On my way to Havurah Shalom this morning for the Shavuot service, I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition about the Kids Science Challenge — a nationwide competition funded by the National Science Foundation to which more than 700 elementary school students submitted questions and ideas.
What floored me was the independent study conducted by an 8-year-old third-grader named Claire who took more than 100 water samples from five grass fields and five turf fields to study the difference in water run-off. She got the idea from playing soccer on the different surfaces and noticing that water on turf fields [...]
I had been thinking of offering a list today of my favorite “green” folks on Twitter, until I got this message from Astrology.com’s GreenScope:
The law of karma gets restated in a hundred different ways. In environmental terms, it’s simple: whatever you do will literally come back to you. So look for cleaning products that can go safely into the water supply system. Baking soda, vinegar and lemon juice work on almost anything and are completely biodegradable.
I’d written previously about green cleaning products — and yes, baking soda, white vinegar and lemon juice make for some excellent “mean green clean.” Apart [...]
I heard a new term this morning: “locavore.” This is someone who eats food that is produced/grown locally. The concept isn’t new, but I’d not realized there was now a “locavore movement” named for it.
Apparently, locavore was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s “word of the year” in 2007.
I am still trying to track down the source of “Bloom where you are planted” — a quote that seems particularly fitting for the locavore movement. People assume this is in the Bible — and the sentiment certainly is there — but I’ve yet to find this quote. Others claim this is from [...]
An interfaith gathering in the United Kingdom on May 15 helped dedicate the country’s largest woodland burial park.
Green burials — ranging from simply foregoing embalming to home funerals, woodland burials and sea reef memorials — are becoming increasingly popular, with good reason. To start with, embalming uses chemicals that pose health risks to morticians and which can seep into ground water, and the casket industry uses a tremendous amount of lumber, copper and other metals every year.
Much as many of us struggle against it, death is a natural part of life. No amount of body preservation, concrete grave liners or [...]
As part of my Jewish conversion process — and also out of my own curiosity — I recently read Arthur Green’s “Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow.” There’s a great deal of food for thought in these pages — including an entire chapter on “Kabbalah for an Environmental Age.” One passage in particular that struck me was:
The main Hebrew term for “soul” is neshamah, actually meaning “breath.” When the Torah depicts God blowing the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils (Gen. 2:7), Adam becomes a “living being,” a bearer of soul. Our soul comes into being in the moment when God [...]
When you think of “full moon magick,” images of people in pointy black hats dancing around a bonfire might come to mind. Many Pagans do mark the phases of the moon with rituals and other observances — though rarely with the bonfires or pointy hats — but Neo-pagan traditions aren’t the only ones with ties to the moon.
The evening after the first full moon following the spring equinox marks the beginning of Passover, and Easter falls on the first Sunday after that (i.e., on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox).
The Hindu holiday Hanuman Jayanti [...]
As our cities have grown larger, we have worked hard to distance ourselves from one another — compartmentalizing our lives through fences, apartment blocks and gridlocked cars. Even as we are in increasingly close physical proximity, we have grown more suspicious of each other. We isolate ourselves, not getting to know our neighbors, hoarding our resources and supplies for our own use, telling ourselves we definitely don’t need anyone else to get by.
Natural disasters and severe economic downturns have proven otherwise. And so has a family farm celebrating Easter in Western Oregon.
Yesterday, some friends stopped at a local family farm [...]
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Recent articles
- I was anti-gun, until I got stalked
Salon.com.
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- Voodoo Sisterhood
Skirt! Magazine. National.
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- Day camp teaches bike skills alongside eco-friendly field trips
The Oregonian. Portland, Oregon.
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- Shades of the Shoah
Aish Hatorah. Jerusalem, Israel / International.
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- Goodbye Green Guilt, Hello Change
Christian Science Monitor. National.
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- St. Lucia Day greets cyclists with treats
The Oregonian. Portland, Oregon.
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- Displaced by March Madness [PDF] [HTML]
Christian Science Monitor. National.
- Class Mixes Snow Caves, Sisterhood
Portland Tribune. Portland, Oregon.
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- Noses Know the Score
Portland Tribune. Portland, Oregon.
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