the driveway, I saw a large, chubby bird take flight, darting from the bare poplar to the stately evergreen. It wasn’t more than 20 feet off the ground and 100 feet from me, but it was hard to pick out amidst the tangle of branches.

Gently, I kept walking. These birds are keen witnesses, though. I hadn’t gone 10 more steps when it swooped away, skimming along the base of the cherry trees that line the front of my yard. I kept after it as it turned north, still flying low, and disappeared in a heap of forest debris. I approached, peering into dips and burrows and gaps, seeing nothing with these novice, untrained eyes. No doubt, birders, trackers, naturalists of all sorts would have seen a library-full of information. I just saw a heap of debris.

It was time to give the bird its space, and go back inside. And just as you might imagine, I returned to my space feeling a whole lot better. You can’t stay knotty trailing a thing of beauty, even if it gives you the slip.

Stop Ethanol

If you haven’t seen it yet, please read The Clean Energy Scam, by Michael Grunwald in this week’s Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html) (March 27, 2008).

He lays it out for us to see how increasing ethanol use is causing the destruction it was designed to prevent. And how we are paying for it through tax subsidies ($8 billion in 2007).

Biofuels, inappropriately pursued, displace food crops; raise the costs of staples like wheat, eggs, and milk; create financial stress and increased hunger among the very poor (there are wheat and rice shortages around the world including Pakistan and Mexico, with strikes as tensions grow, and violence breaking out in food lines in Egypt, for example); and encourage the devastation of thousands of miles of forests as land is cleared to grow more and more crops not to feed the hungry but to feed our cars. Grunwald clearly, and disturbingly, explains it all.

Combine all the negative impacts of growing more biofuels and we end up in worse shape than if we burned fossil fuels!

And in case that is not scary enough, John Hess, chairman of Hess (oil and natural gas) Corporation, is quoted in Newsweek as saying that by 2050, China could have 1.1 billion cars on the road, up from 20 million in 2005. (In 1997, there were only 600,000,000 cars in the world, total! And that does not include trucks.) Even before that, we will need well over 100 million barrels A DAY by 2015 to meet the world’s transportation demands, according to the International Energy Agency. (We currently use 87.5 million barrels a day mb/d)

What can we do? Be part of a grassroots talking campaign to speak against biofuels. Let your congressmen and senators know that you do not support biofuels, that we have to reverse our commitment to them and switch to other alternative energy pursuits. (Both Clinton and Obama promised to expand biofuel efforts in their midwest campaign speeches.)

We will not be able to stop the car. We all want and often need our independence if we live beyond the city limits and public transportation. It took us 100 years to build a car-based society. It will take us another 100 years to figure out how to make it sustainable. But we have to start now - with a combination of supporting improved and expanded public transportation, but perhaps even more successful, personal transportation that is sustainable based on renewable energy, shared vehicles, denser settlements and less wasteful trips.

Jewish Environmental Manifesto

American Judaism is defined by its extraordinary activism. When Jewish learning and identity needed bolstering, we organized schools, youth groups, JCC’s and Hillels to respond. When “continuity” was a concern, we mobilized to fund funky efforts engaging Jews who hang close to the edge. Whenever Jewish rights and liberties were restricted, we created a network of defense organizations, which helped not only Jews but others who suffered prejudice and exclusion.

In the last decade alone, the leadership of the Jewish community launched such remarkable and successful efforts as Taglit/birthright, designed to confer upon every Jew between the ages of 18 and 26 the right and ability to visit Israel; PEJE – The Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education designed to increase enrollment in Jewish day schools; and the Foundation for Jewish Camping designed to increase the number of Jewish children “participating in transformative summers at Jewish camp”.

All of these efforts - powerful, valuable and successful - were launched because dynamic Jewish philanthropies and donors organized, studied, led, funded and inspired them. These Jewish leaders did not wait for the right combination of staff, ideas, capacity and programs to come to them. They saw a need, a vacuum in our capacity to respond to that need, and mobilized. They gathered the lay leaders, the professional staff, the thinkers and strategists and social scientists, and they put their money behind their commitment.

