As Jews mark Tu Bishvat, the EPA turns its back on the Earth and public health
(RNS) — Led by its first-ever Jewish administrator, the EPA is planning to repeal a landmark determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.
An individual picks an apple.
(Photo by Skylar Zilka/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Laura Bellows
January 29, 2026
RNS
(RNS) — Every year on Tu Bishvat, Jewish communities celebrate a new year for the trees and rededicate themselves to the work of being caretakers for the planet that sustains us. The holiday, which we will mark this year from Feb. 1-2, is typically celebrated by hosting a Tu Bishvat seder, or festive meal, in which we enjoy various tree fruits and nuts.
The holiday is also an opportunity to honor our relationship to the natural world — our place alongside the air, water, food and ecosystems that sustain all life, physically and spiritually.
This year, the Trump administration is threatening that relationship like never before. The Environmental Protection Agency, led by its first-ever Jewish administrator, Lee Zeldin, is planning to repeal a landmark determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, issued in 2009, has been upheld by every administration since and forms the legal basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.
The decision to repeal it has no scientific rationale. It is a reckless, brazen maneuver of extreme short-sightedness that poses a fundamental risk to the health and well-being of not only trees, but of all life. The Endangerment Finding is simple, but crucial. Based on reams of scientific data, it finds that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health because emissions trap the sun’s heat inside the atmosphere, raise the temperature of land, air and water, and can cause deadly disruptions to our climate.
The Endangerment Finding has been nearly universally confirmed by climate scientists and scientific studies. And the dangers of the impacts of greenhouse gases are many: more frequent and severe climate disasters, like fires, floods and hurricanes; sustained droughts and heat waves that pose severe and long-lasting damage to our economy, our food supply, our housing stock and our future; and increased illnesses and medical emergencies.
January 29, 2026
RNS
(RNS) — Every year on Tu Bishvat, Jewish communities celebrate a new year for the trees and rededicate themselves to the work of being caretakers for the planet that sustains us. The holiday, which we will mark this year from Feb. 1-2, is typically celebrated by hosting a Tu Bishvat seder, or festive meal, in which we enjoy various tree fruits and nuts.
The holiday is also an opportunity to honor our relationship to the natural world — our place alongside the air, water, food and ecosystems that sustain all life, physically and spiritually.
This year, the Trump administration is threatening that relationship like never before. The Environmental Protection Agency, led by its first-ever Jewish administrator, Lee Zeldin, is planning to repeal a landmark determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, issued in 2009, has been upheld by every administration since and forms the legal basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.
The decision to repeal it has no scientific rationale. It is a reckless, brazen maneuver of extreme short-sightedness that poses a fundamental risk to the health and well-being of not only trees, but of all life. The Endangerment Finding is simple, but crucial. Based on reams of scientific data, it finds that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health because emissions trap the sun’s heat inside the atmosphere, raise the temperature of land, air and water, and can cause deadly disruptions to our climate.
The Endangerment Finding has been nearly universally confirmed by climate scientists and scientific studies. And the dangers of the impacts of greenhouse gases are many: more frequent and severe climate disasters, like fires, floods and hurricanes; sustained droughts and heat waves that pose severe and long-lasting damage to our economy, our food supply, our housing stock and our future; and increased illnesses and medical emergencies.
Zeldin’s EPA has already distinguished itself by dismantling as much of the regulatory frameworks behind protecting clean air and water in this country as fast as it seemingly can. For instance, earlier this month, the EPA decided it will no longer consider how many lives clean-air regulations would save when developing those regulations. And the agency stopped estimating the value of lives saved when setting limits on two deadly air pollutants. Instead, it is calculating the cost to companies of following regulations.
Such actions are destructive enough. But revoking the Endangerment Finding is a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s war on climate action. In undoing the finding, the EPA is not only lying to the public about the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis. The agency is also denying our fundamental, if damaged, relationship with the Earth, on which our lives and livelihoods depend. In Hebrew, the term for a human being, adam, shares a root with adamah — the Hebrew word for the Earth.
The mystical Tu Bishvat seder was designed by the kabbalists, or Jewish mystics, around the late 17th century. More recently, this tradition has been repopularized, especially among ecologically or environmentally focused Jewish communities. During the seder, participants not only enjoy the (literal) fruits of the Earth; they also explore environmental responsibility today. The seder focuses on the theme of “four worlds”: Asiya, the world of action; Yetzira, the world of change, emotion and transformation; Briyah, the world of contemplation and intellect; and Atzilut, the world of essence.
Zeldin and the EPA would do well to think of these four worlds today, for to repeal the Endangerment Finding is to violate each of them. It is a failure of action, a deliberate refusal to change and a violation of core Jewish values of protecting the natural world and the sanctity of life. And all of us will be impacted.
