Jews aren’t just making waves within their own community over the issue of sustainability. Some are also creating change in the broader community as well. Here are a few of their stories.

Ben Senturia

Ask Ben Senturia if the Jewish community is doing enough and you get a ready response.

“No one is doing enough,” said the 69-year-old Central Reform congregant. “We’re at a key point in terms of encouraging new leadership in the environmental movement, specifically the social justice movement in general. There is a transition underway.”

The word leadership comes up a great deal in a conversation with Senturia, a longtime environmental activist who now is trying to focus on the bigger picture. As co-founder of Leadership for Social Change, an organization he helped create in 2006, he’s working to connect sustainability to a constellation of other social justice concerns including labor, gay and transgender rights and diversity issues. He’d like the next generation of leaders in these movements to collaborate and work together more for positive change.

 “It’s important to get new, strong leaders and there are opportunities beginning to happen,” he said. “If I was a young, concerned person in my 20s or 30s now and thinking about environmental issues in the Jewish or other communities, I think the lesson is that this is the time to jump in.”

Senturia wasn’t shy about jumping in early on. A one-time executive director of the St. Louis Committee for Environmental Information, he would eventually become head of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. Later, he was a trainer at the Institute for Conservation Leadership, a Washington D.C.-based organization. Even after retirement, he co-organized Missouri Votes Conservation and was active with Great Rivers Environmental Law Center.

He feels his present role is the logical next step for those in the general or the Jewish community who care about sustainability concerns.

“It connects all the dots,” he said. “The environment is powerful if we know how to connect the environment to all the other issues so that people support each other.”

The native St. Louisan, who is an avid birdwatcher, said social justice and ecology fit together well.

“I just have always loved the outdoors,” he said. “I’m also offended when I see a planet and people being abused in the name of whatever. It hurts me to see land and people being abused.”

Steve Sorkin

Steve Sorkin definitely believes in being a part of the solution.

“It hasn’t been a whole lot lately but once upon a time, I was quite the environmental activist,” said Sorkin, 57.

But even these days, Sorkin is still a member of the Sierra Club and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, a group for which he once served as interim executive director. He’s also still a part of the Jewish Environmental Initiative and a former member of One Sacred Earth, a now-defunct interfaith ecology group and he was once an element of the opposition to the Page Avenue extension.

“Open space and land has always been my personal interest,” said the Olivette resident, who also happens to serve as administrator for the St. Louis Rabbinical Association. “Obviously, I support clean air and water and other environmental things, too, but more urban-oriented issues like open space are a primary motivation.”

He says it’s vital for Jews to take an active role in the fight for environmental protection.

“I’m a really strong believer in the concept of stewardship,” he said. “I think it’s important from a Jewish perspective, just as important as tikkun olam and Israel and other things that people take as bedrock issues of Judaism. I believe that protecting God’s creation and handing it on to a future generation in good shape is just as important. That’s a big inspiration for what I do.”

As befits an activist, Sorkin came at his interest in the natural world through politics. The Central Reform congregant recalls that he was volunteering for political campaigns as early as junior high school.

“I was always sort of a citizen activist type doing advocacy work, pressing for legislation at the national and state level on environmental issues and active on coordinating petition drives and campaigns to get issues on the ballot,” he said.

“We need to keep plugging away so we can hand off a better Earth to our children,” he added.

Catherine Werner

Going all the way back to when she was taking environmental courses in high school, Catherine Werner knew she wanted to save the world but she was open to suggestions on exactly how. First she wanted to study international relations.

“I went off to college thinking I was going to save the world one way and then had a conversation with my father who was an attorney and he said there was this new field of environmental law,” recalled Werner.

Today, the Shaare Emeth congregant works out of the St. Louis mayor’s office as the city’s sustainability director, a position she’s held since 2009.

But it’s hardly her first brush with the topic. After graduating from Washington University, she started in private practice doing environmental law in Washington D.C. Later, after a stint at the Resolution Trust and Financial Deposit Insurance corporations, she chose to return home to take a “whopping pay cut” and a position as director of land protection at the Nature Conservancy of Missouri, which was work she found very rewarding. It was there that she fell in love with prairies. In 1999, she left the group to start her own organization, Prairies Forever. Later jobs would take her through environmental positions in Chicago government and at the University of Nevada campus in Reno.

Now, she’s home again.

“What I’ve really realized in my current situation is the importance and value of people in the equation,” said the 49-year-old. “While the natural environment is compelling in and of itself…really fostering a sense ofrespect, care, stewardship and nurturing and the relationships between people and the environment is the most important thing.”

Growing up in University City, Werner found a love of the environment early during a temple youth group summer camp experience in Colorado, something that inextricably tied her religious beliefs with the natural world.

“You would get up and pray and sing in the mountains outdoors and that really was my Jewish experience,” said Werner, who celebrated her bat mitzvah in Israel. “That was the most poignant part, combining nature and my religious beliefs.”

Her most recent achievement was completion of the city’s sustainability plan, a 260-page document released to the public late last year. She said her role with the local government is really to help integrate the different threads that were already forming there.

“There were a lot of things happening in the city, either by the city or its partners, relating to sustainability but they weren’t necessarily being characterized as sustainability,” she said. “There was an opportunity to weave together the efforts so they were more cohesive and deliberate in their orientation.”

She said one secret to effective environmental sustainability is the so-called “triple bottom line” approach. People, planet, profit. In the end, she says, creating prosperity has to be a part of the equation.

“We can’t just put a fence around the natural world and say we’ve saved it,” she said. “We need it and it needs us. It needs to be a symbiotic relationship.”

Laura Cohen

Laura Cohen said it’s hard to say how she initially got involved but she traces it back to appeals she heard in religious school to help plant trees in Israel during her Chicago childhood.

“I think that was an early message about the importance of our environment and how trees can help make an area more livable and sustainable,” she said.

Later, Cohen, now 61, was involved in various projects during her time working for the mayor of St. Louis, including the creation of the Columbia Bottoms Conservation Area near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi and the development of Forest Park’s Master Plan, something she still regards with pride.

“That was just a really important project and for me personally was incredibly rewarding with the community galvanized around a parks and open space issues,” she remembered.

After that, Cohen would spend a decade and a half as project director of Trailnet’s Confluence Greenway project.

Today, she’s still a part of the St. Louis Earth Day organization.

Cohen feels it’s important for Jews to lead the conversation on the environment.

“The other thing that I think the Jewish community can do in various kinds of clergy coalitions is to work with others in the St. Louis area in raising these issues and seeing how we can work together,” she said. “I think the leadership in the Jewish community helps set the agenda, both for the Jewish community and for the broader community.”

Cohen said that it’s difficult to know whether Jews are doing enough but she feels groups like the Jewish Environmental Initiative are setting a great example.

“We all have a long way to go in terms of what we can do but I just applaud the effort of groups like JEI and others who are working to raise these issues and make our community more sustainable,” she said.

The city resident knows that whatever happens, Jews should be at the forefront of the fight.

“Obviously, these are going to be very significant issues that are going to play out politically, nationally and internationally, for the rest of our lives and certainly for our kids and grandkids,” she said. “Bringing these issues up and having them as part of the agenda is really important.”