Earth Day celebrations—hangover or new beginning?

Sure it's easy to find your Tikkun Olam groove around Earth Day. But now we're eating vegetarian and composting raw food and garden scraps, coffee grinds, and more, we feel we're making tangible strides toward helping perfect—or at least protect—creation. We're nowhere near there yet—wherever "there" is—but we're better oriented than we were a year ago. 

I love how Kathy Freston reckons eating vegan impacts the environment: it does more to prevent global warming than buying a Prius. Simple. Here are some more of her many simple-but-telling comparisons: 

• Farmed animals excrete 60 times as much waste per day as the world's human population
  
• It takes 11 times more fossil fuel to make one calorie of animal protein than one calorie of plant protein
  
• Livestock worldwide consumes enough water in 24 hours for every human alive to shower eight times daily
  
• Farmed animals produce 40 percent more harmful emissions than all cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships in the world combined

As composters, we are bumbling neophytes; proud owners of a shiny new Tumbleweed. It's light, was easy to assemble, and seems robust, and while we've not yet produced compost, I'm anticipating or have noticed at least three positive effects. Composting is good for our: 

• Yard, replacing expensive water-saving mulch and, over time, helping turn our Hill Country clay into quality planting soil
  
• Environment, helping us cut back massively on the amount of trash we send to the landfill 
  
• Kids, encouraging them to work in the yard, learn about the environment, and play at science 

Of course we also benefit personally from eating vegetarian and composting—we live more healthful, more interesting, and more joyful lives. But for us, performing Tikkun Olam—in these and many other ways—means carrying out mitzvot, and there's no reason carrying out mitzvot, and living Jewishly, should be anything but joyful. Talk about win-win.

Try to find the joy. Good shabbos.