Tree Calculator

(photo from World News Update)

The first of the fireflies are here. They are the brave and hardy avant garde, canvassing the world from the soil to the tree tops, seeing how well we have fared since their last coming. Flashing their small beacons in the night, on and off, they signal to us an urgent message in Morse Code. I can imagine what they are saying:

"What have you done? This place is a mess! The Gulf is streaming out oil, force-feeding the bloated watery gut of your gluttonous world til you are sick with the very stuff you say you crave.

"The intractable tensions in the Middle East are becoming more, not less, complicated and intractable.

"The Miranda Ruling, the celebrated symbol of America's protection of the rights of the individual against potential abuse by the state for 40 years, has fallen. What are you people thinking?"

That's why I posted the photo of the guy at the top of this blog. I like his attitude. He seems pissed.

But fireflies also seem to symbolize hope - shining that little bit of light in the great expanse of darkness. So, as a nod to our little friends who both scold and encourage us, I share this lighthearted and useful bit of information I found recently, on one way to measure the value of trees.

This is very cool. Say you have a tree on your property, or on your congregation's property, or along your street or somewhere at work. One of the things you might want to do is figure out the value of such a tree. Not its board-feet value, but its environmental benefits, spelled out in monetary terms.

You can - by using a tree benefit calculator, courtesy of i-Trees.

Just go to http://www.trees.maryland.gov/calculator.asp (by clicking on the title of this blog) and you get whizzed to an on-line tree benefit calculator.

For example, I have a 3-foot diameter, majestic beech tree sitting just outside my house. To find out, roughly, just what this tree is doing for us, in addition to the aesthetic pleasure it gives, I type in my zip code, my kind of neighborhood, the tree type, its trunk size, and voila. Just like those old-fashioned fortune-telling robotic gypsies, this calculator spits out a formula that tells me all about the probable benefits of my tree.

I learn that my one beech tree will reduce atmospheric carbon by about 1,022 pounds a year, equivalent to almost one-tenth of my annual driving emissions and a little less than one plane ride's emission per passenger from here to Los Angeles.

It will intercept 14,565 gallons of stormwater runoff this year, keeping the tributaries and the bay cleaner.

It will conserve 351 Kilowatt hours of electricity I would otherwise use on cooling my home, absorb air pollutants and increase my property value. All in all, its monetary value in today's terms (not including the pleasure and spiritual benefits it gives me, or what I would get for the value of its wood) equals $371 per year.

But it gets even better. If I put in all my tulip poplars, I find that they yield overall benefits of $10,558 every year, not including the value of their wood!

While the calculator will be the first to tell you that this is not an exact science, it does help us roughly monetize the value of our trees. And for folks or businesses or congregations that need convincing that they should plant more trees, this can be somewhat persuasive.

For those of us, however, who are hopelessly enamored of trees, who just love being dwarfed by them, sheltered in their midst, shielded under their canopy, and comforted by their strength, they are, of course, priceless, no matter what their value.

Peak Oil

(Graph showing that world-wide oil production is thought to be at its peak and is beginning its terminal decline. Red arrow is the projected historic peak and blue arrow is the dip due to OPEC oil embargo, price spikes and conservation measures. From Grinning Planet website.)

As we celebrate Memorial Day, and honor all those who died for the freedoms that make America great, it is time to speak again of Peak Oil. The fact is that all of freedom's gifts that our fallen protectors fought for can be lost if we don't change our ways, accept our call to this moment in history, and create a moderated transition into a post-oil world. And we have to do it now.

A graph too grim to reproduce here gives us a doomsday version of what might happen if we just keep on keeping on. (For those of you who like horror movies, here is the link, from The Way Home website: http://www.briangordon.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/JS-Peak-Oil.gif)

We are living at an historic moment. World-wide oil production is now the highest it has ever been and the highest it ever will be again. The age of cheap, accessible, easy to get oil is over, forever. We have begun, or will begin within a year or two, the world's "terminal decline" of the extraction and production of oil.

