Emily Freed smothers a chuckle, recalling the phone call she often gets from supermarkets. It’s another friend, flummoxed in the produce section.

“Should I buy the local peaches or the organic apples shipped from Argentina?” worries the voice on the line. Freed, 32, who manages six organic farms for Jacobs Farms/Del Cabo in the Santa Cruz, Calif., area, is glad to field the query. Her greener choice? “Supporting your local growers will strengthen your community, give you the best-tasting produce, and cause the least impact on the environment,” says Freed, who also teaches organic gardening in the Bay Area Jewish community. 

This doyenne of culinary herbs—the farms she oversees grow 50 varieties, from basil to rosemary—is one of a new breed of environmentalists, spanning fields from agriculture to architecture, advocacy to entrepreneurship, who are bringing their values down to earth. Literally. The green movement is increasingly devising ways to address such practical needs as healthy food, energy-saving buildings and sustainable small business. These efforts join the movement’s traditional concerns, from the toxic chemicals Rachel Carson warned of in her pioneering 1962 book, Silent Spring, to wildlife conservation and the air pollution now seen as driving global warming. Across this environmental spectrum, Jewish women are leading innovation at local, national and international levels.

When Malia and Sasha Obama tote their backpacks across the Washington, D.C.-area campuses of the Sidwell Friends School, the president’s daughters are learning green values. That’s because Sidwell’s middle school, with its wastewater-cleaning wetland and floors recycled from Baltimore Harbor pilings, won the top rating from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program of the U.S. Green Building Council. Guiding the school and its team of designers on the path to a platinum award was consultant Iris Amdur.

The D.C. architect, 42, began her own green journey with a troubled eye on building demolition practices and an ear tuned to the Jewish mandate to avoid waste. “It just killed me to see all these resources going into the trash,” Amdur says of discarded carpets, millwork and glass. “I salvaged a couple of brass coat hooks, put them in my backpack, and realized my pack isn’t big enough to carry everything I saw.” Her concern led her to help launch the Construction Material Recovery Coalition, which spurred creation of guidelines for local builders and a warehouse for recycled materials, Community Forklift.
Amdur would go on to found GreenShape LLC, a green building consulting firm, on Earth Day 2004. At first, she labored from home with a handful of clients. In the firm’s first four years, she doubled her staff annually and now has eight employees and an average of 70 active projects. “The market is now aware of the value of green buildings,” says Amdur, “and governments—local to national—are adopting LEED standards.”

Northward, in New England, Kate Harrison, 30, hatched a pair of green businesses almost by accident. She was planning her 2007 wedding to now-husband Barry Muchnik, a Ph.D. student in environmental history. “Like all couples, we wanted a wedding that reflected who we are … in keeping with our values and beliefs,” recalls Harrison, of New Haven, Conn., herself a recent law grad finishing a master’s degree in environmental management.

Marrying green took some creativity. In lieu of expensive floral arrangements, the couple asked friends for blooms from their gardens and bought organic dahlias from a local farmer. Dispensing with a disposable aisle runner, they borrowed an old Oriental rug from Harrison’s parents. After the ceremony, Harrison realized she had enough ideas for a book. She gathered them into The Green Bride: How to Create an Earth-Friendly Wedding on Any Budget and followed it with a Web site, www.thegreenbrideguide.com, for updates on vendors. It was natural for Harrison, an alumna of Habonim Dror summer camps, to search out similar resources for b’nai mitzvah celebrations and yet another online business, www.greenmitzvot.com, was born last fall.

Putting Earth on the guest list, in one’s career, and in one’s moral code makes religious sense, suggests Rabbi Jamie Korngold of Boulder, Colo. “Our texts are filled with stories about our ancestors’ experiences outdoors and laws about how we’re to treat the environment,” says Korngold. “God could have come to Moses in a city—but he didn’t.” In her recent book, God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors with the Adventure Rabbi, she calls for a spirituality grounded in the wonder of mountains, woods and seascapes as well as Torah and Talmud. And she cites traditional sources that frown on air or water pollution and favor urban green space. “It’s not our planet; it’s God’s,” Korngold says. Since so many Jews tap spiritual strength in nature, they should also commit to preserving it. “If the natural world is a spiritual portal, we have to take care of it,” Korngold says.

