In this episode I speak with Sydney Rodman, founder of Green Revival. She offers a refreshing perspective on nature and climate action rooted in Orthodox Judaism, challenging the doom-focused environmental movement with a life-affirming approach to solving ecological problems. We discuss:
How her journey to Orthodox Judaism shaped her ecological worldview and approach to business.
The concept of "sourcing" that connects her faith, scientific background, and company mission.
Why invasive species management presents both ecological challenges and economic opportunities.
How the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) informs environmental stewardship.
Why climate action must be centered on celebrating life rather than focusing exclusively on carbon.
David Valerio: Describe your faith and spirituality for me. How does it impact your view of the natural world and the work that you do?
Sydney Rodman: I didn't grow up religious. I'm now an Orthodox Jew. I'm what's called a baale teshuva, which means that I didn't grow up religious but I chose it on my own. I searched and found that this is the best way for me to live. I think great spirituality is all about searching. We're put in this world and we ask, "What is this? What is this natural thing right there? What am I? What is everything?" So I searched and found that what I was already born as was my destiny and what I was commanded to do.
David Valerio: I would love for you to expand on how you ended up coming back to Orthodox Judaism. Did you explore other religions and philosophies before doing so?
Sydney Rodman: I'll get to my story in one second, but I wanted to talk about the concept of sourcing. Sourcing is what we do at Green Revival, but it's also at the heart of what I loved about studying ecology and evolutionary biology. It's all about the source and origin of life. Where does it track back to? This is the question I've always been asking.
I just looked for truth. I didn't try to practice any other religions. I went on a trip to learn Torah and once I was immersed in it, I didn't want to stop. I was learning these things where I thought, "Wait, I figured that out by living Torah, so now I can learn it and live it even more." I was more reflective and understood that everything that happens in life is for a reason and it leads us to where we are..
The fact that I studied ecology and evolution led me to this path. Before that, I used to lead outdoor trips and go climbing and backpacking all over. One thing leads to another and it's all connected to the source. Just tuning in to the source was part of that journey, and even if there were times when I wasn't tuning in, I can look back and see it in a clearer way.
David Valerio: I would love to, like, learn about your childhood experiences with nature. What made you fall in love with nature and decide to study ecology and evolutionary biology in the first place?
Sydney Rodman: I actually didn't fall in love with nature right away. I went on nature walks with my dad and lived close to a park, but it wasn't until later that I truly connected with it. Similar to my experience with Torah, once I was immersed in forests, I didn't want to stop. When you're in a lush forest, you're surrounded by creation. You're away from the distractions of civilization—and civilization started with Cain, who built the first city after killing his brother. There are elements in society that create barriers to understanding, so being in nature allows for that direct connection.
There's a parallel here with being an Orthodox Jew. We're called "observant" because we follow practices, but it's also about truly observing the world around us. That observation, that attentiveness to what's actually before us, connects my spiritual practice with my experience of nature.
David Valerio: How do you think about how God expresses His will through the Torah and created reality?
Sydney Rodman: It is taught that everything is constantly being created. Six days of the week are meant for that creation, and then every Shabbat, from Friday night to Saturday night for 24 hours, we do the same thing that God did and rest with Him. Understanding creation just leads us to God.
Everything is plugged into the source, whether you see it or not. The mouth is a very holy thing. You use it to speak the words of the holy books. Only about 5% of matter is what we see, and then there's dark matter. There's so much going on that we don't know. The world was created through speech and the breath of life in humans and animals. Even in our conversations now, the world is changed through words. That's how the world was created, through speech and especially in Hebrew.
David Valerio: This is a great point and something I think a lot about. As I've moved into the business world and have become a more devout Christian, I’ve learned that speech—and I include listening, understanding, and then communicating in this—is the most powerful skill that one could possibly have. And it's the way that the world is actually shifted. Being able to properly form an idea, to ask the right question, to give the answer to a question in an interesting way, that's really how things happen.
Sydney Rodman: That makes me think of the concept of lashon hara, of bad speech. There's babbling on in the Tower of Babel and people over-speaking and saying things maybe when they feel awkward and they're just talking and say the wrong thing. Or something coming out of your mouth that you regret. That's like a practice of shmiras halashon, or guarding your tongue and mouth. Because everything that comes out of your mouth can be great, or everything that you do in business can be great. Every interaction can be great. So it's like making sure that everything you do is aligned and having that reflection every time.
Shabbat for me is something where every week I can reflect and get ready for the next week and not be burdened by what I did wrong because when you do teshuva, or repentance. It really just means to return. You're returning to how you originally should have been. And when you do teshuva, your sins are reversed so all the bad things that you did actually become mitzvot, or good deeds and connections. I think that's one of the big differences—just the goodness of everything and as we're learning, it's all meant to be, even our mistakes.
David Valerio: That's really interesting. In Catholicism we have the sacrament of Confession where we go and confess our sins to a priest and God works through the priest to absolve us of our sins.
What I gathered from you is that you have a day out of each week where you're completely disengaged from the world and are with God, where he forgives you.
Sydney Rodman: Well, he's not specifically forgiving us on Shabbat. If we just come back, then we're back at any time of any day.
