Bittersweet Truth

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

My parents recently cancelled the newspaper. Their decision to do so was mainly because the paper was becoming more expensive yet contained less material by the day. They also cancelled the newspaper because these days you can find everything about the news online.

From the environmentalist’s point of view this great! Today’s progressive society is constantly coming up with new and improved ways to reduce the use of natural resources; such as the trees that go into making a news paper. However, this triumph is bittersweet.

What about the traditions that we lose? What about being to wake up every morning, opening the newspaper (with coffee cup in hand), and reading the comics?

Sometimes I feel like because we are in the “age of technology”, we lose sight of the simple things in life that make it quirky and unique. Environmentalism doesn’t necessarily have to be such a serious business. These days it is so easy to get caught up in changing your everyday life for the greater good.

So my advice is: don’t lose sight of the simple things. It’s good to keep the environment in mind when buying something or wasting something, etc., but it is not good to lose sight of what makes you happy. If you like reading the newspaper, then read the newspaper. Just make sure you recycle it. Don’t change to an online paper because you think you need to, change because you want to.

Pimlico Race Track - Park or Office Park?

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

Last weekend was the Preakness. On the day of the race, I was in the car with some friends. While thinking about the fact that the people who owned the track were considering putting it up for auction, I absentmindedly said, “I think they should turn it into a park.” To which one of the passengers replied, “Oh yeah, that would be a good place for an office park”. I said, “No, like a real park”. In turn the passenger said, “Who do you expect to pay for it? The city already has enough parks. Why not just plant some trees?”

I’m not trying to make the passenger out to be a bad guy who is against environmentalism. On the contrary, he’s absolutely for it. However, I don’t think he understood the nature of my comment. Just like office buildings, parks are a part of industrialism, and they definitely require the use of natural resources. Unlike office buildings, however, parks sustain two types of life. Of course they sustain the environment (at least better than office buildings), but they also help sustain human life.

I think sometimes when people consider sustainability, they cut humans out of the picture and just look at the environment. But, sustainability isn’t just about the environment. It requires a balance between environmental issues, social issues, and economical issues. You cannot ignore people when you are trying to better the Earth. Advocating for the environment shouldn’t just be about scolding humans for progress and industrialization; and advocating isn’t just about spending all of your efforts on the environment because humans are such a huge part of the global environment.

So maybe one day, the owners will take Pimlico Race Track - a place where people gamble and get drunk - and turn it into a park (not an office park), where people can exist in equilibrium with the environment.

The environmental dilemma

Here is one way to state the problem:

we humans have to fit our infinite appetites into the contours and confines of a finite world.

One of the glorious aspects of being human is that we are blessed with urges, desires. We are curious; we are inquisitive; we are daring; we are hungry for meaning, purpose, exploration, answers. We want to know more, do more, see more, possess more. That is what makes us human and that is what makes us just a little divine. Our drives make us worthy of being God's partner in creation. People who are lazy or satisfied don't build, discover, or grow. They just sit. How wonderful that Eve, way back in the Garden, dared to take the fruit and eat it.

But it is this very seeking and turning and digging and wanting that causes us to trash the earth. Our current linear, one-way path of consumption: dig up, transform, package, transport, sell, throw out, is a model of our expectations of endless resources. It functions as if there are infinite resources, infinite money, infinite dumps. But of course, there are not.

We need instead to build and use the model of cycles, the eternal return of stuff from earth to earth. (for an amusing, if sometimes edgy, portrait of what we do wrong and how we can do it right, see www.storyofstuff.com) We need to make things that from their inception, know how they will end up.

This has begun, elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere they are asking: What if manufacturers were required to dispose of, reuse, or recycle their products after their lifecycle was done? What if computer manufacturers, vacuum cleaner companies, car companies, etc had to take back their products and recycle or reuse or else pay to have the stuff hauled away and dumped?

Nations and companies have begun implementing, or exploring, take-back and recycle programs. Canada is exploring implementing an Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”), at least for electronics, mercury-containing lamps, batteries, packaging and printed materials.

The idea is that if manufacturers had to bear the responsibility and cost of managing the waste their products created, there would be much less waste.

This is one large way of extending our finite resources into a more infinite loop. And it is one way to help all of us understand the true lifecycle, and costs, of the goods we consume. Hurrah.

Legal Stewards of the Land - MD HB 1053 and SB 824

The law is a most conservative body. For example, it will not let me sue you unless I can prove that what you are doing - or planning to do - directly threatens to harm me. In other words, I need standing, locus standi, in order to legally thwart your plans and stand in your way.

That sounds fair, when it comes to the things I want to wear or the religion I choose to believe in.
But what about when it comes to the earth? Can I sue to prevent you from clear-cutting your property even if I live dozens, or hundreds, of miles away? Can I prevent you from burying toxins on your land when I never go near there? Can I prevent you from building in sensitive areas that can destroy fragile ecosystems that I do not own and might never see?

The question boils down to: who owns the earth and its precious resources like land, air, water and who has the right to protect it?

On the one hand, the earth belongs to all of us. What you do there affects me here, and what I do here affects you there. On the other hand, if we all could sue everyone over every act of development, the courts, and our neighborhoods, would be locked in interminable battles. (Though the lawyers among us might be happy.)

There are currently 44 states in the United States that have found a way around this conundrum. They allow certain individuals and organizations to have standing in the state courts to fight against violations of our environmental laws. Maryland is not yet among them. There is, however, a way now to remedy that:

Senate Bill 824 and House Bill 1053: Community Environmental Protection Act of 2009

These bills are currently in their respective Environmental Matters Committees. If passed by both chambers, these bills will allow certain individuals and organizations to be designated as having legal standing to sue in Maryland courts on behalf of the earth, and you and me.

If indeed we believe what we teach, that humans have the obligation to tend well to the earth; and if we wish to act according to what we know, that all the earth is connected and what we do in one place affects the health of people and the ecosystem hundreds even thousands of miles away, then we need these bills. We are the stewards of the earth, and we therefore need the legal standing to be its legal guardians.

This effort is also a Maryland League of Conservation Voters priority. As they say, "We urge Maryland to follow the current national trend and expand a citizen’s right to a day in court."

Please support these bills. Go to www.mdlcv.org to see how you can help.

On hospitality

With the most dire economic projections suggesting that perhaps 50 million people world-wide may be out of work in the depths of this depression, now might be a good time to talk about hospitality.

To many of us, hospitality is some vague social nicety that encourages us to open our doors to dinner guests and occasional meetings, card games or book clubs. It might mean welcoming family for weekend visits, holiday meals, or family reunions, and if you are in the more observant community, it might mean putting up strangers who are visiting your shul for a family simcha. In fact, those are valuable social niceties that multiply and enrich, in small ways, life's social encounters and strengthen the knitting of society.

But now is when we will learn the true meaning of hospitality, the way it is understood in desert communities, or was practiced among the "overlanders," the intrepid Americans who traveled from Missouri to settle on the west coast in the mid-1800's, or in any society or migrant population when scarcity and dislocation rudely reared up.

