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I had the distinct pleasure to spend a week at the beach in a most graciously, if somewhat indulgently, appointed house this past month. My room was ground floor, facing east, not more than 30 paces from a private pool and 50 paces from the beach. I could hear the surf gently pounding when the door was open. (Sadly, in all this extravagance, there was no window to open to let the sea air and the ocean’s noises in.)

My routine was as follows: to bed around midnight, awaken around 6:00, open the shades to see if sunrise will be visible (it was all week), throw on just enough clothes to get by, unlock the door and step out into the fresh, humid ocean breeze. It was hard to sit down for everything was wet, not from some Camelot-ish, overnight rain (though it was tempting to think so), but from the condensation that is ubiquitous at seaside. Throw a beach towel on the rail to dry at 3:00 pm and, while it will likely be dry by nightfall, it is also likely to be damp again by morning.

I have not checked this out but I wouldn’t be surprised if one way the dune grasses (of which there were thankfully an abundant amount this year, testament to the beach reclamation efforts of the local communities) thrives is through the moisture they pluck from the air at dawn. (Israel is developing pioneering methods for the age-old technology of harvesting dew by channeling the water droplets directly to plant roots before the dew either evaporates or dissipates.)

After a week of watching, it was clear that each sunrise was different, as if each had its own story to tell, each dawning its own personality, each morning truly a new day. Gifted with this enchanted week, I rediscovered what is obvious to anyone living close to nature, and largely invisible to those of us who don’t:

1) This extraordinary spectacle of sunrise breaks upon us every morning, everywhere, to everyone, worldwide, equally, with no cost or human effort. Yet I would bet that most often, unless there is some rare obscurity or natural oddity, most of us don’t think about it much. (Birkat Hahammah, the sunrise blessing we recite every 28 years that occurred this past spring, is a rare moment when we directly, ritually acknowledge the gift of the sun.)

2) The sun, as our biologists, geologists and environmentalists tell us, is the only open system on earth. All else is closed, contained, save for the errant meteor that comes crashing in every now and then. What we have here and now is all that we will ever have. Except for the remarkable life-giving power of the sun. The world runs on sunlight. Plants are powered by the sun; animals eat the plants; other animals eat the animals that eat the plants; the people eat the plants and animals that ate the plants that were powered by the sun. It is one big chain of sunlight.

3) And we do one more thing with sunlight: we burn it. In open pits and hearths, cars and power plants, we burn sunlight. Most of today’s fuel – coal, natural gas, oil - was made from the plants that were powered by millions of years of sunlight millions of years ago. In other words, we burn, travel by, cook with and heat ourselves with stored sunlight.

4) Of course, we also use the products of current sunlight: wood, biomass, wind, the circulation of the air and the flow of the ocean waters, like the gulf stream, and direct sunlight itself. The wise ones of our generation tell us that we must change our ways and live off of current sunlight, the sun’s income, that which comes in to us daily and whose products are renewable, and not its savings, that which is stored and not replenishable. With proper research and development, we can do that. Sunshine provides abundant energy for all earth’s needs, including our ever-growing, ever-demanding power-hungry society. It is that that we must use.

5) If I had the privilege, and the skill, I would create a photo-montage, a documentary of sorts, of 365 days of sunrise from the same spot on earth. Right here on the eastern seaboard of the mid-Atlantic states overlooking the ocean would do. Perhaps such a visual spread would remind us that each day is new and different, bringing its own opportunity for adventure and achievement and learning and, sadly, loss.

The photos would show the arc that the sun sketches as it moves from solstice to equinox and back again. We would see the “stopping and turning” of the sun at its northern and southern most outposts. We could see how the sun hangs lower in the sky throughout the lesser days of winter, and how it rises high overhead in the blazing days of summer. We could see the phases of the moon and its relationship to the sun. (The moon was in its last quarter that week, rising just a bit earlier than the sun, and rapidly disappearing into a thin sliver that got visibly thinner over the few days we were there.)

Perhaps it would forever remind us that no matter how much we pave over this earth, no matter how much dirt we move or dig up, no matter how powerful our machines and how much we alter and force the earth to do our bidding, in the end, we are dependent on it, as it is dependent on the constancy of the sun.

Short of such a montage, perhaps we can simply commit to checking out the placement of the sun every morning (or evening, the key is constancy) noting the time, marveling in the heavenly cycles, and remembering how life really works.