David Valerio: Okay, so Shabbat's not a special day for forgiveness, but Shabbat is a time in which you...
Sydney Rodman: Shabbat means to sit. It's about not doing the 39 things that during the week you do to build the temple. They are called melakhot. These are things that we do during the week to bring forth the future, but that we are not permitted to do on Shabbat because we don't have to bring the future into that day. We rest and experience what's called olam ha-ba, the world to come. So we get to actually have a taste of the next world every week.
David Valerio: What was it like for you to start taking Shabbat seriously?
Sydney Rodman: I had wanted to do it for over a year when I realized, "This is what I should be doing. I'm a Jew." But I actually started practicing Shabbat in Dubai and then spent the summer in Israel, so it was very easy to do it there where I was surrounded by an environment for that.
I went on this free trip to Dubai for college students from around the US because we did learning in a program, and the reward of the credits was to go on a free trip. Then I stayed in Israel and worked at a vertical farming company. That was really great—to be in my homeland and also doing startup work for a company that I thought was really awesome. It made it really nice that I got to begin my Shabbat practice there, and then I just didn't stop.
David Valerio: Now, I would love for you to talk more about your company, Green Revival. How did you end up starting it?
Sydney Rodman: I graduated a year early and thought, "What am I going to do?" A year or two before that, I had a rather unusual summer job as an invasive species technician. I was scuba diving in one of the clearest lakes in New York to remove an invasive weed called Eurasian watermilfoil. This plant grows incredibly fast and hurts tourism revenues as well as real estate values. There was even a story of somebody dying from getting tangled up it. They didn’t see the plants underwater and weren’t able to move because it's just so thick and dense.
I enjoyed the work. We were really helping people, helping nature, and it was really fun to be outside everyday. But then I wondered about the waste practices at the end of the job, and the broader problem of invasive plants all over the country and all over the world. It just kept coming up—the Maui wildfires were amplified by the presence of invasive grasses. There's a lot of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania because of a plant called Japanese barberry that the ticks love.
It's like a disease—an environmental disease. It's an infestation of plants that aren't supposed to be there, and it's up to humans to weed them out and let what's supposed to be there, thrive. So the thought was, "How do I get rid of it and scale up plant utilization in industries?" I went back to Houston and started going to events, and over time realized what I wanted to do.
At first I was planning to make aliyah, to immigrate to Israel. I filled out all the paperwork, then I decided to start Green Revival instead and stay home. Now I'm married and my life is here.
The premise of Green Revival is that we want to solve a crisis—the invasive plant crisis—which is a root cause of many other issues. The solution to that becomes a way to scale up green economies and Make America Healthy Again, where we're not using forever chemicals and what we consume is healthier because it's from natural sources.
In Judaism and indigenous traditions, plants were created before many other things. We relate to plants via symbiosis. Our houses, our habitats, are made of plants. Our clothes, our food, everything around us is from creation, from nature, whether it's minerals or plants or animal products. We're building things, so why not build out of what is literally all around us?
Everyone is alarmed about the state of the environment, and for good reason. But the response is not to think that the world is ending. God promised Noah that the world will never be destroyed by the sign of a rainbow. So it’s not going to be destroyed, but we have to do our part to help it. Everyone has a role and has chosen what their destiny is to help the world. I'm solving a problem of disease in the environment, and all of the solutions are how I sell it.
David Valerio: What is typically done with invasive species waste? Is it just thrown away?
Sydney Rodman: There are three ways that land managers deal with invasive species. There are biological, chemical, and manual approaches. I'm working with manual removal.
For biological control, it's usually some type of bug. Weevils are commonly used because they will eat the invasive plants. But this approach sometimes creates other problems. The question always is how the new species affects the ecosystem. Will it do more harm than good? Was that species really meant to be there? Sometimes biological control is appropriate, but it's complicated.
Then there is spraying chemicals, which hurts the soil itself. The plants evolve resistance to herbicides, just like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Chemical control is being used less often nowadays, though it's cheaper than the other options.
I'm banking on manual removal, which was what I did in the lake and what landscapers do all the time. After it's physically removed, there are a few things that can happen. It can stay on site and keep spreading as it rots. Maybe an animal like a bird will eat it and spread the seeds more. Even the tiniest piece of something like watermilfoil can spread if you don't remove it properly. When I was removing plants from the bottom of the lake, if I didn't suction up even one small small fragment, it would probably spread.
There's no way to completely eradicate invasive species once they're established. They're always going to be here, which means they're like a free resource. We don't have to grow them. If the removed material stays on site, it just keeps spreading, so that's not a good solution. Usually it's either burned, brought to a landfill, or moved to another site where it sits and rots.
David Valerio: What is your company using it for?
Sydney Rodman: Tons of applications. Right now we have two projects. In the first, we're working with Haffner Energy in Houston to help make hydrogen for EV charging. And then we're working with a Johns Hopkins spin-out called JJ Innovative Materials that's making construction boards out of invasive plants. They're material scientists, so it's really fun to learn from them and do research together.
David Valerio: What is your main source of the biomass at the moment?