This reduction is a game-changer, inevitable and unavoidable. We have built modernity on affordable, abundant oil. Our food, energy, lighting, transportation and millions of products we use every day for health, medicine, ease and recreation come from or are dependent on cheap oil. Even if no greenhouse gases were emitted burning the stuff, we would still have a crisis on our hands.

As the World Financial blog puts it:

Nowadays, everything is made of crude oil: our clothes, medicine, 90% of all our chemical products and everything else which looks like plastic. There is no day you don´t touch some crude oil except you live alone in the forest, far away from civilisation...

Note: In one hundred years, people will take us for a mug and can´t believe that we really burned this precious commodity within 150 years.

Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute writes on the reality and impact of Peak Oil: “This [the Gulf disaster] is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks — more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet. The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff.”

This is not hard to understand. It is only hard to accept. But the truth is simple: over the next 20 years, the ways we live will change, radically. There is nothing we can do to stop that. What we can and must do is manage and control that change, build new ways of living into our expectations and habits, and reclaim what we have lost in our misbegotten pursuit of excess.

This is going to require more from us than using Nalgenes and cloth shopping bags.

For example, Charles Komanoff (whom I had the pleasure to meet and serve on a panel with), crunched the numbers and found that in 2000, 47% of oil use in the United States was due to passenger travel, and 18% due to freight. Which means much of the solution is in our hands. We need to advocate and pay for a change in transportation options and technologies, and we need to check our own habits for how much we contribute to this mess. Now matter how difficult it may be at first, it will be cheaper and less disruptive if we change now than if we wait til oil is rarer still and prices spike beyond what we can support.

The solutions for Peak Oil will be more demanding than those for CO2 emissions. No amount of carbon offsets will give us more oil. We simply must find different ways of living.

In this transition period, it will be helpful to promote the benefits of living and buying local; reclaim the concept of neighborhood; re-ignite our passion for place; live closer to where we work; support local businesses; change travel expectations; support alternative research; and dare to believe that solutions may come from places we cannot now even imagine.

And we need to do it now. For that is the best way to celebrate and carry forward the life of goodness and freedom that our protectors died to preserve.

A visit

I am at the cabin in WV, de-winterizing it and readying it for the summer.

That is not hard to do, since we use the place all year round. We just turn off the baseboard heaters that keep the pipes from bursting, turn on the water, sweep out the lingering ashes from the wood-burning stove, and we are ready to go.

Almost. There was one more chore that I did in earnest for the first time today: cleaning up the front porch. The cabin is deep in the woods, so over the course of the winter and early spring, leaves, bugs, dust and debris whose origins I don’t even want to contemplate, accumulate on the floorboards of our porch.

So I cleaned: Sweep. Mop. Sweep again. (Trust me, that second sweeping is the secret to a happy floor.)

What amazed me about this job is not that I ended up with a clean porch and a presentable entryway (which, I admit, was important but predictable), but what happened to me along the way. Now normally, I think of myself as a rational person, one who understands the purpose of work, the boundaries of self, the nature of time, all those everyday concepts that are the hallmarks of sanity. So believe me when I say I am as surprised as anyone by what I am about to report. Here goes.

It started off innocently enough. In the beginning, there was just me, my mop-and-broom, and the dirt-laden floor. It is a ritual I have done thousands of time, not just with this floor but many floors. The motions are easy, swinging, repetitive, as familiar to me as rocking a cradle. Away and back, to and fro. The rhythm soothes, the routine lulls, loosening the dirt from the floor and me from my earth-bound moorings.

This is where the mystery began. And it wasn't the first time.

Not always, not even often, but sometimes, somewhere along the way of cleaning the floor, I feel, I know, I am not alone. Somewhere in the midst of a stroke of the mop or the arc of an arm-swing, the presence of other women, myriads of them, come to join me. They gather across the divide of space and time. They are women who have swept and mopped and cleaned their homes just like me, using their versions of sponges, rags and brooms just like me. They join me. Their arms become my arms, their purpose my purpose. It is not that we merge, reducing our multiple selves to one. It is more that we move together, bodies mirroring bodies, synchronizing souls. When it happens, it always surprises me and it always delights me. But I also always wonder what it means.