In addition to the EPA’s decision flying in the face of basic Jewish and universal values, it also directly abrogates the EPA’s own legal mission. That mission, in the words of the EPA itself, is to “protect human health and the environment.” It could not be clearer that a repeal of the Endangerment Finding contravenes this basic statement.
As Jews celebrate Tu Bishvat this year, it is imperative that we join with all people of faith to oppose this dangerous decision. In a time of cascading political and environmental threats in the U.S., it can feel difficult to imagine anything beyond the narrow bounds of the daily news cycle. But this holiday is a reminder for us all to honor and recommit to protecting our foundational relationship with our planet — and to fight for a future that is shared, safe and livable for all life.
(Rabbi Laura Bellows is director of spiritual activism and education at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Banning Lead In Gas Worked: The Proof Is In Our Hair
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The U.S. Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. CREDIT: Photo used by permission, Utah Historical Society.
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February 3, 2026
By Eurasia Review
Prior to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, Americans lived in communities awash with lead from industrial sources, paint, water supply pipes and, most significantly, tailpipe emissions. A dangerous neurotoxin that accumulates in human tissues and is linked to developmental deficits in children, environmental lead levels have come way down in the years since, and so have human exposures.
The proof is in your hair.
An analysis of hair samples conducted by University of Utah scientists show precipitous reductions in lead levels since 1916.
“We were able to show through our hair samples what the lead concentrations are before and after the establishment of regulations by the EPA,” said demographer Ken Smith, a distinguished professor emeritus of family and consumer studies. “We have hair samples spanning about 100 years. And back when the regulations were absent, the lead levels were about 100 times higher than they are after the regulations.”
A useful element with a dark side
The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health. The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling, a distinguished professor of both geology and biology. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can’t do exactly what they’d like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it’s had really, really positive effects.”
Lead is the heaviest of heavy metals that, like mercury and arsenic, accumulate in living tissue and are toxic at even low levels. Yet lead holds very useful properties, great for fashioning into pipes and as a chemical additive. Lead was added to paint to improve durability, speed up drying, and produce vibrant colors with greater coverage. Lead also improved the performance of automobile engines by preventing pistons from “knocking.”
By the 1970s its toxicity became well established and EPA regulations began phasing it out of paint, pipes, gasoline and other consumer products.
How Utahns’ affection for family history advances science
To document whether these steps were helping reduce lead exposure in people, Smith joined with geologist Diego Fernandez and Cerling, who had developed techniques to discern where animals have lived and what they eat based on chemical analysis of hair and teeth.
The lead research is built on a previous study funded by the university’s Center on Aging and the National Institutes of Health that had recruited Utahns who consented to provide blood samples and family health histories.
For the new study, the researchers asked members of that cohort to provide hair samples, both contemporary and from when they were young. These people obliged and some were able to find ancestors’ hair preserved in family scrapbooks dating as far back as a century. In all the team acquired hair samples from 48 individuals in this manner, offering a robust window into lead levels along Utah’s populous Wasatch Front, which historically experienced heavy lead emissions from industrial sources.
“The Utah part of this is so interesting because of the way people keep track of their family history. I don’t know that you could do this in New York or Florida,” said Smith, who directed the U’s Pedigree and Population Program at the Huntsman Cancer Center while these studies were conducted.
This region supported a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century, centered in the cities of Midvale and Murray. Most of Utah’s smelters were shuttered by the 1970s, around the same time the EPA clamped down on the use of lead in consumer products.
The research team ran the hair samples through mass spectrometry equipment at the facility directed by Fernandez.
“The surface of the hair is special. We can tell that some elements get concentrated and accumulated in the surface. Lead is one of those. That makes it easier because lead is not lost over time,” said Fernandez, a research professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “Because mass spectrometry is very sensitive, we can do it with one hair strand, though we cannot tell where the lead is in the hair. It’s probably in the surface mostly, but it could be also coming from the blood if that hair was synthesized when there was high lead in the blood.”
Blood would provide a better exposure assessment, but hair is far easier to collect and preserve, and more importantly, it offers clues to long-ago exposures for a person who is now grown up or even deceased.
“It doesn’t really record that internal blood concentration that your brain is seeing, but it tells you about that overall environmental exposure,” Cerling said. “One of the things that we found is that hair records that original value, but then the longer the hair has been exposed to the environment, the higher the lead concentrations are.”
The team’s findings regarding lead in hair run parallel to the reductions of lead in gasoline following the EPA’s establishment by President Richard Nixon.
Prior to 1970, for example, gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon. That might not sound like much, but considering the billions of gallons of fuel American automobiles burn each year, it added up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released into the environment per person a year.