It is time we utilize that same formula, employ that same energy, engage that same wisdom and dynamics in the arena of Jewish environmentalism. The vibrancy of the environment and the well-being of the Jewish community need nothing less.

The facts are clear: the environment is being rapidly degraded by business-as-usual. We need to re-imagine and redesign the ways we mine, manufacture, build, power, use and dispose of the stuff of society. If we don’t, we will irrevocably deplete and so exhaust our available resources (both natural and monetary) that we will diminish the security, health, dreams and options we bequeath to our children. Thousands of young Jews see environmentalism as the defining issue of their lives. And they see organized Judaism making little to no significant contributions to the cause. Which means they see Judaism (or at least organized Judaism) as making little to no difference to them. 

We can respond to both needs in one comprehensive response. Here is what we must do:

1) Reclaim tending to the earth a mitzvah. We must re-establish environmental ethics as a mitzvah, a sacred standard of Jewish practice, like tikkun olam, feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly, freeing the captive.

We must enfold it in the practices and policies of all that we do, from the paints we use in our classrooms and Section 202 housing, to the food we serve at our simchas to the flooring we choose for our JCCs, to the curricula we develop in our day schools and synagogues, to the investment policies of our Federations to the vans we buy to carry our seniors to the legislative policies we endorse on local, state and federal levels.

In short, environmental concerns must become part of the formula the guides the actions and decisions of the Jewish community in the basic conduct of our lives.

2) Offices of Sustainability. Every significant Jewish community should create an Office of Sustainability to assist in the “greening” of the buildings under local Jewish ownership or management. The American Jewish community controls millions of square feet of public space, from federation buildings to JCCs to synagogues to schools to senior homes and more. Our collective behavior can significantly reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases nationwide, create healthier indoor space for all those who work and visit our buildings, save money that can ultimately be used to bolster salaries of our communal workers and support greater programming from pre-school to senior centers, and serve as a model for others, both for-profit and not-for-profit concerns, in our communities. 

But synagogues and schools and others cannot do this themselves. The learning curve, the options, and the financing to pursue greening strategies are often daunting to organizations that want to do the right thing (never mind those who are skeptical). Going green often requires the investment of human resources that these individual organizations do not possess. This can be easily remedied, however, if each sizable Jewish community created one centralized office that can assist all local Jewish organizations, encouraging them and guiding them in their green building efforts. This office could be based in the Federation, or the JCC. This would not only assist in our environmental agenda but also serve to strengthen the ties among a community’s various Jewish organizations.

Many of our communities are already blessed with Jews involved in the green building trade, green waste management, green consumer knowledge, green energy experience. And many of these Jews are not yet engaged in the Jewish community. We can both benefit from their knowledge and experience and, perhaps for the first time, make meaningful and potentially enduring connections with them.

3) Green Fund. We need a handful of influential funders and philanthropists to come together to use their moral and financial suasion to move this issue toward the top of the American Jewish agenda, and as importantly, to embed it in our contemporary Jewish identity. Just as we think of American Jewry as committed to supporting Israel, working toward tikkun olam, and protecting human life and dignity around the world, so we now need to add: the protection, sustainable management, and attitude of awe toward this miraculous but fragile world of ours.

Through the leverage of a Green Fund, a group of philanthropists can inspire and enable the Jewish community to fully engage in this work. They can guide a national discussion on Jewish environmentalism so that every school, every federation and every synagogue embraces and explores this issue.  They can entice and grow the field with a call for RFPs (requests for proposals) for new or expandable programs, seeking out the most creative and most successful, They can fund Jewish environmental classes and programs to create more informed lay leaders, train and support Jewish environmental professionals, and build an educated and committed populace. They can assist in the initial funding of local Jewish Offices of Sustainability. They can support the pioneering and ground-breaking work of national Jewish environmental organizations such as Teva, Isabella Friedman, Hazon Kayam Farm, the Jewish Farm School and others that work on both ends of the learning continuum, teaching the teachers and the learners.