Sometimes they come just to keep me company, sometimes for support and sometimes with a lesson. I don’t want to overstate this, but I don’t want to understate it either. I know that the most likely explanation is that I have conjured them up somehow, products of my imagination. No matter. I can still learn from them. Here is what I learned today.

Tending to the outside of the home is different than straightening up the inside. Porches, sidewalks, yards are beyond the totally private claim of home space but not yet part of the fully public claim of shared space. They are within the legal bounds of "mine" but allow the permissible trespass of "other". They are a messy middle ground, where differing worlds both meet and part. Such places are both dangerous and exciting. I plan on devoting a chapter to thresholds in my book on Home - there is much to say about them. But here, I want to focus on two messages that my women seemed to bring me today from and about this liminal place:

1) Cleaning the outside of house is woman's way of marking home. All territorial animals have ways to signal that this place is claimed. Men use stones and fences to mark the boundaries of pre-existing space. Women daily create, conjure the space of home into existence, with every stroke of the broom.

2) Cleaning the outside is a public demonstration, a symbolic, sympathetic protest combatting and defying all things disordered. Using porch as theater, women's cleaning becomes a redemptive act performed by one calling for the participation of all. It is a manifesto for the public straightening of all things unjust, writ in the common dust of the earth.

Today's visit carried many more lessons. Perhaps it is something in the magic of the woods that amplified my women's message. But what I take away is this: despite what we might think, we are all bound to and responsible for each other beyond place and time; what we claim as our own is in truth just an extended act of borrowing; the boundaries between self and other, here and there, now and then are more porous than we imagine; and we must struggle to better understand how to live well and equitably with each other on this singular earth of ours.

This is their message on one foot. Now, as the rabbis say, we must go and study.

The art of survival

Rebecca Solnit is a spirited, spiritual guide to life's open-air secrets. She sees patterns and purpose in both mundane and extraordinary events that most of us overlook. Her writing style is as rich as her subjects are unusual.

She has treated us to a history of walking, which is not at all as plodding as you would think; three books on landscapes and politics; one on Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering photographer and murderer who captured motion on film and showed us that horses really do fly, on getting lost and finding oneself, and more.

Most recently, she has written what just may be her best book to date, and certainly her most important. It is called A Paradise Built in Hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster.

Solnit recounts several catastrophes (both natural and human-inflicted) that befell communities over the last century from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina. She argues that in times of catastrophe, many people, from all walks of life, rise to great heights of kindness, selflessness and generosity; that among such people and such acts, an air of purpose and joy fills the soul and becomes infectious.

Even more, it was those whose hearts were open to the other, those who did not fear the masses, who did not withdraw or withhold, who were best able to create quick, makeshift, appropriate responses that enabled others to survive.

There are those who believe that when the big crisis comes, we should hole up in our houses with our loved ones, shotguns and home-grown vegetables and protect what is ours. But there are others, like Solnit and the people whose stories she tells, who believe that survival, and society, do best when we trust and work with each other.

Research on the 1995 Chicago heat wave seems to confirm this. It tells us that while the weather overwhelmingly oppressed all the poor, conviviality, neighborliness, and the age-old tradition of looking out for each other disproportionately improved mortality rates. Poor whites and African Americans died in higher percentages than did Latinos. The apparent reason: the Latino neighborhoods offered a safer, closer, more intimate community. People took better care of each other.

On the other hand, the tragedy of Katrina that haunts us still was compounded by a legacy of fear and hate. It was not just nature, poor engineering or organizational ineptitude that caused so many casualties, Solnit argues. It was the darkness of the human spirit.