To us, hospitality means sharing a bit of our excess. When we expect guests, we prepare and shop for more. When they stay over, we offer a guest room. Our stores are not usually diminished, our portion is not truly burdened, when we extend our hand and home in hospitality. Most often, though not always, we offer hospitality on our schedule. Some of us may feel a little put out, or may sense some invasion of privacy. But these are conceits and blessings of luxury and muchness. For, in fact, most of us can afford the space, the time and the money. to be hospitable. It is a small badge of honor we still cherish. And we know the guests will leave soon.

But in this economic climate, when people are losing their homes and their jobs, hospitality may be pressing instead of optional. Family and friends may need to take guests in. Our guests might be able to pay or they may not. There might be an end date in sight or there may not. And while our guests may be grateful, they may not be gracious. For they may come with emotional baggage filled with loss, embarrassment, guilt and anger.

That is when the true test of hospitality begins. When we are asked to bring others into our sphere, allow them to share our limited supply of food and space and time. It does not mean that our guests have no obligation to give back to us. They may assist in the home-work when they are with us. Or they may not, being overwhelmed at the moment. They may return our kindness to us years from now. Or they may repay our generosity by showing the same to others.

Or perhaps even this picture is too rosy. Perhaps we will not be the hosts pressed into service for our loved ones. Perhaps we will be the supplicants, the reluctant guests needing to live off the generosity of others. It is intriguing that the words guest and host come from the same root, as if to reinforce the fact of their mutuality, reciprocity. That is, not only do I need a guest to make me a host (hence, mutuality) but while today I am the host, tomorrow I may need to be the guest (hence, reciprocity). Such awareness arouses my humility and my patience, no matter which side of the equation I am on at the moment.

We are living in a time that will challenge us all. It will challenge our generosity, our sense of entitlement, our boundaries, our sense of self. It will ask us to think deeply about what is truly ours; how much we truly need; what is best, and rightly, shared. It will ask us to judge ourselves and others more grandly than by our income and what we crudely call "worth". It will ask us to measure life by the truer standards of goodness and joy and satisfaction.

Perhaps, then, in this dark time, we will learn to be guided by the gentler lights of simple joy and the elegance of enoughness that have been outshone by the blinding glare of the rush for more. If so, that would be a lesson we can all take to the bank.

a lesson from gathering sticks

The forecast calls for some snow tomorrow, a weak, wispy but just-the-same welcome balm for a snow-starved wintry soul. To build this up to more than its worth, I decided to go out to collect firewood from our yard, tinder and kindling to kick-start the flames in our fireplace. The chore offered both a primal joy and a practical benefit. Regarding the practical, just in case the power goes out, I will have the means to create hungry, crackling fires. Regarding the primal, gathering the fuel to keep one's family warm and dry is a most satisfying nesting and nurturing feeling, and it is a visceral reminder of how dependent we truly are on the stuff that thrives and dies on this earth.

Gathering firewood for need possesses an urgency of its own. The last "storm" that blew through a few weeks ago - a modest event that hardly merited such a grand label - left our neighborhood cold and dark for almost an entire day. Our sole source of heat and hot water was our living room fireplace. As inefficient as fireplaces are for heating large spaces, they are just fine for heating small spaces and a few bodies cuddling up right next to them. Keeping the fire stoked, flaming and hot is a constant pursuit. Knowing all this, I set out to collect the twigs, sticks and limbs that had fallen over the past few months.

As I wandered back and forth across the yard scooping up all that I could find, I thought about all those generations of all the people who relied on this life-and-death task of hide and seek. I only had to/chose to gather wood today. They needed to gather it every day. Would there be enough wood to take them through the winter? Was the wood dry enough to burn well? Was there enough to do the job or would they need to save some for tomorrow?

My yard, I fully realized, was my own, and I was the only one with the legal right to glean the trees' discards for my use. But what about all those millions of people over the years, all over the world, who owned little or no land, who needed to gather their wood from the commons, from forests and woods and meadows that belonged to everyone, or no one? How would wood be fairly apportioned? How could everyone be certain to get enough? Would people rush out every morning, at the earliest light, or the dark of night, and take more than their fair share, fearful lest someone else would rise early to gather more than their fair share? And who would determine how to measure a fair share? Would a lonely widow merit the same as a houseful of kids? What if it downed wood ran out? Would people start chopping down trees? By what right?

All of a sudden, I discovered a deeper understanding of the odd biblical story about the man who gathered wood on Shabbat (Numbers 15:32-36). It is a harsh story, full of questions and unpleasant things. On the second shabbat after the encounter at Mt Sinai, when the Israelites were still camped in the wilderness, a man was discovered out gathering sticks. This was recognized as a violation of the law, but exactly what was to be done about it was unclear. So Moses took the case to God and God said the man should be stoned, by the people of Israel themselves. And so it was.

Among the many details of this perplexing story is the repetition of the words " the whole community." It is stated three times in only four verses. The man was brought before "Moses, Aaron and the whole community" we are told; God said "the whole community should pelt him with stones;" "So the whole community" stoned him to death.

Not a pretty picture. And, to the modern mind, excessive. Indeed, nowhere does it explicitly say in the Bible you may not collect sticks on shabbat. Other shabbat violations do not require death.

Why this harsh punishment here. Why so early on in our experience with commandments? And why did God make the people Israel the executioners? After collecting wood, I think I know.

Gathering wood is not a leisurely or idle task. One does not do it for pleasure. It is purposeful and measured. Like all carbon-based fuel, firewood demands the exclusive one-time use of a commodity that humans do not make, and that is available only in limited and single-use supply. To collect wood on a day when others do not is to unfairly advantage oneself at the expense and to the detriment of everyone else. To choose to do so shows a disregard of the safeguard for all; a preferencing of self above all else and all others; and a selfishness that does not just benefit self but that disadvantages and endangers others.

Firewood is a precious, life-sustaining commodity. Given the human tendency to hoard, to be certain there is enough not just for today but for tomorrow as well, gathering must be a communal (or otherwise managed) affair. If everyone does it together, in the full light of day, each person serves as a check to be certain that everyone is taking and getting their fair share. Honorable behavior is more likely to happen when everyone gathers together. To allow someone to gather alone, when everyone else is prohibited from doing so, threatens the well-being of the entire group.

This one commandment, then, is not narrowly about gathering wood on Shabbat. It holds within it not just the wisdom of setting aside one day to celebrate being instead of doing, purpose instead of productivity. This one commandment also highlights the imperative of communal responsibility, that is, doing right by and caring for the other. It teaches that no one can set their personal greed or appetites or even fears above those of others and above the common good. It teaches us that nature’s gifts belong to us all, and need to be shared by all, both those here today and those who come after us. It teaches all the best lessons of belonging, restraint, and enoughness.

environmental lessons from economic collapse

Everyone agrees that our economic crisis is in large measure anthropogenic, that is, due to human behavior, living larger than we could afford, taking more than we could return, wanting more than is either reasonable or fair to expect. That is, we loaned more than was just so we could reap more than we sowed; borrowed more than we could replenish with what we can earn; divvied up, spread out, and pawned off the responsibility so that no one truly could be blamed, or could even have been moved to care.

