By Rabbi Fred Dobb
Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, Bethesda, Maryland

• When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a Sabbath of God. 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, a Sabbath of God: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard… you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you: each of you shall return to their holding each of you shall return to their family... Do not wrong one another, but fear your God… the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me. Throughout the land that you hold, you must provide for the redemption of the land…
  Leviticus 25, linking justice and sustainability.
• There are important intermediate steps between hand outs and legislative reform. For example, low income renters and homeowners might be given incentives to exchange incandescent light bulbs with energy efficient ones. Landlords should be given incentives to put heating and cooling thermostats in their units that allow for turning down the heat when no ones home and up when they are and so forth. Obviously this not only provides cost benefits but also is good for the environment. Communities need to do a better job of organizing the recycling of used furniture so that we can reduce both waste in our landfills and the production of low quality and cheap (but not in the longer cost effective) furniture. We can also do more with making healthier foods more affordable...
  Rabbi Howard Cohen, response to JRF Omer Study, Week I, on the question of balancing our advocacy efforts with direct service.

There will always be hungry people in our midst (per Deut. 15) – unless and until, anyway, we tackle its root causes, and prevent the feedback mechanisms which exacerbate the problem. So far our Omer study has addressed many of these reasons why so many still go hungry, and these explorations are valuable, but incomplete. We still need to more thoroughly investigate the linkage between environmental destruction and human hunger, poverty, and suffering.

That linkage goes way back. The first sixth of the Talmud is Seder Z’ra’im, the Order of Seeds, pointing toward sustainable agriculture and tzedakah alike. Sustainable agriculture, where the land is respected enough to keep feeding people generation after generation, resonates from Leviticus to Tractate Peah to Israeli innovation in drip irrigation. That environment-hunger linkage is also important to consider precisely so we can learn how to feed people and spare ecosystems. The connection between human hunger and environmental devastation is a fact of history, a challenge for today, and a key to our survival tomorrow.

In the Past: Societies that don’t plan for the long-term, and don’t fastidiously protect their environment, collapse, with often disastrous results. Easter Island cut down forests to build up cities and monuments, and once treeless and soil-less, imploded. Ancient Mesopotamia supported a huge population through irrigation, but the growing salinity of the soil led millions to starve. Rome’s downfall may well have involved heavy metal contamination in the populace. How different are we?!

In the Present: Poor and hungry people, understandably, denude their local environment. What good is a wildlife preserve next door when your own family is malnourished? When residents need subsistence firewood to stay warm and heat food, what chance do the last nearby trees have? No environmental solution can work without also meeting the basic needs of the human population -- true in the savannah or in Savannah, in Tell Afar or Tel Aviv, locally and globally. And the reverse is true too: stripping vegetation creates new drier microclimates, leading to lower crop yields. Deforestation leads to soil erosion and loss of farmland. Toxins spewed into the air bioaccumulate in the plants and animals we eat. Polluted water sources compromise agriculture across the board. The environment must be protected in order to feed people; people must be fed in order to protect the environment.

In the Future: The impact of environmental destruction is always felt heaviest those already poorest and hungriest. “Environmental justice” advocates, including religious environmentalists, have long noted the undue environmental burden of the poor (the field began in a sense with a United Church of Christ study in 1985; the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, has in recent years been a key player in this movement). The worst however is yet to come: the rising sea levels and adverse weather changes that global warming are bringing will first and most seriously affect poor hungry people in developing nations, clustered along coastlines, already experiencing horrific food insecurity. Indigenous knowledge of agriculture and nature will be lost as the same crops no longer grow where they have for millennia. To keep people fed, global climate change and other environmental catastrophes must be mitigated.

