Eleven green(ing) synagogues

Sunday morning, 12 people representing 9 synagogues gathered at my house as part of the BJEN (Baltimore Jewish Environmental Network) training kick-off for greening our local synagogues.

We studied Jewish text; reviewed our Green Covenant of Commitment (online at www.bjen.org along with our Green Synagogue guide) that participating synagogues will sign as an expression of their values, actions and commitment; we learned about energy audits and greening our simchas, where to find additional practical guidance and resources; and most of all, met to support each other as we all embark on this sacred task.

Each synagogue is approaching this effort in a way that is unique to its needs, demography and capacity. That is as it should be. Greening is not a one-size-fits-all enterprise. But it does have a few elements in come that we felt in abundance yesterday:

-- a deep concern and conscientious awe for the natural world and the gifts it offers us
-- an optimism and belief that we can make a difference, that the human spirit and technological advances can help us reverse this unsustainable lifestyle, even as they helped us get into it
-- that living an environmentally aware and self-renewing (aka sustainable) life brings us meaning, purpose, joy and delight
-- that being more aware of our consuming habits and of the origins of the things we eat and use and buy to live, and of all the people along the way who made getting that stuff possible, raises our appreciation for the miracles of life and all those who participated in the long process of enabling us to have what we have.
-- a sense that we are privileged to be able to work on this effort

It was a moving, historic morning. Yasher koach, kudos, to all the participants and synagogues involved in greening Baltimore's Jewish community. May your hard work see great results. And may you be satisfied with the fruit of your labor.

the trouble, and promise, of lists

The word “sustainability” is taking root in society. Along with the word "green," it is becoming the official term of art for the cultural transformation we need to survive on this planet. The question is, though, amid its popularity, what does it mean? Or more precisely, what do people think when they hear the word "sustainability"? And what does that predict about our ability to make the societal changes necessary to heal the earth?

Dr. Daniel Sherman, a professor of environmental policy and decision-making at the University of Puget Sound, asked this very question to members of his campus community and came up with a challenging finding. "The dominant association," he writes of the word 'sustainability', "is a list of prescribed practices for [people] to adopt, or feel guilty for failing to adopt."

There is good news here, and not-so-good news. The good news is that people are increasingly convinced that there is a problem and that they can, and should, do something about it. In response, sometimes they do; and sometimes they don't. (Wait. That's still part of the good news.)

The not-so-good news, he suggests, is that this to-do list approach either supplants or defers a deeper understanding of the true meaning. Sustainability does not, after all, mean an isolated list of discrete things to do. It reflects a 360 degree attitude that guides the everyday acts of our lives. It is a belief that we need to use things fairly, wisely and well today so that others can use them fairly, wisely and well tomorrow. To treat sustainability as a list of "shoulds" is imagining it to be so much less than it is.

While not great news, this is not bad news either. For sometimes, lists can transcend themselves. When we begin to learn something, we often begin with lists. As a child we are taught to say thank you, I am sorry, and please in certain situations. But we also learn, as we grow older, that those words are not isolated acts, not numbered items on a limited to-do list of politeness. Rather, they are markers, symbols, of deeper, intersecting values of gratitude, remorse, humility, caring, kindness. What begins with lists can morph into values and beliefs that define our lives. Put another way, over time, we become what we do. And one day, we realize we no longer need to check the list to know how to behave.

Sometimes, though, lists never rise above themselves. They remain external enumerations of things that we might forget if we don’t write them down. In such a case, they never transcend their particularity. They never become more than the things they are. We never see the big picture. They do not change our spirit or the way we choose to live on this earth.

Perhaps what Dr. Sherman's findings are telling us is not that sustainability is misunderstood, but rather that it is in its first stage of absorption. We may in fact be on the way to making the values of sustainability part of our personal and cultural identity. If we successfully make that transformation, we are witnessing the birth of a new era. Let's do it.

green cleaning

Sunday, BJEN sponsored a 'green cleaning for your home' gathering with Loren Lavoy, owner of Green Clean (www.greencleanusa.org) to learn about safe ways to clean one's home.