Now we are paying the price.

And the price is very steep. It was forced on us by these regrettable circumstances. But I can't help imagining for a moment, what if, way before the crisis, independent of any impending crisis, say two years ago, we had taken $350 billion dollars and spread it around to invent 98% efficient solar energy conversion panels, electric cars and the infrastructure to support them, fixed all our bridges, roads, schools; built amazing inter- and intra-city public transit; increased teacher salaries; improved our social services to our nation's most needy. How much good - economic, environmental and social - would that have done?

Nope. Too expensive. So instead we lost billions in the stock market, and are spending billions more to bail out a profligate market with uncertain returns.

Now, translate all these lessons into the environmental problem. It too is anthropogenic, human-made. Here too we are living larger than we can afford, taking more than we can return, dipping into the principle when we should be living off the interest, forgetting that the atmosphere and sea are finite and not endlessly able to absorb our waste.

Scholars, analysts, prophets tell us we do not make radical changes unless faced with crises. But here is the bright side. Perhaps in this one instance, we can use the lessons of the financial crisis to motivate us to respond to an impending yet still avoidable environmental crisis. For the truth is, we will one day soon recover from this economic crisis, hopefully even in the next year or two. But we cannot and will not speedily recover from the crash of the environment, not in our lifetime, or the lifetime of our children, not even in this century.

These dual crises we face are not only similar in their structure, but gratefully and blessedly also in their solutions. By using green technology to fuel economic health; producing goods in a cyclical, no waste, cradle-to-cradle style; living wisely - consuming only what we can appropriately replenish - we can build an enduring, sustainable economy and environment; tending more to service - being with, educating, doing for and tending to each other - can build an economy pegged to human welfare and not collection of stuff.

Erich Fromm and Abraham Joshua Heschel among thousands of others have taught it: our culture needs to change from a predominant mode of stuff and "having" to a predominate mode of relationship and "being." That is good for what is called the triple bottom-line: people, planet, and profit. One integrated solution for one just, healthy, good world.

Telling the story

"One of the most important needs a comprehensible universe meets is the ability to project the future."

I came across this line in a book by Jeffrey Fager entitled, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee. And suddenly, it all became clear. Sort of. At least some of it did.

Amidst discussions about the origins and meaning of biblical land reform, Fager gives us a refresher course on the necessity of stories. Humans need to make sense of the world, to set all of life's chaotic elements in order, to recall a usable past, and through that, build a vision of an irresistible tomorrow.

"Once a universe is understood, it is possible to know how to live in it because there is a continuity between the descriptive (what is) and the normative (what ought to be)." Bottom line, we cannot live without stories linking what we choose to do today with where we want to be tomorrow.

That is what we seek from our culture. That is what we demand from our religions.

But that is what is so scary about today's non-green behaviors. That is what is so scary about a story captured by the catchy refrain: "Drill, baby, drill". It is a story all about now; it is a story all about me. And it will blithely, crushingly, burden our children of tomorrow

Once upon a time, even as recently as 50 years ago, we had a vision of a future that outlived our meager lives. Time was measured in generations, and generations were measured in decades, not months; success was measured in how much we saved, not spent; our worth was measured by what we gave away, not what we earned; business-folk cared as much about the quality of their product as they did about their stock portfolio.

But with modernity came quarterly earnings reports, global markets, digital clocks. Time was measured in now; eternity is the time between the pressing of the enter button and the repainting of the screen.


Which is to say, we have fallen pray to the moment, the now. Society has failed to give us a vision that can shine past the shelf-life of the food in our refrigerator, much less excite the rest of our tomorrows.

Why not drill now, even though at best it is a quick fix which will leave all humanity in an even deeper hole, with increased environmental, energy and financial distress, but it also eases the tax burden of Alaskan citizens? Why worry now about running out of continental shelves and Alaskan wildlife refuges to dig in and destroy? That is, oh, ten years away. Why not just keep doing what we have always been doing?

Why worry about what happens when we continue to pursue centralized power from materials ripped and sucked and blasted out of the ground, materials that enrich the owners and stakeholders but continue to destabilize the atmosphere and our oceans, and through continued centralization put millions of individuals at risk from hurricanes and other natural disasters, technological glitches and those seeking mischief or destruction?

Why worry about what about green house gas emissions that will continue to degrade our slender slip of breathable atmosphere so that whatever our children seek to do may be for naught anyway for the climate change dice will have been thrown? That is not now.

That is the failure of our current society; the failure to tell us a story about the future that includes the world the day after tomorrow. Especially when that day looks mighty bleak right now.

We used to be able to see further. We used to be able to care more. But the story of buying now and paying later has been so successful. The problem is, few people read far enough to see what happens "later."

The mortgage crisis gives us a glimpse. And with yet another venerable financial firm biting the dust, the sight is far from pretty. Perhaps now we can get people to turn the page and see what later will look in a selfish, "Drill, baby, drill" world. As none other than T. Boone Pickens is telling us: America possesses 3% of the world oil reserves yet uses 25% of the world's oil. You don't have to be a math genius to realize that all the drilling in Alaska and off the coasts will not give us the oil we crave.

It is time for environmentalists, and Jews who care, to speak another story, an irresistible story that we can offer to offset the "Drill here, drill now, no change" narrative. We can't win through lawsuits, or cost savings, or convenience alone. Compelling stories aren't always cheap, and they aren't always convenient. But they fill the soul, and they allow our children to look back, and bless us.

Let's work on crafting, and telling, that story.

can't phone home

One of the last vestiges of family unity is disappearing - the family phone number. This is a lot more momentous than you might think. First of all, if you have to reach someone's mother, are you sure you want to bother them on the cell phone, when you don't know where they are or what they are doing? Second, cell phone numbers still aren't listed. How do you look someone up when they don't have a home phone? How do you find out where they live?

Even more, this is the era of growing individuation, when we walk around with plugs sticking in our ears, radically distancing us from one another even when we stand just a hair's breadth away, draped in our private cocoons woven in threads of invisible sound. Family phone numbers symbolically kept us together, even if we eat at different times, if our kids listen to their MP3s when driving with us in the car, and text their friends while we are talking to them.

We have lost the iconic family dinner; rarely gather weekly in front of the TV for a favorite family show; certainly don't sit around the hearth and tell stories or read out loud to one another; hardly play together in this generationally-divided world, and long ago lost our family crest with our ancestral coat of arms. We even have ceded common surnames shared by all members of the family, what with women keeping their given names (like me) and blended families bringing different names into one abode.