What can we do for environmental justice? Three examples from Adat Shalom in Bethesda, MD. We designed our own synagogue building to be as energy efficient and as possible, using alternative materials (like cork instead of vinyl flooring) to be conscious of human health impacts. We sponsored a drive to replace potentially toxic mercury thermometers with digital ones, safely disposing of the hazardous older models. And we partnered with our local “Interfaith Power and Light” group (http://www.theregenerationproject.org) to buy a good percentage of the energy our synagogue uses from wind and other renewable sources, to do something to lessen the global warming now upon us.

In each of our communities there are so many things we can do. One of the texts above, from Rabbi Howard Cohen in Vermont, lists a host of possible actions. A number of our JRF affiliates are now designing synagogue buildings and expansions with environmental concerns in mind, led by JRC in Evanston Illinois which is breaking new ground by striving for high LEED certification (see www.usgbc.org for more on LEED green building).
Through Hazon (www.hazon.org) and on their own, numerous synagogues are starting organic gardens on their grounds, stewarding the land and feeding people at the same time.

And as individuals, acting on our most deeply held Jewish values, there is no limit to what we can accomplish. But first we must realize that we cannot choose either to feed the hungry or to protect Creation. As Jews and as people, we simply must do both.

Questions for Thought and Discussion:

1. What’s the best term for what we seek – social justice, or social-economic-environmental sustainability? Is justice possible without sustainability; and even if so, how helpful is it?
2. What (or what else) can / should you and your congregation do, to ensure both environmental and social/economic justice?
3. If you’re up for this tough one: what’s the role of Population in sustainability and justice? Advances in technology, agriculture, and ethics all mitigate the ill effects of population growth, but at 6.3 billion and counting, by some definitions Earth is well past its “carrying capacity” – especially if we could and would bring everyone up to the average upper-middle-class North American standard of living. Women’s rights, the role of education and government, and many other issues must be included in any discussion of population; for us, a Jewish population decline (thanks to first genocide, now demography) further complicates matters. But the question remains: Do we live our lifestyles, and freely choose our family size, on the backs of the world’s poor and backs of our own great-grandchildren? Two resources follow this question: lyrics from folk-singer-turned-UU-Minister Fred Small’s fabulous “Too Many People”, followed by excerpts from P Zohav’s provocative but important post earlier in this year’s Omer study:
   • Everything Possible
     1994 by Fred Small

     Too many people having too many babies
     Got to love them babies, but there’s
     too many people having too many babies
     Got to love them babies, but it’s out of control.

     Adam and Eve, time on their hands,
     hyperactive glands, room to expand –
     when they began begetting, they begatted to excess,
     eschewing tactics prophylactic: now we’re in a mess…

     Some say no, no no, it’s not the population,
     it’s consumption, pollution, unequal distribution –
     I say that’s so, but it’s a simple equation:
     population times pollution, equals no solution
     when there’s too many people having too many babies…

   • Shalom all,

     At the risk of supporting Malthus, I wonder if the current and often passionate discussions and suggestions may be glossing over something essential to the conversation. Population growth and the environment.

     Raising minimum wages, working for and with the homeless often seems to me to be akin to putting our fingers in a diminishing dike. Not that taking measures such as these ought be avoided, but maybe taking another look at population growth may provide an expanded context.

     When people and their environments are under stress they will reach for all kinds of notions that support, justify, and rationalize their point of view, support their chosen or inherited traditional ways of being. Sometimes it looks like religion, sometimes it looks like an ideology…

     In my view so long as the Palestinians, Israelis, Hindus, Muslims, Chinese... (one can substitute any other group) keep on making more and more children who will need more and more "stuff" supported by more and more demands for water, power, roads, buildings, bridges - a lasting peace with ____ (Israel, India, Pakistan, Iraq) will pretty much remain a dream.

     Hungry, deprived peoples do not dance well together.

     I do not believe that goodwill towards one another is sufficient. We need to work to reduce the pressures on our societies that inevitably will shove us into conflict, produce poverty, and hunger. P Zohav, in 2006 JRF Omer Study

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Rabbi Fred Dobb is the spiritual leader of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation and serves on the Board of Directors of COEJL, Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.

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