Coronavirus, Megacities and the Bible
Rabbi Yonatan Neril – The coronavirus thrives in megacities. The coronavirus has spread the most in megacities of 20 million people — Wuhan, New York City, and Tehran. The Wuhan metropolitan area has 19 million people.
Confronting coronavirus, curbing climate change
Rabbi Yonatan Neril – How much can the world do when we take a threat seriously! If China and S. Korea can arrest the spread of COVID-19, curbing climate change is surely possible.
Coronavirus vs. Humans: Nature Out of Balance
Rabbi Yonatan Neril – What does a pangolin — a scaly, ant-eating mammal — have to do with the coronavirus?
Amidst LA fires, religious leaders gather for ecological sustainability
With wildfires blazing in California, the Los Angeles Symposium on Ecologically Informed Theological Education took place from Sunday to Tuesday, Nov. 3-5, at American Jewish University’s Brandeis Bardin Campus near Simi Valley. Participants include faculty from Fuller Theological Seminary, America’s largest; Hebrew Union College; Bayan Claremont Islamic Graduate School; and Seattle School of Theology, among others of the 85 registrants. Speakers include priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, theological school professors and environmental scientists. Religious institutions have suffered the impacts of climate change in California, along with residents and businesses. In 2018, wildfires destroyed multiple churches in Paradise and caused the temporary closure of the Pepperdine Christian University campus. In 2017, wildfires destroyed three Jewish summer camps. The Symposium will take place 5 miles from the Easy Fire, 20 miles from the Getty Fire, and 12 miles from the recent Saddleridge Fire. These fires, along with the larger Kincade Fire, have forced…
Daoism and the Construction of Sustainable Societies
Clara Calabuig – According to Dr. Sarah Flavel, scholar from the Bath Spa University, the environmental problems that we face today can be explained by the Daoist principle of yin-yang, and thus are a result of a loss of balance in the human-nature relationship: “We have gone too far in exploiting the environment, to the extent that if we do not retreat from this path, we will lose balance completely”.
Burning Oil to Make Fresh Water
By Yonatan Neril Where does our water come from? A reservoir? A stream? A river? I recently visited the building site of the world’s largest desalination plant, at Soreq, in the center of Israel. They have built a huge tunnel to transport seawater from the Mediterranean Sea and turn it into fresh water. People think that desalination is the great solution to the world’s water problems, especially here in the Middle East. In recent years, hundreds of desalination plants have been built around the world. The U.S. has dozens of plants, Algeria has 15, and Israel five. What few people realize is that all of these plants burn fossil fuels in order to produce clean water. In the Jewish teaching, it is stated, “Who is wise? The person who sees the long term effect of their action.”(Tractate Tamid, 32a) Desalination technology solves the short term problem of water scarcity, but exacerbates…
From Crisis to Cosmos
Maria Fernanda Gebara – The roots of our ecological crisis can be found in the economic, political and social realities of modern industrial society, its organization of labour and methods of production.
San Francisco, Climate, & Christianity
Faygle Train – The San Francisco-Bay Area is a special one. The first Chinese fortune cookies with predictions were baked here, the first Levi’s jeans were manufactured here, and it’s one of the top 50 most visited cities in the world! But not all ‘Fog City’ facts are fun ones. San Francisco and the state of California are also suffering the effects of human-caused climate change.
New York, New Solutions
Faygle Train – New York is one of the most famous cities on earth, known for its musical theater, its multiculturalism, its yellow taxi cabs, and its winding subways. However, like other states, it is also becoming known for its climate change risks.