At least we could all point to the shared home phone number. Everyone who lived in that house could be reached there. To know that the other members of your household possessed that number, too, was a signal that no matter whatever else might divide you, those seven numbers made you an indivisible unit. You belonged to and were responsible for each other.

Believe me, I never thought of this until today, when a friend of mine emailed me to say that she was giving up her house phone number. Everyone in the family would now only be reachable through their personal cell phones. I immediately felt a loss. I enjoyed the serendipity of calling them and speaking to whomever answered the phone. I felt close to all the members. Sometimes I wanted to connect to the family, not an individual. Now when I want to invite the family for dinner, I have to choose whom to call. I have to decide who represents the family. The sense of whole is lost.

If I feel a loss of center for them, do they feel the same loss of center? To me, family phone numbers are powerful symbols. Even when my children are at college, with dorm numbers and cell numbers, our home phone number is their phone number. We are bound by seven digits even when separated by hundreds of miles. My phone number ceases being theirs when they get married, or move out to pursue a career. It is as much a rite-of-passage as getting a driver's license.

Life-changing events severe family connections to the home phone number. When children leave to build homes of their own. When divorce divides a family. That is life as it is meant to be. That is when home numbers change.

My friend will save almost $200 by disconnecting her home phone. It is a trend that has begun and will no doubt continue, much to the symbolic loss of a family center. I doubt we can reverse it. But at least let us mourn the loss of home-ness that it symbolizes. Perhaps we can find a substitute for it (reinvent the family crests?). And maybe in a dashing display, we can use the money we save to pay for one last celebratory family dinner: Chinese, home-delivery.

A blessing for turning on the light

I just bumped into Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce. And I am just on page 21 - so you may know something about this book that I don't. But I have been struck with the passion, data and hutzpah of the book already.

He takes on the myth of America's business ethic - saying that "The ultimate purpose of business is not, or should not be, simply to make money... The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy."

That is not the general way we hear people talking about business. Hawken argues that in order to live in a "green" society, we must not only ask how do we save the environment, we must also ask, how do we save business, for it is only when business can thrive while being green will we all prosper.

I will let you now if the book continues to inspire or takes a turn somewhere. But the datum that caused me to write this entry is the following:

According to Hawken, in 1993 - the year the book was written - humankind consumed in ONE DAY the amount of energy it took the young earth 10,000 days to create. That is, in 24 hours, we consume 27 years-worth of converted sunlight. And that was back then. Imagine the rate of consumption now.

No matter how big and how old the earth is, that rate of consumption is clearly way out of whack with a sustainable society.

That's it. I just wanted to share that stunning datum. And suggest:

If we make a blessing every time we eat - thanking God for the energy that has gone into the sowing and growing and harvesting and threshing and kneading and baking, surely there ought to be a blessing every time we turn on the light.

csa time

The local CSAs are beginning in Baltimore. With the combination of the brilliant spring sun, the abundant spring rains and the glorious cool weather we should have a bumper crop of produce this year.

After so many years of lamenting the absence of spring, of feeling like we went from late winter to the midst of summer, from jacket weather at the beginning of the week to shvitzing by the end, we have finally been blessed with a spring whose glory merits praise. Something to tell the grandchildren about, just like the stunning blizzard of a few years ago.

Days that are cool at night and beckoningly lovely throughout the afternoon. Easy enough to work up a sweat, but only if you earned it. Not the humid, blistering warmth that melts you simply on contact.

Breakfast on the patio or porch mornings. Fresh and clean and renewing air.

I am on my back porch as I type this, looking out over our heavily wooded backyard. Various pieces of heavy equipment and previous heavy use tore up the ground around the trees seven years ago. For six years, the backyard stayed barren of ground-cover. The earth lay there, bare and forlorn, exposed to the elements. Only the relative flatness of the land, and a deep cover of leaves in the fall, prevented us from losing so much topsoil.

Then, sometime last summer, poof, the further section of our lawn began to sprout little patches of green. Not grass or high stalks that needed to be tended. Just curled, tender short ground-cover that modestly covered the naked earth. A little skirt of green, inching out here and there.

Somehow over the winter, through the magic that is the earth's regenerative powers, that gentle, rolling, curling ground-cover migrated almost all the way to the house. Our backyard, while native, is not wild or overgrown but softly blanketed with sprouts reaching from side to side and all the way back to the pachysandra in the woods.

Why can't we grow lawns like this - lawns which need no tending, no mowing, no use of fossil fuels for fertilizers or trimming or edging? Lawns that are sturdy to walk on and resilient and verdant and nature friendly? I would be someone who markets the seed or seedlings of this ground-cover, and others that do as well, would make a nice living.

the chosen generation

Memorial Day weekend is a good time to think about causes and values that transcend our quotidian lives and that pull us, or compel us, or drag us to engage in Life writ large.

The people we honor and remember today - as we go off to celebrate our group playtime and the beginning of summertime (despite what the calendar and weatherfolks say) - gave their lives both to create and preserve a society that gives us the opportunities and blessings we enjoy today.

We, too, in this interstitial generation, are being called to do remarkable things.

If humankind is lucky, if we do the right thing, the 20th century will go down in history as the one and only era of non-sustainability. It will be studied as a time of great discovery; blind innocence; gaping, gasping degradation; and delayed awakening. Historians and plain folk alike will marvel at our ignorance and impudence, building as if we lived in a one-way, dead-end system, as if we could extract precious resources from the earth, fiddle with them, use them, and throw them away. And that we could, with impunity, casually and blamelessly toss into the ocean, the land, and the air all the gunk and detritus that we spew out when making the marvels of our civilization.

If we are lucky, and do the right thing, all the centuries before us, and all the centuries after us, will model the one true way of being: living well today while enabling our children, and their children, and their children, to live well after us.

We occupy that rare and historic moment in time; we are the chosen generation which has to make this change in vision, value and style. We are in the midst of creating the second industrial revolution, where our energy, our production design, and our waste all are part of the sustainability equation, where the process is as critical as the product.

We - as consumers, scientists, inventors, policy makers, investors - are called to carry our civilization over the revolutionary hump. We must prod and push and celebrate our advances, and we must tend well to those who are displaced, disoriented and otherwise harmed by both society's inactions and actions.

This is grand and unsettling time. But no revolution is easy. We are the founders of the next great society. It is not easy, but it is invigorating, it is necessary and at the end of the day, it is right.

The Seventh Year

This past week's parashah offers one of Torah's most soaring texts on seeking the ideal of political, social and economic equity. And it all focuses on the ownership of land.

It teaches us the humility and freedom of ownerlessness: "When you enter the land that I give you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Lord. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year, the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest."

For six years, we can act as if the land is ours; its produce is ours and the wealth and status that it affords us is ours. Such is the concession to our quotidian impulses. But the seventh year, like the seventh day, calls us to transcend coarse reality and enter the realm of the ideal. For in the seventh year, all boundaries fall; all private property reverts to its primordial state: being the possession of God, gifted to all humanity.