A Green Fund created and guided by Jewish philanthropists can bring welcome and beneficial energies, wisdom and freshness to our community.

With these three initiatives: restoring a sacred engagement with the environmental to the status of a fundamental mitzvah that commands our attention and behavior; creating mechanisms to green our Jewish built-environment; and providing the social, moral and financial leadership to make this happen, we can pursue our sacred mission, substantively and spiritually re-connect with many Jews, and contribute to the healing of this wounded world.

The Best Time for Sleepless Nights

If you have to have a sleepless night, try to make it when the sky is crisp and clear and the moon is round and bright. I know you can’t order insomnia delivered to your door, like Netflix, to be saved and played at a convenient time, or have it stored in your night-table like a favorite book to reach for as you wish. But, I offer this as a heads-up anyway. During your next unbidden mid-night excursion, take a peak outside. If you are lucky, you will see a radiant moon casting shadows on your lawn, or street, or windowsill. It is an eternal monthly re-run that never seems to grow old.

There are several good things about a full (or even near full, ie, gibbous) moon. It is luminous. Moonglow has its own charm. It is a soft, white light, without the intensity of glare or heat. You can gaze directly at the moon and be swept away by a close encounter with a celestial object no less stunning than those millions of light year away. Yet we tend to degrade our heavenly neighbor, and take it for granted, overlook its awesomeness because it is always there, like a piece of furniture we learn to step around, seeing but not always attending to it.

It is pock-marked with a faded, jagged pattern of dark, not quite always discernible, not quite identifiable, and therefore endlessly entertaining. Is it an old man, as we westerners imagine? Or a rabbit, as easterners imagine? A dragon, moose, woman as other traditions suggest?

It stays up in the sky all night, rising close to sunset and setting close to sun rise. So no matter what time you take your mid-night perambulations, the moon is there to keep you company.

It is amazing to see how fast it travels across the sky. It reminds us of the constant movement of the earth, and our otherwise invisible, unfelt, hurtling and twirling through space that we are mostly oblivious to; the majesty of the Milky Way and the awesomeness of creation far beyond our precious planet.

It coaxes contemplation, pulls us beyond the woes and worries and drama of our lives and reconnects us to the grand drama of Life itself. For we are forever a part of that. It is humbling, and to my mind warming, to remember that this same cool light of the moon is the one our ancestors saw, wrote about, sang about, took comfort in, thousands of years ago. In the dim, reflected light of the moon, we can often see much further than in the blazing light of the sun.

For more information on the phases of the moon, check out:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonphase/

http://www.calculatorcat.com/moon_phases/moon_phases.phtml

apple trees

I have always wanted to live by an apple orchard. There, spring, summer and especially fall offer up luscious smells of flowers and fruit. The October orchard air is thick as cider and the ground treacherous for walking, what with all the rounded, rotting fruit on the ground. But it is intoxicating, irresistible and a bit spooky at night amid the gnarled, crooked branches.

So last summer, after realizing I was never in fact going to buy an apple orchard, I decided to grow my own. I found an on-line seller of fruit trees and ordered 8 trees - lodi, winesap and one other whose name I cannot now recall - because they all supposedly work to fertilize the other.

Tree-planting season had long past by last summer so I was told the trees would be shipped late fall, after three frosts had assured that the trees (the tiniest of twigs really) were hibernating. By the time the trees came in late November, the ground here was too hard to plant them, so they stayed all winter in a box in my entryway, waiting. Their roots were wrapped in dampened paper and they seemed perfectly happy (and mostly forgotten) perched against the wall until such time as sun and warmth and lack of other commitments enabled me to free them from their constraints and place them in the ground.