Many to most home cleaning products contain dangerous chemicals that leave a residue of toxins in the home, on surfaces and in the air even long after their smell dissipates. Not good for adults and certainly not good for kids and pets.

What was even more surprising, although pleasantly so, was that products exist that can get our homes clean without making us sick.

First of all, remember that plain soap and water clean the best. No need, and no benefit, of antibacterial soaps most of the time. Indeed, we are all better off leaving antibacterial additives to hospitals and the truly vulnerable so we do not dilute the medicine's effectiveness and do not deprive our immune systems from ramping up to full speed.

Second of all, grandma knew best. Take all the products you have for cleaning the kitchen, floors, sinks, bathtubs, toilets, etc., use them up and then buy the following:

Borax, Bonami, a good scrubbing sponge, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and vinegar.

All of these can be found in your local grocery store. No need to shop at a specialty outlet.

With these bio-friendly, inexpensive, and safe products, you can clean just about everything in your homes, as good as and often better than the fancy, expensive and unhealthy products. And they take up a lot less space in your closet.

Check out, for example, www.grist.org and its review of green cleansers. A truthful and helpful real life sampling of possible products and their effectiveness.

Two helpful hints when you go green:

1) These cleaners take a little longer to work. The hint from Loren: apply them to one surface, then the next, then the next, and so on. THEN go back with your mildly wet, gentle scrubber and rub, and then take your clean rag and wipe things off. You will get a clean and shiny surface you can be proud of.

2) They don't smell, and some people feel if it doesn't smell clean it can't be clean. Solution: buy essential oils and place the wicking sticks in them to slowly release great scents into your room. And if you vacuum with a bag, instead of a bagless, cleaner, place a drop or two of lavender on the bag before you vacuum. It will leave a gentle fragrance everywhere you clean.

Greening our Home

Two bits of green news on the home front:

First the hard news:

We had our home energy audit today. A wonderful company called TerraLogos came by and for a few hundred dollars, checked us out. With cool gadgets such as hand-held laser remote temperature seekers with a cute little screen that shows where the house is leaking out, pouring out, costly warmth, to a door-sized blower that measures the pressure differential in your house to locate exactly where you need to stanch the air flowing out of (or in the summertime, into) your home, to an assessment of my appliances, they are going to help me understand where all my energy inefficiencies are skulking about, and what I can do about it.

The full report comes in two weeks - I will be certain to share the news with all of you. (What do you think: a new reality show?!? Who thought watching people buy houses would be a winner?) In the meantime, as a sneak peak, Atticus, my gentle but thorough inspector (how can you not like a guy named Atticus? It conjures up images of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, with all the righteousness and courage he portrayed.) showed me that my leaky house was operating at twice the air transfer or pull or some such (I will be able to report more precisely in two weeks) than we should be.

Now, on the one hand, we can be looking at thousands of dollars to fix all these problems. On the other, as Atticus kindly pointed out, there are lots of places for us to save, both in money and CO2 emissions. So the question is really not can we do anything, but what do we do when?

The better news is this:

In reviewing our energy bills with Atticus, we noticed that over the past two years, which coincide with our coming-of-age as more aware energy consumers, we cut our summer electrical bill in half, and our winter electrical bill by 20%. So even though we pay for 100% green energy, still and all, we know that the less energy we use, the better it is for everyone. (Yes, it does cost a little more. But the difference between last year and this year for our entire annual electrical bill was under $200. That is, for the price of two theater tickets and a great dinner, not including baby sitter, we can power our home totally on green electrical energy. Where else can righteousness be bought so cheaply!)

The grid still needs to supply a full load of energy - and on the whole, energy demand is still growing. So if we can reduce our share to offset new houses, new offices, more buildings, etc, we are helping everyone, including ourselves. That is the ticket, grow the economy without growing the energy usage. It can be done.