That which was ours last year (and will be ours again the following year) is nonetheless not ours this year. It belongs to everyone equally. And we are levelled - socially, economically, and therefore, politically - with everyone else. There can be no hoarding; no merchandising; no lender and no borrower. Everything is shared. It is a return to Eden; to the manna-fed, ownerless existence of the wilderness.

For six years, we live in reality. In the seventh year, we are reminded, through our acts, the opening of all fields, and the sharing of all food that the earth produces on its own accord, of our common humanity. Ideally, we take some of those lessons, those humbling thoughts and feelings, and carry them with us across the threshold from the seventh year, to the return to year one of a new cycle of seven.

Imagine if we applied some of these lessons today. What might that look like?

Perhaps it would mean we would empty out our off-site storage bins every seven years. Fling open the doors and make all our excess available to those who need. Or perhaps it would mean that we didn't buy anything new - except the utmost necessities - in the seventh year. We would manage with last year's wardrobe and shoes and articles and stuff. Perhaps it would mean we set aside a larger portion of our income to do the good work of enabling others to earn a living for themselves.

We are in the midst of the Seventh Year. The count continues to this very day. In the waning months of the year, perhaps we can each imagine a contemporary application of this age-old teaching. And see what it feels like to live a little closer to our ideal.

my bird feeder

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.

blessing of constancy

I am in West Virginia, on a sudden but modest hill surrounded by two mountain ranges. To get to this cabin you drive west on Route 70, meander a ways, turn off the paved road by the large house forever in the process of construction, rising from the growing graveyard of contrivances that once carried people but now rely on people to carry them, drive a while on dirt and stones until you arrive at the “driveway.” If any regulatory agency set standards for driveways here, this would not be a driveway. But in the wilds of WV, almost anything goes. Still, as citified folk approach, our first thoughts are: Please Gd, let that not be the “driveway.” Then we think: Shouldn’t this thing have a chain-belt to pull me up, kind of like a roller-coaster? The trick is to get a running start so you have enough momentum when the traction gets a little light.

To the east of the house is mountain; to the west of the house is mountain. Sunlight comes here later and leaves earlier than it does for our neighbors on the heights. The view is not much. The house is surrounded by trees, a bit thin in the winter but just the right density in the summer. Still and all, if you want a view, this is not the place to go. It reminds me of the Midwestern quip: An easterner was visiting a stark prairie town, with not a tree in sight. Engaged in conversation with a native plainsman, the easterner, clearly unsettled by the unbroken vastness of the prairie, finally asked: “Don’t you miss trees?” The plainsman snorted: “Trees? Who wants trees? They block the view.”

You either like this cabin or you don’t, depending on whether you think the trees are the view or are blocking the view.

But the real reason I am writing this is to share a quote I read here. I recently bumped into the nature writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. She was gentle, easy writer with a love of the out of doors. Her book, Rural Hours, is an accessible naturalist’s diary of the seasons of the year in Cooperstown, NY. She occasionally culls lessons from physical nature to human nature, and sometimes the other way around. The following is an observation that works well in both worlds:

“How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year! If the blossoms were liable to change – if they were to become capricious and irregular – they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less… Whatever your roving fancies may say, there is a virtue in constancy which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow…” (p. 29)

We love the extraordinary in nature. We travel to see the majesty of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, the stunning beauty of the orchid. But it is the irises that bloom in our garden every spring; the snowfall that cheers us in the midst of winter; the luscious smell of warm summer rains; the knowledge that the seasons will once again come around so that we can plant vegetables and harvest them in due time; watch the flowers bloom and be greeted by the bees and butterflies lured by their fragrance, that calm our restless spirits.

And it is with people as it is with nature. We love the exotic, the glamorous, the new, the extraordinary. But we thrive on the constancy of a mother’s hug, the familiar repertoire of family recipes, the recognition of who sits where, and the anticipation of family traditions. Even as we need change, we need reliability, both in the seasons of nature and the seasons of our lives. But what was once a given is now in jeopardy. There is displacement and disruption in both these realms. The hope is that our work and awareness and skills in one arena will spill over to our work and awareness and skills in the other. Not too far-fetched a hope. And not beyond our the tasks of our daily lives.

The Global Warming Solutions Act

The Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA; Senate Bill 309/House Bill 712), championed by Governor O’Malley, is now before our state legislature. This legislation would put Maryland in the forefront of our national efforts to reduce global warming pollution by adopting state-wide, science-based greenhouse gas reduction targets of 25% by 2020 and 90% by 2050 below 2006 levels.

While many of our delegates and state senators are supporting this bill, it is also attracting much opposition. The truth is, we have no choice but to reduce our emissions and to change our production and consumption habits. The only choice is how, when and with what positive or negative impacts. We either will be able to develop controlled, affordable and just ways to change over our technologies and grow a green economy and marketplace, or we will slam into shortages, rising prices, increased health problems, and an environment seriously ill. Wisdom tells us we should get on top of this problem. That is what this bill does.

Yet, as mentioned, there is opposition. Your support of this bill is essential. Write to the Governor, your delegates and senators, mayors and county executives. The more support, the more we can offset the opposition. Much of the opposition is coming from the Sparrows Point steel plant . We understand that. This bill seeks to protect those who will be affected by its regulations and requirements. Here are some points that explain how, with the changes this bill recommends, it nonetheless seeks to undertake them with justice and care for everyone affected.

1. A great deal of flexibility is included in the GWSA. It contains a provision to revisit the goals every four years and to modify them as circumstances require. For example, if we do not achieve the new technology that would enable us to get to 90% pollution reduction, then the goals will be adjusted.

2. In no way does the bill require each individual entity to reduce emissions by a specified amount. Rather, the goal is an overall reduction, with flexibility for individual entities depending on what is determined to be practical and feasible. Policies that affect particular economic sectors will continue to be shaped by stakeholders in an open, public process.

3. A study funded by Maryland’s Department of Business and Economic Development and carried out by the Baltimore-based International Center for Sustainable Development found that clean energy industries could generate between 144,000 and 326,000 jobs over the next 20 years, contributing $5.7 billion in wages and salaries to Maryland citizens and boosting state and local tax revenues by $973 million. A policy that encourages innovation is an opportunity for the creation of large numbers of well-paying new jobs in the green economy of the future. This point has been emphasized by both Democratic presidential candidates. Maryland businesses can become leaders in developing these new technologies.

4. In a recent interview published in Mckinsey Quarterly, national leaders in the steel industry said that “innovation will be important to make our steel making processes more energy efficient and environmentally sound and to improve our product capabilities: lighter, stronger steels can meet the evolving needs of our customers, for example.”

