2005

Hinduism and Ecology

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The word “Hindu” derives from a Persian way of characterizing the variety of traditions and cultural practices that can be found on the other side of the Indus River, the great Himalayan cascade that now bisects Pakistan. “Hindu” describes persons practicing Vedic ritual or worshiping Krishna. “Hindu” also describes the shared customs of Jains, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians.

2001

Economic Globalization and the Environment

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Among many preposterous claims, advocates of economic globalization argue that it increases long-term environmental protection. The theory goes that as countries globalize, often by exploiting resources like forests, minerals, oil, coal, fish, wildlife, and water, their increased wealth will enable them to save more patches of nature from their ravages and they will be able to introduce technical devices to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of their own increased production. There is ample evidence, however, that when countries increase their apparent receipts in a global economy, most of the benefit goes to global corporations who have little incentive to put their profits back into environmental protection. Instead, they plow them back into further exploitation, or they just take the money and run, right out of the country. This is normal corporate behavior in a global economy.

2001

Clinton’s Environmental Legacy

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When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, he said that he would spend every day of his presidency thinking about how to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Four years later, the United States and the former Soviet Union possessed more nuclear weapons in their arsenals than before Carter’s arrival in the White House. What was Carter thinking about on those long afternoons in the Oval Office?

2000

The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century

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As our century draws to a close, we are facing a whole series of global problems which are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible. Concern with the environment is no longer one of many “single issues”; it is the context of everything else–of our lives, our businesses, our politics. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities–social, cultural, and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations.

1999

A Global Gamble

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The debate about global warming is a debate about the outcome of a gamble. We are betting that the benefits of our industrial and agricultural activities will outweigh the possible adverse consequences of an unfortunate by-product of our activities, an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that could lead to global warming and global climate changes.

1999

A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age

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A longing for Kabbalah is abroad in the land. Even people with little connection to Judaism, no knowledge of Hebrew, many of them in fact non-Jews, are seeking initiation into the secret chambers of Jewish esoteric knowledge. Differing from the interest in Hasidism that centered mostly around Chabad in the preceding decades, this turn to Kabbalah has rather little to do with Jewish observance or with nostalgia for a romanticized shtetl past (a past that many denizens of “Kabbalah centers” in fact do not share). The Kabbalah seekers are after the Truth, with a capital T.

1996

Toward a Meaningful Ecological Politics

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The word “ecology” comes from the Greek root oikos, meaning “home.” The idea is that the earth is a place of close relationships – that plants, animals, minerals, and humans matter to each other and together constitute an integrated whole. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, studies the interconnections between species and habitat. It arose from the insight that nature’s character could not be understood by merely concentrating on individual parts but that one must also focus on nature’s mutualities and interdependencies.