I am torn about the Cash for Clunkers stimulus initiative. As reported in the Chicago Tribune and calculated by the Associated Press using Dept of Transportation figures (in other words, sources that don’t have a particular environmental ax to grind):

“The total savings per year from cash for clunkers translates to about 57 minutes of America’s output of the chief greenhouse gas.” One billion of your tax dollars and mine for less than one hour of emissions savings is a very expensive program.  Somehow, I think we could have used that money, and the lessons it could have allowed us to teach, better.

Such modest savings could be achieved, I dare say, by greater efficiencies, or everyone driving less, or adding a 5 cent tax to a gallon of gasoline (which fluctuates so violently anyway this would be almost invisibly swallowed up by the erratic market swings; quick, what is the price of a gallon of gas around you right now?), which gives us the added benefit of using those monies to invest in green energy research and development, or simply by giving America off one more day a year.

Even more, Cash for Clunkers reinforces the economic model that says only by buying more stuff can the economy thrive. But we know that the human appetite is infinite while the earth’s resources are finite. We simply cannot build a sustainable economy on the practice of buying more stuff. Yet, despite the current admonition that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” we are wasting this crisis. We should be using it to build a truly sustainable economy.

I realize that our car industry is “too big to fail”. And that this initiative was an economic stimulus gift dressed up in green clothing. But as others are saying, we will all go down if we continue to support a marketplace that allows companies and industries to get too big to fail.

The question we must continue to ask is this: how do we create an economy that is both friendly to people and nations, and healthy for the environment?

In 1996, Herman Daly, an economist who explores what sustainable economic development might mean, offers this definition of our goal:  “Development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means quantitative increase.”

In other words, how do we build a better, healthier, happier world without increasing material amounts of stuff and waste? How do we do more with less?

Sustainable development economists increasingly are saying that companies should focus more on selling services than selling stuff . For example, I want to keep my food cool and extend its shelf life. Therefore I buy a refrigerator. Now, the refrigerator company is happy that I bought one refrigerator but will be happier when I buy another. So what do they do? One, they don’t worry about what happens to my refrigerator at the end of its life for any obligation or connection they have to it was likely severed after the warranty ran out. And two, while they build the refrigerator well enough so I will want to buy another one of their making, they don’t want to build it so well that I will die before it does. In other words, as soon as I buy one refrigerator, they want to sell me another.

The emerging green economy logic challenges the culture of buying stuff. They suggest that businesses offer services. By offering “a service instead of a product, a company profits by reducing its use of materials and energy, and providing that service at the lowest cost possible. Lovins argues, for instance, that air conditioner manufacturers should offer cooling as a service – not AC units as a product – so they’d have an incentive to make the systems highly energy efficient. In some green business circles, the idea of recasting a product as a service, often called “servicing,” is the holy grail of environmental innovation.”  (Green to Gold by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston)

An additional component to servicing is that the company is responsible for the disposal of the item (in this case, the air conditioner) at the end of its life. Inevitably, the company will begin designing a/c units whose component parts can either be easily disassembled, recaptured and recycled, or readily disposed of in the environment and naturally degraded. No more indiscriminate hauling and trashing.

Is this the silver bullet to solve all our environmental problems? Clearly not. All our needs cannot be met this way. But for those that can, let’s try it.

Judaism offers an imperative that can guide us in this work. It is the phrase bal tashkhit. Classically, this phrase means do not wantonly and indiscriminately destroy things. It comes from the biblical prohibition against cutting down fruit trees to build fortifications during a siege. It was expanded to include all unnecessary destruction.

In the 21st century, in an era when we now understand that in nature there is no such thing as waste, we can, and I want to argue should, re-cast bal tashkhit as not just a valuable admonition against inappropriate destruction. But rather, as the admonition which counsels:  Create no waste! Waste itself needs to be seen as an anathema to healthy, sustainable living. Just as nature makes no waste, so humans must make no waste. Which means we cannot consume and discard in ways and amounts that overwhelm nature.

Will this harm the economy? On the contrary, the research, development, design, creation, manufacturing, servicing, reclaiming, re capturing, remanufacturing, re-selling, re-installing, fixing, maintaining, etc will create its own form of vibrant green economy, which, while utilizing the best of a global marketplace will also be powerfully grounded in local resources - both human and economic.

A no-waste, or at least low-waste, economy is the way of the future. Bal tashkhit is the way to the land of milk and honey.