We are in a green revolution. Things will change. We cannot stop that. The question remains: do we try to hold the reins of change so that it can be done in an equitable manner, before additional, potentially irreversible, environmental degradation occurs, while assisting in the development of new technologies and helping those who need to be retrained in the new green economy? Or do we resist this for a misguided short-term non-action that in the long run will hurt everyone, even those purportedly helped by doing nothing?

the constant environmentalist

Once upon a time, I was an occasional environmentalist. I sent my children to school with cloth lunchbags, packed their food in re-usable containers or placed it in zip-lock bags that I dutifully washed, hung on my knife rack to dry, and re-used. I wondered about all the resources that went into creating the bulging plastic bag I shlepped from store to home in all of seven minutes. I recycled bottles and cans and more kinds of paper than the Dept of Waste Management wanted. We used ceiling fans more than air conditioning and did not buy things with lots of packaging.

But caring about the environment was more a personal aversion to waste than a green creed; a behavior more than an identity.

And then somehow, somewhere, in the last two years, what had earlier happened to so many others happened to me: I became green. Preserving resources, consuming less, awakening more to the awes and ahs of life, seeing the gifts and burdens borne by the physical the world and increasingly responsive to my ecological footprint were not things I did but who I had become. I bought a hybrid, did not replace all my burned out bulbs (do I really need 4 over my sink?), slowly accumulated an assortment of canvas bags that live in my car-trunk, turned down the temperature on my hot water heater, wash clothes in warm or even cold water, and even began my version of composting.

Step by step, act by act, awareness by awareness, environmentalism became not a behavior, but an identity. What was remarkable is that it mimicked exactly the way I became an observant Jew. Mitzvah by mitzvah, deed by deed I changed my behavior. And then, boom. What had been an accretion of distinct acts coalesced into a new way of being. What started as somewhat awkward, self-conscious behaviors morphed into familiar habit, and a sense of pride.

Starting by doing it all is overwhelming, disorienting, very expensive and a bit much for most psyches. But act by act, sooner or later, bit by bit, we are transformed by our actions. And when that magical moment happens, we feel blessed. Given the enormity of the task before us, that is a very good thing.

folded green paper

A confession: I use Kleenex. Yes, I have heard that Kleenex brand tissues are not good for the environment. I even tried buying Seventh Generation tissue instead, when I could find it. But it wasn't soft enough. So, I continued to buy Kleenex. And then this morning, this happened:

I was in my car and reached down to open the new box of Kleenex tissues that I had placed there a little while ago. Upon enjoying that delightful little zzhhipp-ing sound the cardboard makes as you rip off the closure, I saw peeking out at me a folded slip of deep green paper.

Thinking, whoa, what a lovely surprise. What sort of gift could this be? A coupon for my next purchase? Had I unsuspectingly bought their billionth box and now would enjoy a lifetime of free tissues? Delighted at this unexpected joy, I opened the accordion-folded 3 x 5 inch paper.

It was none of that. Instead, it was a creative act of guerilla advocacy waged by Greenpeace. Now, I am not always a fan of Greenpeace. Their tactics often offend more refined (not to mention civil) political sensibilities. But I have to tip my hat to them when they are this inventive.

They had figured out that they can slip this folded piece of paper into the very slot left for you to insert your thumb to open the box. And on this neatly folded paper, they tell you what you didn't want to hear:

Kleenex is made from 100% virgin fiber, which, in Greenpeace's words, "has a devastating impact on ancient forests."

They have approached Kimberly-Clark (the parent of Kleenex) and asked them to use recycled materials for their tissues. Kimberly-Clark, according to this insert, has declined, saying that we, the customer, don't care.

Clearly, we do. And we need to tell them so.

Here is what I plan to do:

1) Visit www.StopKleenex.com and see what I can find there.
2) Call Kimberly-Clark (1-888-525-8388) and tell them that I care and will no longer buy their product until they change their tree harvesting and manufacturing ways.
3) Buy handkerchiefs. I know, I know. Tissues seem so much more aesthetic and sanitary. Who wants to carry that stuff around in their pockets? But now that I think about it, my father used handkerchiefs his entire life. Maybe if he was bed-ridden with the flu or bad cold, he might have used tissues, but otherwise, a white handkerchief. For messy colds, for guests and cars, I will continue to buy appropriate tissues, whenever possible. In the meantime, I am on the hunt for a nice handkerchief.

advocacy and ethics

Advocacy and Ethics

Advocacy and ethics are the two poles on which environmental activism rests. They are the opposites that drive and fulfill each other.

Advocacy is public; ethics, personal. Advocacy is behavioral; ethics, attitudinal, essential. Advocacy is what you do; ethics define who you are. Advocacy is about winning (appropriately so); ethics about being.

Without ethics, advocacy has no guide, no imperative, no claim. Without advocacy, ethics has little expression, remains sterile, wanders homeless.

Advocacy is specific (one fights for the trees or CAFE standards). To be effective, advocacy must be selective, linear: choose a particular issue, develop arguments to gain fellow adherents, create coalitions and work toward its passage or approval. The question advocacy asks is: how do we get from here to there?

Ethics, on the other hand, focuses not on the specifics but on the whole; not on the externals of an issue, but the internal aspects of beliefs, behaviors and personal commitment. The question ethics asks is: who am I; and therefore what should I do?

When guided by environmental advocacy, we must choose our battles. Pesticides, global warming, the cattle industry, local food. But when guided by environmental ethics, these battles are all of a piece. When guided by environmental ethics, we know that the environment cannot be carved up into causes, bills and organizations; it is whole, inseparable. We know that we are not apart from it but one with it; that while our appetites and designs may be infinite, the stuff of the world is finite. That we are not gods who may with impunity strut and thrust our whims upon the globe, but transient beneficiaries of the earth's bounty. And that just as we have been blessed to enjoy the fullness of the earth's gifts handed to us by our ancestors, so we must bless those who come after us.

Though advocacy may exhaust us; ethics inspires us. And while ethics motivate us, advocacy gets the work done.

Ethics is the mind; advocacy the hand. We need them both.

shore thing

I went to a beach house over the winter break. Relaxing and pleasant, and very quiet. I (re)learned a lesson of the shore.

To most of us, the beach and ocean are seasonal commodities, like lemonade and warm sunshine. We "use" them in the summer months and pack them away when the weather gets cold. The place was empty, almost deserted. Hotels were boarded up, saying things like: thanks for a great summer. reopening mid-April. Many were shuttered tight, with their No Vacancy light on. Of course, that was not true. There were lots of vacancies, but no one was around to let you in. The town shut down; hibernated from November through April. Half a year, all this real estate, built-up environment, infrastructure, lies fallow.

True, not all beach communities fold up by Thanksgiving; and more and more of them try to create a year-round atmosphere of dining, entertainment and relax-zzzzation. And reasonably so. They want to make the most of their investment.

And I can't blame those towns that happily wave goodbye to the seasonal invaders, heaving a sigh of relief. After all the fuss and bother of the summer months, the town deserves a good rest, and even more, needs a facelift. Maintenance, painting, fixing all get done in the off-season.

So, I am not complaining about the way the towns handle their cyclical lifestyles. But I am saddened that we, the visitors, hardly give the seas and beaches, and the towns that are built mostly for our use, a second thought once the days get short.