‘It’s an enormous amount of lead that’s being put into the environment and quite locally,” Cerling said. “It’s just coming out of the tailpipe, goes up in the air and then it comes down. It’s in the air for a number of days, especially during the inversions that we have and it absorbs into your hair, you breathe it and it goes into your lungs.”
But after 1970s, even as gasoline consumption escalated in the United States, the concentrations of lead in the hair samples plummeted, from as high as 100 parts per million (ppm) to 10 ppm by 1990. In 2024, the level was less than 1 ppm.
By Eurasia Review
Prior to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, Americans lived in communities awash with lead from industrial sources, paint, water supply pipes and, most significantly, tailpipe emissions. A dangerous neurotoxin that accumulates in human tissues and is linked to developmental deficits in children, environmental lead levels have come way down in the years since, and so have human exposures.
The proof is in your hair.
An analysis of hair samples conducted by University of Utah scientists show precipitous reductions in lead levels since 1916.
“We were able to show through our hair samples what the lead concentrations are before and after the establishment of regulations by the EPA,” said demographer Ken Smith, a distinguished professor emeritus of family and consumer studies. “We have hair samples spanning about 100 years. And back when the regulations were absent, the lead levels were about 100 times higher than they are after the regulations.”
A useful element with a dark side
The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health. The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling, a distinguished professor of both geology and biology. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can’t do exactly what they’d like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it’s had really, really positive effects.”
Lead is the heaviest of heavy metals that, like mercury and arsenic, accumulate in living tissue and are toxic at even low levels. Yet lead holds very useful properties, great for fashioning into pipes and as a chemical additive. Lead was added to paint to improve durability, speed up drying, and produce vibrant colors with greater coverage. Lead also improved the performance of automobile engines by preventing pistons from “knocking.”
By the 1970s its toxicity became well established and EPA regulations began phasing it out of paint, pipes, gasoline and other consumer products.
How Utahns’ affection for family history advances science
To document whether these steps were helping reduce lead exposure in people, Smith joined with geologist Diego Fernandez and Cerling, who had developed techniques to discern where animals have lived and what they eat based on chemical analysis of hair and teeth.
The lead research is built on a previous study funded by the university’s Center on Aging and the National Institutes of Health that had recruited Utahns who consented to provide blood samples and family health histories.
For the new study, the researchers asked members of that cohort to provide hair samples, both contemporary and from when they were young. These people obliged and some were able to find ancestors’ hair preserved in family scrapbooks dating as far back as a century. In all the team acquired hair samples from 48 individuals in this manner, offering a robust window into lead levels along Utah’s populous Wasatch Front, which historically experienced heavy lead emissions from industrial sources.
“The Utah part of this is so interesting because of the way people keep track of their family history. I don’t know that you could do this in New York or Florida,” said Smith, who directed the U’s Pedigree and Population Program at the Huntsman Cancer Center while these studies were conducted.
This region supported a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century, centered in the cities of Midvale and Murray. Most of Utah’s smelters were shuttered by the 1970s, around the same time the EPA clamped down on the use of lead in consumer products.
The research team ran the hair samples through mass spectrometry equipment at the facility directed by Fernandez.
“The surface of the hair is special. We can tell that some elements get concentrated and accumulated in the surface. Lead is one of those. That makes it easier because lead is not lost over time,” said Fernandez, a research professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “Because mass spectrometry is very sensitive, we can do it with one hair strand, though we cannot tell where the lead is in the hair. It’s probably in the surface mostly, but it could be also coming from the blood if that hair was synthesized when there was high lead in the blood.”
Blood would provide a better exposure assessment, but hair is far easier to collect and preserve, and more importantly, it offers clues to long-ago exposures for a person who is now grown up or even deceased.
“It doesn’t really record that internal blood concentration that your brain is seeing, but it tells you about that overall environmental exposure,” Cerling said. “One of the things that we found is that hair records that original value, but then the longer the hair has been exposed to the environment, the higher the lead concentrations are.”
The team’s findings regarding lead in hair run parallel to the reductions of lead in gasoline following the EPA’s establishment by President Richard Nixon.
Prior to 1970, for example, gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon. That might not sound like much, but considering the billions of gallons of fuel American automobiles burn each year, it added up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released into the environment per person a year.
‘It’s an enormous amount of lead that’s being put into the environment and quite locally,” Cerling said. “It’s just coming out of the tailpipe, goes up in the air and then it comes down. It’s in the air for a number of days, especially during the inversions that we have and it absorbs into your hair, you breathe it and it goes into your lungs.”
But after 1970s, even as gasoline consumption escalated in the United States, the concentrations of lead in the hair samples plummeted, from as high as 100 parts per million (ppm) to 10 ppm by 1990. In 2024, the level was less than 1 ppm.
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