I am torn about the Cash for Clunkers stimulus initiative. As reported in the Chicago Tribune and calculated by the Associated Press using Dept of Transportation figures (in other words, sources that don’t have a particular environmental ax to grind):

“The total savings per year from cash for clunkers translates to about 57 minutes of America’s output of the chief greenhouse gas.” One billion of your tax dollars and mine for less than one hour of emissions savings is a very expensive program.  Somehow, I think we could have used that money, and the lessons it could have allowed us to teach, better.

Such modest savings could be achieved, I dare say, by greater efficiencies, or everyone driving less, or adding a 5 cent tax to a gallon of gasoline (which fluctuates so violently anyway this would be almost invisibly swallowed up by the erratic market swings; quick, what is the price of a gallon of gas around you right now?), which gives us the added benefit of using those monies to invest in green energy research and development, or simply by giving America off one more day a year.

Even more, Cash for Clunkers reinforces the economic model that says only by buying more stuff can the economy thrive. But we know that the human appetite is infinite while the earth’s resources are finite. We simply cannot build a sustainable economy on the practice of buying more stuff. Yet, despite the current admonition that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” we are wasting this crisis. We should be using it to build a truly sustainable economy.

I realize that our car industry is “too big to fail”. And that this initiative was an economic stimulus gift dressed up in green clothing. But as others are saying, we will all go down if we continue to support a marketplace that allows companies and industries to get too big to fail.

The question we must continue to ask is this: how do we create an economy that is both friendly to people and nations, and healthy for the environment?

In 1996, Herman Daly, an economist who explores what sustainable economic development might mean, offers this definition of our goal:  “Development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means quantitative increase.”

In other words, how do we build a better, healthier, happier world without increasing material amounts of stuff and waste? How do we do more with less?

Sustainable development economists increasingly are saying that companies should focus more on selling services than selling stuff . For example, I want to keep my food cool and extend its shelf life. Therefore I buy a refrigerator. Now, the refrigerator company is happy that I bought one refrigerator but will be happier when I buy another. So what do they do? One, they don’t worry about what happens to my refrigerator at the end of its life for any obligation or connection they have to it was likely severed after the warranty ran out. And two, while they build the refrigerator well enough so I will want to buy another one of their making, they don’t want to build it so well that I will die before it does. In other words, as soon as I buy one refrigerator, they want to sell me another.

The emerging green economy logic challenges the culture of buying stuff. They suggest that businesses offer services. By offering “a service instead of a product, a company profits by reducing its use of materials and energy, and providing that service at the lowest cost possible. Lovins argues, for instance, that air conditioner manufacturers should offer cooling as a service – not AC units as a product – so they’d have an incentive to make the systems highly energy efficient. In some green business circles, the idea of recasting a product as a service, often called “servicing,” is the holy grail of environmental innovation.”  (Green to Gold by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston)

An additional component to servicing is that the company is responsible for the disposal of the item (in this case, the air conditioner) at the end of its life. Inevitably, the company will begin designing a/c units whose component parts can either be easily disassembled, recaptured and recycled, or readily disposed of in the environment and naturally degraded. No more indiscriminate hauling and trashing.

Is this the silver bullet to solve all our environmental problems? Clearly not. All our needs cannot be met this way. But for those that can, let’s try it.

Judaism offers an imperative that can guide us in this work. It is the phrase bal tashkhit. Classically, this phrase means do not wantonly and indiscriminately destroy things. It comes from the biblical prohibition against cutting down fruit trees to build fortifications during a siege. It was expanded to include all unnecessary destruction.

In the 21st century, in an era when we now understand that in nature there is no such thing as waste, we can, and I want to argue should, re-cast bal tashkhit as not just a valuable admonition against inappropriate destruction. But rather, as the admonition which counsels:  Create no waste! Waste itself needs to be seen as an anathema to healthy, sustainable living. Just as nature makes no waste, so humans must make no waste. Which means we cannot consume and discard in ways and amounts that overwhelm nature.

Will this harm the economy? On the contrary, the research, development, design, creation, manufacturing, servicing, reclaiming, re capturing, remanufacturing, re-selling, re-installing, fixing, maintaining, etc will create its own form of vibrant green economy, which, while utilizing the best of a global marketplace will also be powerfully grounded in local resources - both human and economic.

A no-waste, or at least low-waste, economy is the way of the future. Bal tashkhit is the way to the land of milk and honey.

A friend of mine with both expertise in geology and a passion for religion shared with me a talk he gave about the intersection of the biblical story of creation and the scientific theory of creation. He reads and mines the first chapters of creation with an environmental eye as I once read and mined the first chapters of creation with a feminist eye. It is forever remarkable to me how pliable, how full, how unendingly revealing those first few verses are. So now I too return to our founding text with a new agenda, to learn from it how we, as human beings, are to live in this complex, teeming yet all too fragile world.