Is it wise, especially as built space becomes tighter and land more precious, to let such resources lay fallow, wasted, half the year? Can we creatively imagine how to use these places to the benefit of all? What if we moved the increasing homeless population whom we are struggling unsuccessfully to house (not the families with children who need to go to school but the adults who otherwise have no family or obligations to tie them to a community) during these bitter months to these places, house them at reasonable prices and put them to work cleaning and tending and mending these seaside communities? This may redeem both structures and souls, and help transition many of these folk back into lifestyles that can support jobs and homes.

Are there schools? retreats? other seasonal uses we can imagine utilizing these places so that we needn't build more places elsewhere, and so that we can reintroduce people to the wonders of nature "out of season?"

Appreciating the wilds all year round. Utilizing wisely, all year round, what we create. Perhaps these two goals can be blended to yield something greater than we can now imagine. Surely clever entrepreneurs and social activists can come up with something.

two for one

Sharing a home is good for the environment. So say the researchers at Michigan State University. In a study that could be nominated for the Oh Really Awards, we learn that two people living together (in this case, also married), use far fewer resources than two people living apart. Chalk one more up to the benefits of living together. How good it is to have someone to come home, to warm up your bed, to share home-made soup with, to finish off the portion that is too big for you, to vent your frustrations to. People in our homes (as long as they are not threatening or hostile) extend our lives, care for us when we are sick, give us someone besides ourselves to worry and fuss over.

Living together is good for the soul, good for the pocketbook, good for the environment, good to banish loneliness, good for a laugh. Then why, since 2005, are half of American households made up of one person? In the 1950's, according to an editorial in today's Sun paper, 3/4 of all households were headed by married couples. Okay, even I - old-fashioned though I be - am less interested in arguing for the married part than I am rooting for the couple or shared living space part. Being alone is hard for most of us. And even though it has it pleasures of solitude and quiet and freedom in the short term, these can grow heavy in their abundance and relentlessness of living alone.

So why are we such private, alone people? Why do we so cherish or protect our privacy and yet yearn for the hubbub of third places and seek comfort in the company of the vast hordes of cyberspace? Do we not trust each other enough? Are we too self-indulgent? Too demanding? Too unsure?

I, for one, do not know. But I do hope that those who are planning our future pay attention. I hope that future architects and builders and city planners and community activists explore ways to build housing that can both bring people together, and give them their privacy; in ways that enrich their personal lives, and limit their footprint on this grand world of ours. Surely that is not too much to ask.

long time away

Life and events have lifted over this glorious fall Thanksgiving weekend so I am once again able to set fingers to keys and think a bit.

The weather has released its bracing fall coolness into the world and the leaves graciously responded. Vibrant yellows and deep reds excite the air. On a stretch around my circle, a small orchard of maple trees line the street. The leaves they discard and scatter around their base form a thick sea-foam of brilliant yellow, not yet brittled or dried. It was like walking along a beach of leaves, with an ocean of grass beyond.

Thanksgiving itself was unseasonably warm in the morning, so that all the neighborhood pick-up football games - including my son's alumni high school game - was well-attended and thoroughly enjoyed by players and spectators alike.

The afternoon grew cooler and windier and threatened to rain (we should only have been so lucky).

The thanksgiving tradition in my home is to celebrate the night before, erev Thanksgiving, Wednesday night, with a large homemade meal, including a home-made tofurkey (or as my mother has come to call it, faux turkey). This year was the biggest and best ever. Family - old and new, and friends - old and new, came. The living room was filled with chatter and camaradarie and love. Inspired by the CSA, I baked squash bread (with yeast, so it tastes something like a rye or sour-dough bread, with a slight yellow-tinge). It was delicious. I made it into loaves, as well as rolls that we scooped out and served home-made vegetable soup in.

Stuffed acorn squash also made an appearance for the first time. Stuffed with tri-color cous cous sauteed with onion, raisins and dried cranberries. A little molasses for a deeper taste and eggs to hold it all together. Quite yummy. And quite satisfying, both gustatorially and spiritually.

But the day is past and the weekend is over and the frenzy of gift buying is upon us. Time is no doubt a scarce commodity for many, but wouldn't home-made presents, simple though they are, be greatly appreciated? and kept longer, placed in old trunks or suitcases, or stashed away in closets, to be remembered or bumped into weathered years from now?

The faces of shoppers who dragged themselves out to the stores at ungodly hours, all pumped up when the doors were unlocked, desperate to make a killing at the bargain tables, haunt me. Is this love? What are they doing? and why?

From Cosmos to Kitchen II

CSAs are Community Supported Agriculture - that is, a kind vegetable coop you buy set shares in. So every week, you get a set amount of vegetables (and some fruits) depending on the produce grown on the farm you associate with.

They are wonderful in many ways, but the biggest challenge, and the second most powerful lesson I learned from mine, is the burden of abundance. It is almost embarrassing, and certainly guilt-inducing, to even have to admit it.

But, after all, how much watermelon can one eat, some of our members uncomfortably mumbled? How many squash can you prepare before exhausting both your ideas, and your appetite?

After a while, your friends begin to run when they see you coming with a bulging canvas bag. You may be able to dump your excess on them once, but after that, they get wise to you.

I am particularly happy scheduling meetings at my home now - in part just so that I can entice my visitors to take some of the excess produce home!

I give some to the women who clean my house; to the guys who came to repair my oven. I'd give it to my mailman, if I ever saw him. I am thinking of leaving some outside for the oil man to find when he hangs the delivery receipt on the front door handle! Or maybe I'll just wrap them in bunting and leave them on my neighbors' doorsteps with a note pinned to them that says: Eat me!

Inevitably, we cannot eat all of it fast enough, and so sometimes some of it goes into the compost heap.

This brush with abundance, and the waste it causes, makes me appreciate the necessity of two elements of food 'technology':

-- the art of preserving food
-- the creation of a successful transportation and distribution system.

In days gone by, preserving, or "putting up" foods, was a time-honored tradition. It was an all-consuming household ritual that is all but lost to us today. Late in the season, households would prepare for the intense, concentrated cooking, jarring, baking, sealing that would go on possibly for days. All available hands were recruited. Water-hauling, pot-stirring, fuel-tending, who knows what else; the tasks were endless. But it was necessary if the "excess" harvest, the harvest that could not be eaten before it went bad, was not to be wasted. It was this food that would get the families through the winter.

In the face of such excess, I began to appreciate the physical and spiritual elements of preserving.

With almost a dozen squash - acorn and butternut and another one that looks like baby, striped footballs with flattened ends - I had to figure out how to use them all. There was just so much ratatouille and casseroles that I could make. And truth be told, they don't freeze particularly well.

I was lucky enough to find a squash yeast bread in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest - a trusted cookbook if ever there was one.

So while I had my doubts, I followed Molly Katzen's lead and discovered that I could use up three acorn squash making three loaves of delicious squash bread. And these freeze beautifully.