Thankfully, though, many faced with disaster are possessed of humanity's brightness. Throughout the book, Solnit recounts story after story in which ordinary people possess the initiative, kindness and capacity to organize, heal and support each other. Rump communities sprouted up, serving as surrogate family and security till government, infrastructure and routine returned. What we are learning from contemporary disasters is that we are each others' first responders. In the short run, spontaneous and random acts of kindness and organization lift the survival rate and blunt the psychological impact of loss and dislocation.

It is important that we hear this wisdom, this reality, for we are entering an era of increased crises, both natural and political (the two are often connected) and we must know how to respond. The BP Gulf disaster is only beginning to show its full fury. More avoidable and unavoidable tragedies will regrettably but inevitably come our way.

Solnit compelling argues that how we behave, how well we manage, how well we survive, are determined by what we believe. If we are filled with hate and fear of the other, we will lock our doors and take comfort in our guns.

But if we create a society which believes in the goodness of each other, if we believe with William James (as quoted by Solnit) that "human beings are at their best when much is demanded of us...," then we can prepare for on-coming random disasters in ways that ennoble us all, and save as many as possible.

But we need to do this together. We need to believe in each other.

Community resiliency is a growing discipline, wherein cites, counties, states and neighborhoods assess how well equipped they are to handle broad-scale disruptions. While we must further develop and train emergency personnel and systems, and have rapid communications and response teams ready, we also need to create a society of trust where every neighbor can be a first-responder. Believing in each other, caring for each other, tending to each other is a large part of preparedness, and survival.

I have not even begun to do justice to Solnit's soaring book. The references, the quotes, the historic cameos and coincidences that she has uncovered are worth the price and time invested in reading it. Not just as a window on the past but as a cautionary tale, and a hope, for tomorrow.


(photo of outdoor kitchen in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake, from windows2universe.org)

Morning cover

My husband was asked at shul yesterday what the word tallit means. We all know what a tallit is, that four-cornered flowing garment of infinite design and color that anchors the mitzvah of tzitzit, fringes.

But what does it mean? Where does the word come from? What are its roots?

It turns out, not surprisingly, that we don't really know. The word itself never appears in the Bible. The first time we see it is in the Talmud. But there are two best guesses about where it comes from, both based on elements of nature.

The first suggests that tallit is a derivative of the word talal, meaning shade. In a world of tanning salons, bronzers and beach bums; of places filled with forests and tall buildings and obscured skies, it is hard to imagine the passion for shade.

But Israel is a place of relentless sun. Especially in the summertime. It is not only hot, it is dry. Few clouds blunt the fierce solar rays. Day after day the sky is a brilliant blue, and the sun a stinging orb.

In biblical Israel, shade was a rare and precious commodity. In the settlements, the low buildings could offer some relief. But in the fields and along the roads, shade was elusive.

Years ago, my family and I were walking around Jerusalem on a typical summer's day. It was close to noon, so even the shadows that cities often cast were thin, waning and few. In an alley in the old city, we lit upon a long sliver of shade, not more than four inches deep, huddling against the side of a building. So for a few blessed minutes, we too huddled in its midst, flattening ourselves against the stuccoed wall.

Imagine then what it must be like to walk along the way with the naked sun beating down upon you, with nothing save the distant, desired, deferred dusk to ultimately offer relief.

In most ancient traditions, the sun was a god, harsh, powerful, dangerous and relentless. How fascinating that in Judaism, God is our shade, soft, comforting, protecting, restorative.

A tallit is measure of God's tender care, a sheltering fabric woven by God's courtiers, the seraphim, wrapping around us, shielding us from the harsh rays of the day we are about to enter. That is if the root of tallit is shade.

The other option is that it comes from tal, meaning dew. In summer months, when rain is far away and water is scarce, dew is the elixir that keeps life nourished. It was seen as almost magical, as stealth moisture slaking the thirst of the earth under the cover of night, dropping imperceptibly as a gift from heaven. It leaves as mysteriously as it comes. But its gifts remain to buoy us and gird us through the day.

So, like the dew, the tallit covers us in refreshing nourishment, ever so briefly in the early hours of the morning.