Today was that magical day. A sunny, crisp 40+ degrees, with the ground soft and giving beneath the shovel. I dug holes deep enough to accommodate the tiny roots, cleared three feet of grass around the sprig, mulched all around and watered well. The mulch came from the wood chips of a tree on our property that fell down during a storm two years ago. When the tree men came to take it away we asked if they could chip it for us instead. They obliged - it saved them a trip - and a fee - to some nursery dump. After sitting so many months, stewing on the ground, the mulch was rich and moist and perfect for the job. 

The “trees” (less than an inch in circumference and most less than three feet in height) swathed in their blanket of bark and soil, will stay dormant for another few weeks, needing time to awaken to the soil and sun and water. I imagine they will take another five years or so to be big enough to sprout fruit. I hope to be here for their first harvest. Meanwhile, I will watch them grow. And maybe practice making preserves and apple pies.

world water day

Today is Purim, a day of celebratory abandonment, when we read a raucous and bawdy book about the Jewish people’s triumph over hatred and external threats, eat and drink a bit too much, and otherwise act as if we hadn’t a care in the world. We all deserve one day a year to slough off the burdens and worries life places upon us.

But Purim ends tonight, as Shabbat blessedly begins, and reality returns. Coinciding with Shabbat this year is World Water Day. At the urging of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the UN designated March 22 as the annual day “to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide.” Over a billion people worldwide lack adequate, safe drinking water. And the numbers are likely to grow as climate change threatens annual rainfall patterns and the rapid melting of glaciers robs many areas of a slower, steady seasonal water supply.

This week, click on http://www.worldwaterday.net to learn more about the problem, what is being done and what you can do. And check out http://www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org. This group is spearheading a return to drinking local instead of relying on bottled water (40% of which is tap water anyway!). Bottled water is not the solution for several reasons: the manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of these bottles harms the environment, and wastes valuable resources, including good money that could be spent elsewhere.

Think Outside the Bottle website tells us that:  Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Never mind the billions of dollars spent unnecessarily which could better go to purchase or support things and services of real value.

And read about the increasing privatization of erstwhile public water supplies to meet the water demands of private water bottling companies.

Learn more about what you can do to do limit the use of the bottle, and to make it healthier. Many companies, businesses, buildings, organizations and schools are going bottle-free. Increasingly, conferences and hotels are going bottle-free. Thinkoutsidethebottle has a pledge you can take. Check it out.

You can still carry water around in your own reusable containers - just make sure it is the right kind of plastic (not the kind that leach unhealthy chemicals) or better, metal. More and more manufacturers are making attractive metal liquid containers that we can refill, wash and use again instead of disposable, one-use, throw-away containers. (And even if they can be recycled, reuse is higher on the sustainability scale than recycling, which still requires lots of additional resources to collect, transport, re-make and send back out into the consumer stream.) It can make a great gift to that someone who has everything.

But, meanwhile, today is still Purim. So while the sun shines, celebrate hilariously.

Shabbat shalom

Prius

We bought a new Prius today. Proud to say that both of our family cars are hybrids. It works for us now that our children are grown or growing. This is a good time to buy a hybrid, if a smaller car works for you. Car sales are down and dealers’ eagerness to deal is up. As always, don’t accept the first offers you get. Give them time to call you back with their next offer. And most likely you can do even better than folks like us who are a bit of a soft touch.

Still, it will take us years of high fuel prices to pay for the car. But we didn’t choose the car for the savings. We chose it for the world’s children; for the health of the environment; and to make it easier for us to get in to the car each day and turn on the motor.

I usually find it hard to say goodbye to a family car. I usually concoct some sort of private decommissioning or honorable discharge or farewell ceremony for me and my machine, thanking the car for tending well to my family; keeping us safe on all the roads we traveled; enriching our lives by the places it allowed us to go. I have less need to say a sentimental goodbye to this car. Perhaps it is because it only got 20 miles to the gallon. Perhaps it was because it never carried a Reisner baby. Perhaps because I really imagined it to be my husband’s car all along. But this time, it is not just a car we are letting go. It is a whole innocent way of life.