I'm SO glad the Union has launched this website! My husband and I have always been involved in environmental movements (we were charter members of the Cousteau Society and actually met Jacques Cousteau back in the 70s). But we always felt like salmon, swimming hopelessly upstream, until recently. Here we are, in our 60s, finally feeling like environmentalism is being taken seriously by more than just us tree-huggers.

Tu B'Shevat has always been my favorite holiday and this year, again, my 5 or 6 Shabbat School students (two of them our grandkids) will be planting a tree--in the very last place in our yard than can support one. Next year, I guess, we start in somebody else's yard!

Anyway, we all need all the help, advice and guidance we can get to fix our world and I thank the Union from the bottom of my heart for giving us a Jewish environmental path to follow so we know our efforts reflect our bodies, our minds, AND our Jewish souls!

Mr. Serwer,
Mazel Tov on your excellent exercise in a very rare concept these days: common sense. Yes, we are in fact going through a cool cycle which is a bi-product of the same thing that warmed the earth slightly in the recent past: the sun. Yes, the economic reality of the "global warming" or "climate change" myths (they just can't get around to admit they are wrong) is much more dismal than the convenient lies of AlGore and his ilk.

Let’s start with not uprooting two hundred year old olive trees on West Bank land.

Reaction??

Irregardless of whether you believe that climate change (and it is climate change, not global warming, because not all of the areas in the world do become warmer, some become colder) is due to a natural cycle of the earth's dynamics, or believe that this natural cycle has been accelerated by human action (climate scientists do not argue that the earth does not have these cycles, their argument is that the rate at which these cycles occur have been increased by human activity; as the earth's spin slows down, these events of hot and cold should be getting further apart, not closer together), it does not mitigate the true point and spirit of Tu B'Shvat, and any other type of faith-based environmental observance, that we are blessed to have trees/plants that produce our food, clothing, shelter and medicines and should, as human stewards, be doing our best to protect and enhance their blessing to be fruitful (in addition to our own well being of fruitfulness). Anything we do to improve the existence of other species can only improve upon our own, just as anything we do to destroy our environment will only end up harming ourselves (i.e. The Dust Bowl). As is well known and exemplified - if we poison the earth, water and air, we poison ourselves. Again, irregardless of what/who causes climate change, humans are yet out of step with what makes other natural dynamics work: sustainability - there is a checks and balance system. Our consumption and industrial patterns and economic policies are simply unsustainable - for ourselves and the planet. As anyone with any education in science knows, unlimited growth is cancer, which ends up killing its host. Humans need to be reminded of what our boundaries are; we can't continue to grow and grow and grow with disregard to other living things, as well as our own health; the result of that unchecked growth is collapse/death.

Tu B'Shvat reminds us of our limitations - yes, we can plant the seed, but we did not create the seed, nor did we cause the sun to shine, nor rain to fall to cause it to grow. However humans do have enough influence with our numbers and technology to have an impact on those patterns - no matter how small or large your view of that impact is. EVERY organism has an effect on its environment, and THAT is a basic principle of science that NO true scientist can dispute.

"Man and Nature" written in 1864 by George Perkins Marsh documents how the falls of ancient civilizations in the Middle East (Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman) were not from tactical, military blunders or social unrest, but from natural resource exhaustion. That region of the world is the cradle of human civilization and used to be thickly forested - its an arid land due to over-use/over-consumption over millenia. The conquering, invading armies came from outside the region, from areas that had not exhausted their natural resources, and were able to sustain and resupply themselves, versus the occupying powers that collapsed because they had no supplies. It also documents the author's observation that within his own lifetime (1801-1886), the climate in his home state of Vermont significantly changed due to deforestation of the state (80% of the state of VT was deforested from the late 1700's until post Civil War). He watched as the annual rain fall dropped, and temperatures swung in extremes in the summer and winter; he watched fertile soil erode into streams due to no plant cover, killing off the native fish populations with the particulates. George Perkins Marsh gave a lecture on human-influenced climate change (via deforestation) in Rutland, VT as early as 1852; through simple observation he was able to conclude that humans had enough of an impact on their environment to change weather patterns locally and regionally, if not globally. Simple illustration: In the summer is it cooler in the shade or out in the sun? The shade of course. If you cut down all of the trees, which provide a cooling shade, you increase the temperature, as well as remove your source of transpiration/moisture in the air that relates to rain. Just because the U.S. woke up after its exploitation of Eastern forests and began to replant and allow the land to recover doesn't mean other nations aren't now following in that disastrous path (South America, Indonesia, China and India) and the US is exploiting those sources on the cheap while struggling to keep that resource protected at home from industrialization. It's not just about the trees, its about what the trees hold together - the watershed, the ecosystem. Rip out a thread of that web, and the whole web ripples, if not falls apart.