Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation

Ancient wisdom on sustainability

August 26, 2010

Today’s guest post comes from Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Md.

Fred is my rabbi, and he’s a great guy; he was “green” before green was cool. In 19990, during his  junior year at Brandeis, Fred set off on a 3,300-mile walk from Los Angeles to New York as part of a project called the Global Walk for a Livable World. Today, he serves on the national boards of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) and as Chair of Greater Washington Interfaith Power & Light. Fred believes, as I do, that clergy of all faiths can and should play a greater role when it comes to teaching people about the environment, and the impact of their consumption.

This is a letter that Fred wrote last spring in the Adat Shalom newsletter under the headline “You Can’t Take It With You”:

Recently, while wrapping up the Book of Leviticus, we read Parashat Behar. This Torah portion is basically one chapter, Lev. 25 — and it’s at the very top of my list of favorite biblical passages. Behar outlines the every-seven-year Sabbatical (Shmita) during which the fields lie fallow, and the every-fiftieth-year Jubilee (Yovel) when debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and land is returned to its original owner. It’s the Jewish source for the notion that “you can’t take it with you”.

Leaving aside the scholarly debate over how thoroughly these teachings were practiced and enforced during Temple times, as a values statement there are many vital messages for us today in this teaching, from the political to the personal. Four short examples: [click to continue…]

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Baseball, a river, plastic bags and behavioral economics

April 6, 2010

It was a beautiful day for a ballgame yesterday at Nationals Park. President Obama threw out the first ball (to cheers), temperatures climbed close to 80 degrees, the game was a sellout and the ballpark overlooking Washington D.C.’s other river–the Anacostia — never looked better. Here’s the view from my perch in the upper deck.

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About that river: The Anacostia River flows for about eight miles from Prince George’s County, Maryland, into your nation’s capital, where it empties into the Potomac. It has a troubled past and a bright future, as I learned recently on a boat trip along the Anacostia organized by my synagogue, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, and led by our eco-friendly rabbi, Fred Dobb.

Jim Foster, the president of the Anacostia Watershed Society, told us that dumping of raw sewage, along with industrial waste from the Washington Navy Yard, had turned the Anacostia into one of America’s most polluted waterways by the late 1980s. Not coincidentally, the Anacostia runs through Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. Today, things are looking up.  Driving the improvement are tougher pollution laws, increased awareness of the river’s value, riverfront development spurred by the new Nationals Park and, most recently, a law regulating plastic bags in the District of Columbia that has already had a remarkable impact.

Plastic bags along the Anacosta

Plastic bags along the Anacosta

Plastic bags are a blight on the river. A trash survey by the city’s Department of the Environment found that, depending on whether the garbage was collected at storm drains, streams or nearby surface sites,  between 19 and 33 percent of the waste entering the Anacostia was plastic bags. About 20,000 tons of waste enter the river each year.

Last June, in an effort to protect the Anacostia and its tributaries, the D.C. City Council unanimously passed a five-cent tax on plastic and paper bags to discourage their use. Money collected under the bill will go to clean up the river.

How is the bag tax working out? Brilliantly, so far. In January, the month the bill took effect, people dramatically scaled back their use of plastic bags. According to The Washington Post:

In its first assessment of how the new law is working, the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue estimates that city food and grocery establishments issued about 3.3 million bags in January, which suggests a remarkable decrease. Prior to the bag tax taking effect Jan 1, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer had estimated that about 22.5 million bags were being issued per month in 2009.

Yes, that’s right: The city’s stores report that they gave out 85% fewer disposable bags the first month the law took effect. [click to continue…]

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