As my friend reviews the march of life, both as it is depicted in the parade of days in Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, and in the geological record here on earth, he says that, “each kind of organism settled into its role, ceas[ing] to be alone and becom[ing] a member of a mutually dependent community… The first ecological community invented the basic rule of ecology, a rule that still shapes the way we live today: No complex creature can live alone.”

For anyone who knows the biblical text of creation, these words jump off the page, singing with familiarity. In Chapter 2:18, after creating the human and putting him in the garden, God recognizes the problem: There is no other creature there. It is only then that God creates all the other animals, culminating in the creation of woman.  “Lo tov heyot adam livado” it says in the Hebrew: “It is not good for the human to be alone.”  “No complex creature can live alone.” The two sentences are practically translations of one another.

But we needn’t stop there. In the first chapter of Torah, Genesis 1, this same message is given in its own way, its own idiom. Day after day of God’s creating, God looks out upon his latest handiwork and proclaims, “It is good.” (True, on the second day, when the waters were divided into the waters above and the waters below, there is no proclamation of goodness. But that is made up for on the third day when God says, “It is good,” twice.)

Each installment of creation, each discrete step, feature and creature are judged to be good in their own right. Before humans came into the picture, each incremental stage of creation was bestowed an independent value of goodness by God.

And yet, that was not enough. At the very end of creation, at the end of the sixth day, after all the air, land and water; after all the vegetation; after all the animals and creeping things; after man and woman were created, only then is the ultimate blessing conferred on creation: “And God saw all that he had created, and behold, it was very good.”

Life is composed of discrete beings, distinct creations that are born and live and die distinctly. But they can only do that when embedded in a teeming world of interdependence. Complex life cannot live without complexity. “Symbiosis is,” as my friend says, “in a sense, the ecological equivalent of covenant.”

All life is bound together, covenanted with each other. To protect ourselves we must protect the other; to protect the one we must protect the whole; to protect the whole, we must protect the parts. It is the moral, ecological, Jewish, biblical thing to do.

I made the mistake of taking my walk midday today. This early morning got away from me; this evening threatens rain. So I decided to take a break and walk early afternoon (which I otherwise never do), in my wooded, verdant, suburban neighborhood. Big mistake. The signs were there early on. I had gone outside to my “porch office” (one of the perks of working from home, besides the commute and the discount commissary, is that I can daily choose the location of my office). This morning, it being bearably hot and bearably humid, I chose to sit outside. There it was: the insidious, incessant rumbling of that suburban dinosaur, the lawnmower. It was grazing somewhere on the street behind our house, polluting the air with noise (never mind the exorbitant gift of carbon dioxide) over acres of land. (Even as the over-wrought dinosaur across the street is doing now!)

When I went out for my walk, I decided to head in the other direction.  No respite. Not one but two lawn companies were shepherding their noisy monsters across green carpets. There is no refuge. Last night, I went for a walk at 7:00 pm. There was a dispatch of grasstrimmers working away at the neighbors even then. The din of suburban summer is almost as constant and annoying as the rush of city traffic.

The sound of a lawnmower is rated at 90 dB, the same as shop tools, truck traffic and a subway. A busy street is only rated at 70-80 dB.

Can we imagine having no-mow times in neighborhoods? Can we imagine some households buying no-engine push mowers powered by humans and tending to the job themselves or hiring a neighborhood kid to do it? (Save money on the gym membership and it works all the muscle groups.) Can we imagine electric mowers that silently sail over the grass?

As we have reported here before, lawnmowers are one whopping source of discretionary carbon dioxide emissions. (Meaning, there are great alternatives and substitutes that we can use without degrading our standard of living.) The Union of Concerned Scientists tells us that: “One gas mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollutants as eight new cars driving 55 mph for the same amount of time.” And “Traditional gas-powered lawn mowers are responsible for 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution.”

I recently had the privilege of attending a session with Paul Hawken (The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism author). He challenged us to dream big about what a green world would look like. And one of the dreams he offered was that it would be much, much quieter. It seems like a small thing to ask, but it leads to so many collateral benefits, that I now see it as a surrogate for so many beneficial changes.

Still, until we get there, could neighborhood associations please get together and at least declare several days or times a week as “no-mow” time zones?

It’s a thought.