Either way, we are wrapped in the nurturing and nourishing folds of nature, both shade and dew seen as direct gifts of God. What better way is there to start each day?

Sunrise, Sunset

Avram and I stayed in a 100-year old carriage house over Shabbat, sharing our cozy accommodations with four gentle bay horses at a bed and breakfast in central western Pennsylvania. We were upstairs, the horses downstairs.

The planks that made up the walls of our room were from an abandoned old barn that had stood several miles away. Our ceiling was held up by an 8-inch square, hand-hewn support beam taken from an old dance hall. This was Heinz territory and the dance hall - we were told - was built and operated for the weekend entertainment of the young women who worked in the local factories. (This tale of social responsibility and humanistic business practices seems to be borne out today. Heinz has a whole section on its website touting its commitment to sustainable practices. Kudos for this.)

The carriage house and stable were in the middle of 35 acres of meadow; hayfields of knee-high alfalfa, timothy and oat grass; and dense woods. I saw my first shagbark hickory tree in those woods. Even for a novice like me it was not hard to pick out. The bark hung in long strips with the bottoms slightly curled up, looking for all the world like an unruly column of hair. (Think Mr. Snuffleupagus, for you Sesame Street fans.) The ground was strewn with telltale hickory nuts.

We were on the high ground in this notoriously and seductively hilly area, with nothing between us and the sky for miles around. We were able to witness sunrise and sunset from beginning to end from the vantage point of our carriage house. One whole day's worth of sunlight, watching the sun as it watched over us.

There is something humbling about the daily, effortless advance of the sun; the constant, quiet progress it makes hitching itself ever higher in the sky until it is impossibly close to the very apex of the heavens. And then, when it has proven its point, lowering itself, with gentle, feigned modesty, just a hint of pride shining through, to its appointed rendezvous with the waiting, patient, understanding horizon.

To be aware of the transit of the sun, of the passage of the hours, of the earth's ever-falling trajectory through space, and feeling a part of this stunning choreography, is to live just a bit grander, if ever-so-briefly.

We were in Pennsylvania for my daughter's college graduation. To us, of course, she is like the sun, buoyant and graceful, lighting up our lives. Sunday, we watched her as intently as we had watched the sun. From moment to moment, we were in awe of her ascent to womanhood, her moment of celebrated achievement, and her move away from us to the waiting, patient call of tomorrow.

This exquisite pairing of awareness of daughter and sun reminded us that there were too many days that came and went over the cluttered years without a single celebration, a quiet cheer, or even one simple hurray. There were too many days when we did not notice the brilliance of our daughter, and other loved ones, as they made they way through our earth-bound heavens.

No matter how hard we try, that is just the way life is lived.

But I am grateful for the confluence of this past weekend's hilltop retreat and life's commencement, for it momentarily cleared away the quotidian bramble and debris that obscure the constant, if overlooked, sources of warmth and light that fill our days.

That seems a fitting run up to Shavuot. Last night we counted the last of 49 days. Tonight we celebrate. Each night, for the past seven weeks, we counted each day. Each day according to its number; each day remembered for its uniqueness; each day celebrated for itself. No day overlooked (hopefully!).

This counting is good. It reminds us how hard it is to remember the mundane; how easy to forget. But that is what we are asked to do: Notice and remember. Whether today is a Tuesday, rainy, boring, graduation or your birthday, it is here, noteworthy and unforgettable.

That is a good spiritual discipline to carry forward as best we can even after the holiday.

Hag Sameah - have a wonderful Shavuot.

First Fruits

You gotta love May. (My mood has clearly changed!)

My youngest son's high school prom was last night - and he looked fantastic! It wasn't just the tux. It was his spirit showing through, all that he had become, and a bit of what he is yet to be. He stood there, my baby and a stranger, all molded into one.

He isn't mine anymore. He is launching into the world. And how lucky the world is. My consolation is that at least I get a front row seat. So, I managed not to cry, much, at least not in front of him.