In recent decades, most North American Jews have grown up among city blocks or suburban lanes. Yet, for some, youthful contact with nature plants a lifelong affinity for things green. Animal conservation advocate Susan Lieberman fell in love with wildlife when, as a young woman, she traveled to Israel. Living on a Negev kibbutz, she was awed by the desert’s vastness, the armies of migratory birds winging overhead. “I just loved being outside,” recalls the Los Angeles native. “I knew that was what I wanted to do professionally.”

Photo: Roger Sideman Emily Freed is in her element on one of six organic farms that she manages in the Santa Cruz, Calif., area. The farms grow 50 varieties of herbs, from basil to rosemary.

At Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Lieberman delved into the then-emerging field of ecology. She later earned a Ph.D. in tropical ecology on Costa Rican reptiles and amphibians, and did a post-doc on Mexican desert tortoises. She would rise to leadership roles in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and her current post as director of the Global Species Programme with World Wildlife Fund International. From her office in Geneva, Switzerland, she works to save such “flagship species” as elephants and pandas, corals and whales.

No longer the field scientist, Lieberman’s travels today whisk her to intergovernmental talks on the ivory trade and marine life in the Arabian Gulf. “I’m doing the biodiplomacy, so the biology and ecology can continue,” she explains. That means getting fuel and food to Congolese refugees so the rainforests around them will endure. “We’re all in this planet together,” says Lieberman. “If we want conservation to work for the long term, if we want a healthy planet, it has to work for people.”

For other activists, conservation starts closer to home. At 16, author Amy Goldman moved with her family to the North Shore of Long Island, where she first experimented with gardening. In an abandoned greenhouse, she sowed tomatoes that her mother turned into goulash and marinara sauce. “It seemed I had a gift for kitchen gardening,” says Goldman, “and ever since, my hands have been in the soil.”

Now at home in New York’s Hudson Valley, she went on to become a clinical psychologist, but her green thumb never stopped working. After racking up gardening awards, she turned to writing books, reaping a literary harvest that spans Melons for the Passionate Grower; The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes and Gourds; and The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table; Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful Fruit.

Documenting rare forms of garden plants made Goldman a champion for biodiversity. Dwindling heirloom varieties, she explains, provide a “genetic reservoir” for wild plants, farm crops and garden varieties. “We’ve got to act fast to preserve it,” warns Goldman, chair of the Seed Savers Exchange. Heirloom tomatoes like Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter are not just for foodies, she stresses. Such varieties are “the people’s tomatoes,” Goldman declares, noting their abundant yields, which in tough times help stretch family budgets. She sees her passion for seed preservation as part of a larger web of life. “The seed is the first link in the food chain,” says Goldman. “Our fate is tied to our seeds.”

In doing her own green wedding in 2007, Kate Harrison gathered enough ideas to write a book and launch a Web site on creating earth-friendly nuptials.

The other secret, on a vastly smaller but still lethal scale, were the events of October 1948, when smoke from the local zinc works mixed with fog to leave some 70 people dead within the month and thousands more, including Davis family members, racked with chronic illness. Again, no one nearby pinned the blame where it justly belonged, on the zinc plant. In her book When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, a finalist for the National Book Award, Davis retells the Donora incident and other devastating cases of chemical contamination.

Davis has spent a career raising her own voice against the toxic effects of industrial chemicals on human health. Today, she directs the world’s only Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, which works to identify both causes of cancer and risk-reducing factors. ‘We’re on the cusp of a revolution,” Davis says. The old research paradigm gauged the safety of synthetic chemicals by testing if they caused cancer or other harm at high doses. She calls for examining the real-world situation of multiple chemicals at lower exposures. “In the 19th century, better housing, sanitation and the end of child labor led to healthier and longer lives,” she writes in her 2007 book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, noting women’s leadership in these reforms. “Today women, and the men who support them, are working at the local, national and international levels, advocating parallel efforts to reduce the use of cosmetic pesticides in schools and homes, promote less polluting cleaning and grooming agents and make greener and cleaner and less toxic hospitals and communities.”

In Silver Spring, Md., Devora Kimelman-Block, 37, draws her passion for the environment from a grandfather who raised his own flavorful tomatoes. “That sense of doing it yourself, raising your own sustenance—there’s a little bit of that in my blood,” she says. This mother of three was so appalled by the practices of industrial meat production—which she calls “disastrous for the environment, consumer health, the workers and the poor animals”—that she launched KOL Foods in mid-2007.