But the amount of time I devoted to mixing and kneading and waiting for the bread to rise reinforced in me a great appreciation for the work, wisdom, talents and dedication of our mothers, who were taught by their mothers how to take the 'excess' of the season and store it away for the lean days of winter.

And say what we will about the benefits of local foods, it is essential to create a distribution system that gets the local foods to the local mouths.

I know that ours is not the only household in our CSA that 'complains' about too much food. I know that ours is not the only household that has thrown away food on occasion. This waste - small though it be - reinforces the awareness that producer and consumer do not always live in close proximity, or in related orbits. Growing the food is the first challenge; getting it to the ones who need it is the second. Even as we laud eating locally, we still need to work on proper distribution.

So it makes me wonder if farms have excess food too that they are unable to sell and distribute - and does that food go to waste when nearby families go to bed hungry?

Is there a way our community can arrange to buy that excess food and distribute it, with accompanying cooking classes and recipes and potluck dinners, to those in need?

I heard a stunning comment on a report of fresh foods, or the lack thereof, in an inner city. A woman who just started a community garden said: It is easier to get guns and drugs in this neighorhood than to get a tomato.

CSAs are wonderful. I gained so much more than the healthy, local food I ate.

What do I now do with these insights, blessings and guilt?

From Cosmos to Kitchen I

On October 24, the Comet 17P/Holmes, an otherwise well-mannered, highly ignorable comet, erupted in light. While this didn't make the press, the stargazing world is abuzz with excitement. My son - the astronomer - called us at 11:30 at night to tell us to go out and look up and see this amazing phenomenon. Indeed, there where no star usually is seen, was a messy blob of light.

What follows is a quote from astronomy.org/starwatch website I found that explains this phenomenon.


" What happened to dinky Holmes, to transform it into a fuzz ball visible... in center city Allentown? It is thought that a sinkhole collapsed on the tiny one-to-two mile diameter nucleus which triggered an explosive amount of outgassing caused by the sun’s heat. The gasses pushed out huge quantities of dust which were sprayed like a turning garden hose as the nucleus rotated. The result has been a circular halo of debris now over one million miles in diameter, scattering sunlight back to us and creating the fluffy blob of light near the bright star Mirfak in Perseus the Hero. Why the media hasn’t picked up on this is anyone’s guess, but it is the top story if you’re an astronomer. Comet 17P/Holmes won’t be around forever. Its expanding coma will eventually get so huge that it will simply disappear against the sky background."

We live in an exciting neighborhood!

And while we are on the subject of the sky: the annual Leonid meteor shower is coming up.

Meteor showers - when you can possibly see a dozen or so shooting stars an hour! - occur throughout the year.



The Leonids are so called for they appear in the constellation of Leo.

This is what upcoming.yahoo.com tells us about this year's Leonids:

"Because Leo does not start coming fully into view until the after midnight hours, that would be the best time to concentrate on looking for the Leonid meteors.

The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33 years. With each visit the comet leaves behind a trail of dust in its wake."

That site also gives you a lot more stargazing information in user-friendly (non-technical) language.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors is also a good popular and understandable site. This is their explanation of meteor showers:

What are meteor showers?

An increase in the number of meteors at a particular time of year is called a meteor shower.

Comets shed the debris that becomes most meteor showers. As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet's orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighborhood of a constellation.

Meteor showers are named by the constellation from which meteors appear to fall, a spot in the sky astronomers call the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is located in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

You can also find a full list of the eight major meteor showers and the best dates for viewing them at this site.

So much for the cosmos.

To the kitchen:

My foray into the CSA world (Community Supported Agriculture) has taught me many things. Two of which are this:

That we as modern privileged westerners generally tend to consume according to our desires. If we want a nectarine in February - no problem. Fresh strawberries in November - just run to the store. We may pay a bit more, but otherwise we generally don't think much about it.

Yet I can remember not so long ago a series of commercials that promoted something called "summer fruit." Pictures of luscious peaches and mounds of berries would be draped across the tv set, telling us these fruits that we have waited for are once again available. Because they were not available all year round back then - at least not at any prices that normal folk could afford. It is hard to imagine these days that something we craved to eat was beyond our reach simply because it was cold outside.

Our cheap fuel and impressive transportation and refrigeration systems have enabled us over the past 20 years to make it summertime all year round in our supermarkets. And while that is great for our appetites, it might not be so great for the planet.

For one thing, today, freighters and tankers that move cheap food and products around the world contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than does the aviation industry. That is a relatively new development.

In addition, the fields that are cleared to feed our summertime desires in the midst of our winter, and the "cheap" products that are made (for example) in China are, in fact, quite costly. They take their toll on the earth and on the health of the workers (occupational safety as we know is not well regulated in China). Additionally, as you probably know, China has now surpassed the US in the amount of CO2 emissions it spews into the air largely from the coal-fired power plants it is building now (using outdated 1980's technology) that run the factories that give us our cheap merchandise.

It all begins with our appetites.

The CSA has taught me what I knew but did not yet feel: that the earth has its cycles and that we live within them. Even more, that there is a grace and humility and joy that comes with living within those cycles. Which is not to say that agriculture and manufacturing cannot be pushed to bring the earth to its fullest potential. Humanity is charged with bringing both ourselves and our earth to our greatest level of dignity and productivity. But not by sacrificing the long-term health of the workers, the land, the water or the air.

So bending my appetite to the cycles of the earth instead of bending the yield of the earth to my appetite is a lesson I take away as this CSA season ends.

I will talk about the response to (some would say oppression of) abundance in the next post.

lessons of potlatch

Still raining, three days running. How lucky we are, even if the rain is intermittent. How good and comforting it is to hear the rain fall on the roof; white noise at night, without the aid of a machine!

I was reminded of the Northwest Indians potlatch ceremony today, during a conversation of the culture of gifts and gift-giving (more of that and its influence on our buying urges later).

To celebrate various lifecycle events, and to mark one's place and status in society, the American Northwest Coast Indians celebrated potlatch ceremonies. Grand amounts of people would be invited from neighboring and sometimes distant areas. Lasting often several days, the ceremony would be led by a host who would lavish food and gifts of blankets, baskets, copper and baubles of all sorts on the guests.

Some anthropologists suggest that these ceremonies served not only the purpose of aggrandizing the host and establishing relationships between grantor and recipient, but they also served to redistribute wealth that had accumulated in one person's domain. It seems that in that culture, undue accumulation of wealth was not smiled upon, and so a folk ritual was developed to serve as a practical corrective.

While the owner gave up (that is, reduced much of) his wealth at these ceremonies, he also gained standing and status. Indeed, it seems this may have been the only way his money truly served him. Evidently, possessing wealth did not promote standing. Giving it away did!

Imagine if our wealth and possessions had value only as a prelude to distribution and gifting - what would the world, our consumer patterns, the environment, and our community's social health look like today?