But as the fates would have it, yesterday was also the day I first noticed, really noticed, the baby apples, the first fruits, of my homespun orchard. They are tiny, no bigger than a very large olive. But they are there. Defying the travails of the consumer world (I bought the trees at Home Depot three years ago), the transporting, the transplanting, the deer, the blizzard and mountains of snow, they have filled out and blossomed.

How they will manage the future, how they will negotiate dry spells, dark skies, desirous deer nibbling at their netting, the scrutiny of an overly zealous steward, only time will tell.

But there is something magical, and comforting, about my orchard and my son both blossoming and showing their promise of full fruit at the same time this lovely month of May (even if it is still overcast).

And at least, the orchard will not wander far from home.

The Big Kvetch

Perhaps it's the unusually rainy and cold merry month of May, but things are looking rather dreary.

Or perhaps it's just having read Bill McKibben's new book, Eaarth. It is, as all his books, wide-ranging, informative, written in his signature casual style and a fast read. But this one is particularly depressing. In it, he reprieves the theme from his End of Nature book, which is that we no longer live on the same earth as our ancestors did (hence the change of spelling from Earth to Eaarth); that we have so altered the way the world works, and have so stripped it of its natural resources and healing capacity that only a wholesale, permanent change in our attitude and behavior will see us through.

We have to give up our mantra of relentless growth. We have to return to local economies, healthy agriculture, earth-friendly productivity and old-fashioned neighborliness. We have to eat better, tending to how our diet affects the planet and not just our bodies. We have to consume less, swap out our persistent habit of travel and replace it with virtual visits, meetings and encounters on the internet. Distance will be conquered, or at least mitigated, by telecommunications.

He is not wrong. And he gives compelling examples of how all this is already emerging, and that we need to work harder to bring it to scale, to make it a part of our new culture, our new Eaarth. But despite his smiling photo on the back flap of the book, his relentless crusade, and his personal optimism amid his deep concern (I met him once this past year when he spoke in Baltimore - he is irresistibly hopeful), this book was depressing. Even its cover is depressing: it is a huge, bloated, fat X that is swallowing up the earth.

Or perhaps it is the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act that was unveiled yesterday, which is as sausage-y and schizophrenic a piece of legislation as one can imagine. (Read more about it here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/the-american-power-act/). The give-aways and concessions they had to put in there to get even this far threaten to so denude the bill that it hardly seems to be a victory. And even after all that, the pundits doubt it can pass.

Or perhaps it is this midrash on Noah that I had reason to teach recently and which frightens me more every time I do:

“When Noah came out of the ark, he saw the devastation. Horrified, he cried to God, challenging: 'God, how could you have done this?'

God replied, 'Oh Noah, don’t you see? When I told you I would destroy the world, I lingered and delayed, so that you would speak on its behalf, and on behalf of all its creatures and inhabitants. But once you knew you would be safe in the ark, you did not argue with Me, or work to make things right. And now you complain?'”

It is the complacency, the unnamed sense of privilege and ability to ride out this storm even if others suffer (though we are not experiencing a passing storm but a permanent rupture), and the lack of imagination for how bad things can get that increasingly astonish and alarm me.

How can one object to the aesthetics of wind turbines when the alternative is the loss of millions of acres of productive farmland; the scarcity if not absence of clean water - or any water for that matter - for more than half the earth; and the doubling of the land area friendly to deadly tropical diseases? How can one complain about voluntarily reducing one's footprint, and thus one's consumption of energy and resources, when the alternative is imposed world-wide scarcity and increased need? How would we feel if we came back 100 years from now and found that through our obstinacy, laziness, selfishness, inattentiveness, lack of imagination and all around foot-dragging that we have turned this Garden of Eden into a world of thorns and thistles?

And one hundred years is not so far away. For many of us, it is the world our grandchildren will inherit.

What we need to do seems clear, even surprisingly achievable and spiritually satisfying if we will it. So, nu?

The stakes are so very high. Beyond earth, where is life? What if we are it? What if we are the sole conscience and consciousness of the universe? What if it is all up to us?