KOL Foods, designed to rhyme with the name of a leading natural foods retailer, stands for “kosher, organic and locally raised.” At the outset, Kimelman-Block sold 400 pounds of beef from one Maryland farm for $3,800. Some 18 months later, she was grossing $21,200 for beef, lamb and Thanksgiving turkeys from six farms for customers in six East Coast communities.

With early success has come growing demand from around the country, which has led Kimelman-Block to seek investors for her business. Dubbing her “values-based” venture “social entrepreneurship,” she aims not only to provide her customers with tasty, kosher meat, but to build a more sustainable system to produce it. “One of my goals is to demonstrate to the big kosher producers that there is another way,” she says. “It’s so much more personally satisfying that the business is good for people and the environment.”

Indeed, the line between Jewish passions for the natural world and for social justice is increasingly blurred. Take Karyn Moskowitz, 46, of Louisville, Ky., who spends her days “making sure that eating fresh, healthy, local food is a right, not a luxury.” Armed with an MBA in environmental management, she bridges two worlds that once had virtually no contact—Kentucky farmers who have traded their tobacco fields for rows of organic produce and city dwellers who live in the “food deserts” of West Louisville and eastern downtown Louisville. In these low-income urban areas, grocery stores are scarce and residents rely on produce-poor corner stores and fast food meals for their nutrition.

As business development organizer for the Community Farm Alliance, based near Louisville, Moskowitz is busy building alternative food networks. She helped “incubate” a West Louisville enterprise, Grasshoppers Distribution LLC, for instance, that markets locally grown foods to city stores, restaurants, schools and CSAs. That last acronym stands for “community supported agriculture,” a kind of subscription service that’s putting fresh vegetables on family tables and making small farming pay again in communities nationwide.

Businesses like Grasshoppers, says Moskowitz, offer benefits beyond healthier meals for urban residents, who often suffer from diet-related illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. “We are protecting family farms and methods of sustainable agriculture, which are being reborn,” Moskowitz says. “We’re healing the land here in Kentucky.”

On a parallel path in Alamo, Calif., chef Alison Negrin, 57, is linking communities that once were not on speaking terms—the local foods movement and mainstream health care. Negrin’s culinary creations once graced the menus of such Bay Area restaurants as Chez Panisse and Ginger Island. Now, as executive chef for John Muir Health Systems, she dreams up dishes for patients and the staff cafeteria on the hospital’s three campuses, along with planning meals for meetings and other catered affairs there. Her role permits Negrin to tap both her love of haute cuisine and her interest in wellness, deepened by her studies of Chinese medicine.

On a recent day at the hospital café, employees and visitors could opt for a whole-grain vegetable gratin or teriyaki salmon with papaya salsa, as well as a traditional Reuben sandwich from the grill. With Negrin’s leadership and that of an in-house Healthy Food Committee, the hospital has pledged to buy more local foods, offer more seasonal fresh fruits and vegetables, and put more whole grains on its menus. “Given that hospitals are such large institutions and we purchase in such volume, we can affect how food is produced and distributed,” Negrin says. She’s partnering with managers at other hospitals across the region to boost the amount of local foods they all use and, by extension, shrinking their carbon footprint, Negrin says. Plus, she adds, “We’re helping our local economy by buying from sources close by.”

Whether it’s promoting local foods or safeguarding gorillas, recycling lumber or touting trashless weddings, women activists and entrepreneurs are aiding the environment in measurable, incremental ways. “We’re starting to do the addition,” says green building maven Amdur, who figures that her firm has helped clients save more than 11 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually and keep 1.4 million tons of construction materials out of landfills. Harrison, dreaming of a day when blissful brides no longer mean full dumpsters, notes that the average wedding generates some 600 to 800 pounds of trash. “If even a fraction of these weddings were green or had one green element, that would be a huge environmental savings,” Harrison says.

Their comments suggest a larger truth: Saving the natural world is a job that belongs not just to environmentalists, but to the rest of us. And it begins, says Rabbi Jamie Korngold, in the details of daily life: “A person’s choices about how to build their home or whether to bring a canvas bag shopping, those are Jewish decisions.”

Paula Amann, a former news editor for Washington Jewish Week, is the author of the book Journeys to a Jewish Life: Inspiring Stories From the Spiritual Journeys of American Jews (Jewish Lights).