If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past three weeks with our Can We Talk? series, it’s that there are Jewish students, clergy and professionals who have made the environment a key priority in their lives, work and education. Their commitment and ongoing efforts to instill an ethic of conservation, ecology and greenprinting into the Jewish community and beyond should be commended and nurtured.

The question we’d like to explore more fully, though, is why such a major component of tikkun olam seems to fall short so often when considered alongside other social justice needs.

Healing the world of course contemplates a broader template than our relationship to the land, but our connection to the land is so essential to our sustenance. To our food, our water, our bodies, our children’s future. We ignore responsible practices at our peril.

It’s so easy to slough off the vastness of climate change or irresponsible industrial practices as something so immense that one person cannot possibly make a difference. The only problem with this argument? It’s seriously flawed.

It’s flawed because, as we saw at our program on Feb. 19, we saw how individuals can make a difference in so many ways: Rabbi Andrew Kastner of Hillel by encouraging the links between our spiritual selves and the world around us; Marc Bluestone with his business practices that provide sensible energy practices for homes; Catherine Werner as the Director of Sustainability for the city of St. Louis in overseeing the creation of a plan that promotes harmonious and sensible living practices, for economic, community and physical resources.

And there are great Jewish organizations both local and around the nation and globe promoting healthy choices and practices. The Hazon movement promoting sustainable communities, our own area’s Jewish Environmental Initiative staffed by the Jewish Community Relations Council and whose teens Aitan Groener and Hannah Cropf participated respectively in our Feb. 19 panel and our special sections in the paper.

Those engaged in these efforts are Jewish members of our community, who are changing the way we look at our resources, one day at a time, sometimes one person at a time. It is only from the good and relentless works of individuals, working and sharing, that we see progress.

Such is the way it’s always been, in the Jewish community and otherwise. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts did not spontaneously combust from nothingness. They resulted from the hard, often frustrating work of pioneering environmentalists who were branded radical and anti-American. But spurred on by the writings of Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, they persevered, and ultimately a new sensibility emerged.

And so it is now. The JCRC’s work and that of local synagogues has led to a local manifestation of the national Green Faith movement, challenging religious institutions to adopt and promote healthy and green practices. The local Interfaith Power and Light movement is kicking off currently, with an event coming up in Kirkwood (7 p.m. March 7 at Grace Episcopal Church; more information at www.moipl.org). The good works of locals like Laura Cohen, who helped shape the community’s understanding and respect of the Confluence Greenway and our great rivers, and Ben Senturia, so instrumental in building a bridge between environmental concerns and political action in Missouri.

The works of these local Jewish leaders are great, to be sure, but they’re nowhere near enough to garner the kind of focus that befits our relationship with our precious world and resources. Without each of us embracing and promoting our care for the land and our environs daily and with intentionality, it’s just too easy to punt the responsibility to someone else.

It’s been especially tough recently, as a poor economy always seems to pit clean earth concerns against one another: Caring for the environment is too expensive when people need jobs. Climate change is somehow a luxury when folks are starving.

These were poor arguments four decades ago, when a green ethos was maturing, and they’re poor ones today. The costs to all of us, and most critically to our children, of not lending serious emphasis to resource issues, are enormous. Sure, we all must get by, but just as we have found common cause for any number of other social issues – poverty, bigotry, illiteracy – so, too, must we do for those matters pertaining to our environment.

We laud all those in the Jewish community and beyond who are doing their part to educate, promote and institute responsible resource practices in everyday life. We implore all to follow their example in your own lives so that ultimately, we all become leaders in a course of sensible and necessary sustainability.