Every day this week, the Forward is publishing pieces from opinion leaders in different fields about their prescription for policy in President Obama’s second term. A sense of urgency over climate change has gripped the world’s scientists, as once-in-a-century superstorms, droughts, floods and shortages of food and water have become commonplace. Lately the alarm has…
Not so long ago, fracking was a technical term little known beyond the energy industry. Now it’s coming to Hollywood, as the fierce battle between environmentalists and oil firms is played out in several forthcoming films. Hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique also known as fracking, has lifted U.S. energy output dramatically, despite warnings from…
Just about four years ago, as the most recent American financial crisis was deepening, it seemed like an opportune time for a kind of right-sizing of the Jewish communal world. The Bernie Madoff scandal had suddenly robbed many Jewish organizations of funds they never, in fact, had, while the national recession depressed donations and decimated…
Six highly untraditional sukkahs — imagine black ash, recycled wood, inflatable inner tubes and grass — took over Liberty Park in this city’s downtown section in late September, inaugurating a locally sponsored national competition for environmental sukkah design. The sprawling scene was the work of a project known as Sukkah Arbor. The project is one…
What if Noah had been an exemplary spiritual leader and not just, as the Torah tells us, a righteous person by the standards of his own generation? Picture Noah as a true prophet of his time, a man who knows that God is about to destroy the world. Such a person would have done far…
There was a rare show of unity between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem this week, as leaders of the three faiths came together to promote a cause that affects them all — the environment. They spoke at the Interfaith Environmental Forum in Jerusalem, asserting the imperative in their religions to halt environmental damage and…
It’s a constant worry to most environmentalists. A plastic bottle discarded today is likely to be intact in a landfill hundreds of years from now. But for Haifa-based industrial designer Hadas Itzcovitch, the durability of those bottles has a silver lining. Itzcovitch, 30, is pioneering the bottles’ use in long-lasting and weatherproof outdoor art, and…
As we make plans to celebrate Earth Day 2011, we worry about radiation from a crippled nuclear plant in Japan. We face air pollution, species extinction, climate change. Major fish stocks are down 90%. And, more parochially, the Jewish community faces extraordinary stress and uncertainty. The federation system and many of our synagogues have lost…
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