I returned this evening from several days at the beach. Over the course of two long evenings, I watched the first five episodes of John Adams, the biopic (though that word does not confer the respect or admiration that the work commands) of the man who, more than anyone, lobbied endlessly for the colonies to become independent; who became the first US Ambassador to Britain, the first Vice-President and the second President of the United States of America.

I confess that I am consumed with curiosity as to how our founding fathers did it, how they “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” How did they have the courage, stamina, vision, daring, stubbornness, faith to break from the past, at the peril of their lives, and create what has never been, yet at the same time display the humility, respect or political savvy to compromise with their compatriots and share the power and the place of wisdom and knowledge with others who may on occasion (perhaps on many occasions) opposed them?

Even more, what does it feel like to know that you are not just making history but that you are history; that your life is bigger than you; that you are living both for the moment and for all time, that your life and your choices will be laid bare before the eyes of posterity?

The exquisite joy and pain of such consciousness must be like grasping the end of a live wire. You are both all lit up and unable to let go.

Why do I tell you all this? Because we are living in such radical, revolutionary times. Just as there was no neutral stance in our war against England, there is no neutral stance in our fight for survival today. Our lives will be laid bare before the eyes of posterity.

Our fossil fuel world is coming to an end and what we do now will determine the trajectory of life for centuries to come. Our innocent, inefficient and increasingly destructive ways of powering, feeding and moving our society by burning yesterday’s sunlight cannot endure. The oil, coal and gas will end. The only question is, which will come first: our successful transfer to clean, renewable forms of energy or the depletion of affordable, accessible stores of fossil fuels, along with the degradation of the only atmosphere that ever nurtured human life?

In truth, this should not be a question. As long as we have to give up fossil fuels, let’s hurry it up.

It is in this light that we need to imagine ourselves as the founding fathers and mothers of a new world, as daring and bold and visionary in our quest for new life as were the founders of America.

Revolutions are not quiet; they are not easy; they are not accidental; they are not incremental. They are, however, invigorating, renewing, at times like these - necessary, and always intentional. It is only now that I understand a lovely but somewhat opaque text in the Pirket Avot, the so-called “ethics of our fathers.” Pirkei Avot is a collection of aphorisms (somewhat like Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac of sayings) from the earliest rabbinic period some 2,000 years ago. The one mishnah that has taken on new meaning for me over this last little while as I have been immersing myself in the green revolution is the following (Pirkei Avot 3:18): Rabbi Akiva said: Beloved is humanity, for they were made in the image of God. Doubly beloved is humanity for it was made known to them that they were made in the image of God, as it says: in the image of God did God make the human. (Genesis 9:6)

According to the rabbis, Adam and Eve knew they were part of remarkable enterprise. Their every act was notable, consequential. And not only did they know that, we know that too. And not just about them, but about us as well. Our acts are wildly consequential. Especially during this demanding, challenging time. We are a chosen generation, for better or for worse. And if we did not know that or believe that before, we should know that and believe that now.

What we eat, how we build, what we make, all are either life-affirming or life-destroying.

The early rabbis too were part of a revolutionary generation. They had witnessed the destruction of the Temple and instead of just praying and waiting for its return, they determined that they were going to remake a vibrant Judaism in a new form, cast from their own imaginings. They knew this could be seen as either horrific blasphemy or creative piety. They meant it to be the latter, and defended it no doubt by claiming blessing in their self-aware daring. “Doubly beloved are we, knowing that we are made in God’s image. (And therefore authorized to keep our covenant with God alive in the best way we can imagine.)”

Like our founding fathers, these early rabbis were exquisitely aware of their place in history; of the need for bold action; of the power of their words (they determined the authentic, authorized method of recording); of the enduring nature of their behavior.

We too live in such an historic moment. There is no neutral now. Everything we do either heals or wounds the earth; either supports or fights our move toward a renewable-energy-driven world. We need to wean our generation, our world, off our dependence on the falsely generous largesse of millions of years of buried energy and water. We need to cease making toxins that the earth and our bodies cannot absorb. We need to dare to guide this fragile world through this hard time of transition.

What if we truly imagined ourselves as founders of a new world; as rabbis rebuilding without a blueprint in the shadow of the fallen Temple; as a congress of confederates pledging to transform this world so dangerously at odds with nature into a world once again in sync with nature?

What would that feel like? What would our lives, our days, look like? How will we feel about ourselves as our time comes to an end? And what will those who come after us think and say about us?

God put the choice of life or death before us, and bade us: “Choose life.” We dare do no less.