(Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It wasn’t an invitation she expected, but Canadian environmentalist Naomi Klein – a self-styled secular Jewish feminist – was happy to address Vatican officials after Pope Francis enlisted her for a campaign against climate change. Pope Francis, spiritual leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, published a 192-page encyclical last…
With Earth Day on April 22 and the unprecedented drought in California affecting the nation’s most populous state, there’s a Hasidic story about a frog that you should hear. The legendary founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, or Besht, was wandering a vast desert when he met a frog so large, he couldn’t tell…
Ecologists said on Wednesday it could take years to clean up a massive oil spill that flooded an Israeli nature reserve with up to five million liters of crude and threatened to spread to the Red Sea shore and neighboring Jordan. A breached pipeline started spewing oil into Evrona desert reserve – famed for its…
An oil spill from a pipeline into a desert nature reserve near Eilat is being called one of Israel’s worst environmental disasters. The Eilat –Ashkelon pipeline ruptured Wednesday night next to the Evrona reserve, on the border with Jordan. The break occurred during maintenance work on the pipeline that runs between the Mediterranean and Red…
A looming decision on one of the most-debated environmental issues in recent years has exposed the Jewish community’s fundamentally different perceptions about what’s at stake: national security for America and for its ally Israel, or the battle against climate change. The American Jewish Committee, one of the largest and most influential Jewish groups, has been…
When the Rockefeller family announced in September that their charitable foundation would sell off all its would sell off fossil fuel assets, the heirs to America’s quintessential oil baron added major heft to a growing divestment campaign. That campaign could stumble in the Jewish community, where the largest family foundation has deep, ongoing ties to…
The organizers’ official count of participants in the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21 was 400,000, but some thought it was even higher, so clogged were the Manhattan streets, so steady the flow of people, so joyful and determined the mood. It was a diverse crowd in some respects — age,…
More than 100 Jewish organizations participated in the People’s Climate March in New York as part of the Jewish Climate Campaign. The Jewish participants in Sunday’s march were encouraged to bring and blow shofars to provide a wake-up call to governments and organizations to work to fight climate change. Among the participating Jewish organizations were…
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