We each occupy this precious planet for but a breath of time. We dare not trash it on our watch, for there will be no one after us to clean it up.

Spread the word. But more, model the way. Show your family, friends, bosses, co-workers how it is done. And how rewarding, fulfilling our new world can be. Invite them in and be their guide. Teach them the words to this new earth-song of ours. It is the only way we will save our planet, and ourselves.

corporate persons

Goldman Sachs is going a-courting today. It is trying to hang onto its die-hard lovers who are faithful to its profligate behavior, while soothing and reassuring past devotees who feel spurned and embarrassed by its selfish and destructive indulgences. The news tonight will be fun to watch.

But I am emboldened by today's meeting to post a piece I wrote in the wake of the disastrous Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to contribute to political campaigns, based on the legal premise that corporations are "persons".

Here it is:

The Supreme Court carved yet another notch in the suspenders that hold up the corporate world’s questionable but codified status as legal person. The problem with this designation is not only the false leap of imagination that allows a clutch of loosely affiliated people interested only in the value of their stocks to act as one huge Goliath, but that the persons these corporations behave like are so awful.

In a fascinating, frightening exercise, the behavior of the corporate "person" was measured against the seven behaviors that, in clusters of three or more, define a psychopathic personality. These behaviors are:

➢ Failure to conform to social norms
➢ Deceitfulness
➢ Impulsivity (failing to plan ahead)
➢ Aggressiveness (repeatedly being a party to a fight)
➢ Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
➢ Consistent irresponsibility
➢ Lack of remorse

Any three of these confer the diagnosis of psychopath. By contemporary standards, then, the corporation is a dysfunctional, destructive and dangerous person. Not even by accident, but by design. They should be restrained, given appropriate medication and a course of therapy. Instead, we have given them the keys to the ballot box.

We could argue that the best remedy is to reverse this long-standing legal ruling. But I don’t believe that such a reversal is likely to happen. Even if it were, rescinding personhood status only affects the corporation’s legal standing, not their culture. Their impulse to behave badly will press on.

What if, instead, we went the other way? What if we allowed, even demanded, that the idea of corporate personhood be fully, energetically, embraced? What if we took this status seriously and demanded that corporations, as persons, be held to the same lofty and noble standards of civility and goodness, generosity and neighborliness, as the rest of us? Their personhood status then would not only be a matter of regulations or laws. It would also be a matter of heart, morality and soul.

Corporations would then be expected to act according to the best of human impulses, in the best interests of society over the long term, and not according to their narrow, selfish interests over the next quarter. Even more, they would be judged on such behavior, by the rating companies, third-party certifiers and in the court of public opinion.

Corporations would have to live by the Golden Rule. They would have to do to others just as they would like others to do to them.

Deceptively enticing others to consume more than they need, make purchases beyond what they can afford, get into debt they cannot crawl out from under; betting against these consumers even as they encourage them to borrow more; mistreating those who work for them; and trashing the environment we all live and work in, might not look so good if measured in this way.

It is time for corporations to acknowledge that they are one of us; that their security and welfare are anchored in the security and welfare of both the human and natural worlds of which they are a part. It is time for them to acknowledge that they are the direct beneficiaries of our collective well-being; that neither we nor nature are chumps put here to maximize their profit without regard for our well-being. When people and nature are threatened, the corporation’s health is threatened.

Corporations don’t need to be altruistic. But they do need to be decent. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

Downstream from Eden

I spent Sunday's steamy afternoon in a cool church by a muddy creek in historic Annapolis.

The Chesapeake Covenant Community, a new-ish interfaith organization dedicated to "engaging, encouraging and supporting people of faith in caring for Earth in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed," was holding its coming out party, of sorts.

Roughly thirty people gathered to learn about the organization's make-over, our dreams, and how together we can make a difference. I have the honor of serving on the founding board.

They had asked me to prepare a closing ritual for the day. They wanted to do something by the creek, they said. Something that would send them forth inspired, connected and charged up.

Uh huh. Sure. No problem.

