Jonathan Zasloff at the Legal Planet blog writes:
| Do Religion and Environmentalism Mix? I’m in Ohio this week for the biennial "Kallah" of ALEPH, the organizational home of the Jewish Renewal movement. This has led to an interesting question about the relation of religion and environmentalism. I’m taking a class given by Arthur Waskow on what he calls "eco-Judaism," which is a pretty self-explanatory phrase: Waskow believes that Jewish theology in general (and Biblical theology in particular) strongly tilts in favor of ecological consciousness. But I’m taking the class because at this stage, I am somewhat skeptical of the general notion that religion can add much to environmental policy debates. First, it seems to me that many of the crucial issues of modern environmentalism are not amenable to broad-based moral reasoning and intuition that religion can provide. Religious thinking has little to say about, for example, what is the appropriate amount of particulates that should be in the air, or whether climate change should be tackled by cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, or command-and-control regulation. Second, it concerns me to suggest that one cannot be a good Jew/Christian/Muslim/anything else and have a particular position on the environment. The environment is a political issue, and it should be. But that begins to move us toward a political test of religious commitment. That said, I don’t want to reject the notion entirely because it also seems to me that there are good counter-arguments ... |
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The rescue begins below and continues in the jump. (If you haven't already, consider joining DK GreenRoots, the new Google Group for environmentally active bloggers.)
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ChangeToWin wrote about Good Green Jobs: Moving from Rhetoric to Reality: "You’ve probably heard lots of buzz about ‘green jobs’ lately. But, you may have wondered, what does all that buzz translate to in the real world? How is the green jobs movement affecting real people and real communities? And are new green jobs being created in ways that make them good jobs -- jobs that can help a worker achieve the American Dream -- too? After the jump, stories and video of how one union is working from coast to coast to get workers ready for the green jobs of today and tomorrow -- and how communities are working with them to ensure that those green jobs are good jobs too."
In the DK GreenRoots-tagged diary: The Insanity of Bottled Water, Asinus Asinum Fricat lamented: "Most concerned citizens find that it is increasingly hard to argue against the fact that waste management has become a gigantic problem in the world, with landfills growing to the size of small counties, oceans being used as dumps and recycling habits remaining dismally low on the radar. The number of plastic bottles produced by the bottled water industry and subsequently discarded by careless consumers has not just exacerbated this problem but added on extra detritus to an already polluted planet, the majority of which is not bio-degradable."
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The Overnight News Digest is posted. Included is the story Major Military Operation Under Way in Afghanistan