So after shvitzing and mulling and perseverating a bit, I found what I wanted.

I turned, as always, to our texts.

I spoke about the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve and our banishment from paradise, and wondered: why were we thrown out? Why was banishment the chosen punishment for eating the fruit of knowledge and not some other biblical favorite, like boils or leprosy?

Perhaps, I suggested, the humans were banished from the Garden not as a punishment depriving them of paradise but as a precaution protecting paradise from their human indiscretions. After all, while their eyes were now open to the possibilities of this fresh, new world, Adam and Eve had no experience in exercising their newly-found knowledge. They were naive, and knowledge and naivete make a dangerous couple. Who knows what mischief, or damage, they might have caused had they been left on their own in the Garden?

Sadly, we know. We are the generation of Adam and Eve let loose in the Garden. We are the generation that ate the apple, whose eyes were opened and who saw great possibilities. Like Adam and Eve, we too were naive, drunk with the nectar of discovery and knowledge, reckless about how we used it. We failed to see the price our advances would demand. We failed to believe the world had limits.

If the 20th century was our Garden of Eden, the 21st century is our banishment.

Adam and Eve were thrust out, and the Garden was sealed with a fiery, swirling sword protecting the Garden against our return.

But if we were cast out Eden, Eden was not totally cast out of the world. There is one remnant of the Garden that is with us still. One bit of Paradise that calls us to hope. It is the waters.

"A river issues from Eden to water the garden," chapter 2 of Genesis tells us, "and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; the second is Gihon; the third Hidekel and the fourth Prat." The rivers of the garden flowed out from it, watering all the lands of the earth.

Our rivers comes from Paradise. We all live downstream from the Garden of Eden. So what does this mean? It means we must never lose hope in our ability to save the earth and the Bay, the Gulf and the oceans, the rivers and the wildlife, the fishermen, whole communities and the land that depend upon them.

It means that earth possesses the wherewithal to heal itself and become paradise again if we but get out of its way.

It means that the vision of paradise has not abandoned us, and we must not abandon it. Through advocacy, green industry, personal behavior, consumer choices, education, and a renewed sense of awe toward our natural world, we can nurse earth back to health, perhaps even back to an echo of paradise.

If you wish to join CCC in our sacred work, please check out our website, www.chesapeakecovenant.org or be in touch with our Executive Director, Bill Breakey at breakeys@comcast.net

tree, hugging

This tree sits in my neighbor's yard. I pass it almost everyday, and everyday I generally ignore it. But yesterday was Arbor Day, a day set aside for celebrating and tending to trees. It was the 138th year of this American celebration. And so to mark it, I stopped for a moment to visit this tree.

It is intriguing. Whether it is one tree split in two, or two trees that come together as one, I will leave to my arborist friends to determine.

But I love the sensual intimacy that the tree evokes, and the romantic, if sad, story that it seems to capture about a couple who lived on our street until very recently.

This husband and wife were one of the first families to build and move here back in the 1950's when this neighborhood was first developed. They chose a wooded lot on the far side of the circle.

For 60 years they lived there. During the entire time that I grew up, rode my bike past their home, went off to college, got married, became a rabbi, worked in New York City, had kids and came home again to settle on the same street where I grew up, they were here.

By the time I returned, they were both in their eighties. I do not ever remember meeting them. But they were a stable part of our neighborhood. Until two weeks ago.

By then, they had both progressed into their nineties, and both were failing. She died first; he followed just three days later. Their obituaries sit side by side in the same issue of the Baltimore Jewish Times, one after the other in alphabetical order, the names of the grieving family members listed first for him, then for her. Neither obituary acknowledges the other.

But the tree does. The tree seems to capture the essence of their story. Two trunks, two independent lives, irrevocably and intimately connected, standing apart but leaning ever closer toward each other, season after season, year after year, until the two ultimately merge into one. Their children and loved ones wrapping themselves around this joining. Roots running deep; canopy full and sheltering.

If our lives could indeed be reflected in a tree, this, I would suggest, embodies theirs.