Sydney Rodman: These two applications prefer woody biomass, so we're working with many types of trees and shrubs. I did some invasive plant removal in my area with a group called Weed Warriors, and something we removed a lot was bush honeysuckle.
There are so many different plants out there, and I think that's one of the reasons why Green Revival is needed. There are hundreds of species that we hope to use, and having that catalog in mind with an ecology background helps tremendously. Understanding the phylogenies and different evolutionary histories of plants gives insight into their industrial characteristics. If you understand their evolution, you understand what they do to survive, and then you can actually use those properties to make things.
David Valerio: Now for the big question. Do Jews actually believe in reincarnation? Is this real
Sydney Rodman: Yes. It's called gilgulim. You could read a book about it, as explaining it is above my pay grade.
David Valerio: I have a general question about Jewish engagement with environmental issues. What does Jewish environmentalism look like, if it exists?
Sydney Rodman: I have so much to say about this. There are more reform groups that focus on tikkun olam, and that's a concept that has spread widely. I see non-Jewish people talk about it in their newsletters. Tikkun means to perfect or repair something, and olam means the world. It also means "hidden," and le’olam means "forever." So it's about perfecting eternity, or making good deeds permanent. Protecting life so that it can propagate, so it can go on.
That's the basis for a lot of people getting into Jewish environmentalism. There's a book called The Way Into Judaism and the Environment that I have sitting with me right now that's a good resource on this.
There's also the Hasidic tradition, like Chabad which is a certain sect of Orthodox Jewry. But it's just one group. Every group has different flavors. Like with reincarnation, there are different souls. Some souls are more Kabbalistically inclined and others are more environmentally inclined. Some are more into law and order. There are different focuses that a soul yearns for.
In Hasidism, there's this beautiful story of a leaf falling on the ground and questioning its purpose. Did it fall to protect an ant from getting eaten? What did that leaf do by just falling to the ground, and how did observing that leaf affect the future of the universe? That perspective is deeply embedded in Hasidic thinking, and Jews learn across many different sects. If it's written down, then we study it.
David Valerio: What's your going definition of what an invasive species is?
I'll give you my own view on it. I've become increasingly skeptical of that whole framing because the natural world is not static. The idea that there are a certain set of native species for one part of the world, and that it's been like that since time immemorial doesn't make sense from the point of view of geology. That's not to say that there aren't plant species or animal species that have negative ecosystem impacts, but it seems to me that the invasive framing is inaccurate.
Sydney Rodman: This is a very sociological question because I'm native to a place as a Jew, but then there are plants and animals that have claims to nativity as well. They're part of the function of the harmony of where they live.
I have nothing wrong with using the word invasive. But at the core of it, it's that there's an issue and you want to get rid of the issue. If there's an invasion of something, whether it's a health problem, a bad ideology, or a threat, you want to know how to address it. Maybe the word invasive isn't perfect—maybe there's another word that's better, though I don't know if someone has one. It's hard to change language in general. But it's about something causing harm and the way to stop that harm is to get rid of it, to remove something that shouldn't be where it's trying to get to, to go towards the good and get rid of the bad.
In Judaism, there are four worlds. There's the world of creation, and there's the world of formation and action. There are different worlds, so you are in a different world than me sometimes, and I'm in a world of creation. Nativity in creation is different than nativity in formation because it's just starting to be formed. So there is no native or invasive when something's first being formed.
David Valerio: I know that you've been getting involved in carbon dioxide removal as you work on your company. Tell me more about that and what your experience has been like coming into this industry.
Sydney Rodman: Carbon dioxide removal is crazy. It has its own rules, its own ecosystems. I think there are some things in CDR that can be scaled up, and there are some things that time will test and they will be discarded. There are some invasive CDR claims to solutions.
David Valerio: Expand on that. What does that mean?
Sydney Rodman: I think it's what's called carbon tunnel vision. For me, it's all about life. Am Yisrael Chai—the Jewish people live. It's all about life and surviving even when we're surrounded by terrorists everywhere trying to kill us. Every step on the land is filled with spirituality and life.
In climate, I think sometimes there's too much of an emphasis on carbon dioxide, on one molecule. It's reversing bad actions that have created emissions. But plants and ecosystems are proven technologies to do this. Conservation is a carbon removal technology. It's a certain language to put carbon back out of the atmosphere, which is a good thing.
But sometimes it is too narrow of a goal, which leads to some solutions that don't really work at scale. I think a better way to go about climate is life. Protecting life, conserving life, living with life, and helping it flourish.
If you work in climate and all you talk about is fossil fuel emissions and natural disasters, then you've entered a death cult. You're not focusing on what the point of life is—to propagate life. It's all about the future generations and preserving life. If you just give up and say, "The world's too bad. Let's not have kids," or "There's no point in trying," then you've already lost.
David Valerio: I completely agree with you. When I got into the voluntary carbon market, I came into it thinking that carbon credits could be a convenient tool to expand ecological regeneration at scale. But after having been in the industry for a few years, the carbon tunnel vision that you mentioned is really frustrating to engage with. Life is more than just about climate. People are here. Nature is here. God is here.
Sydney Rodman: The problem is when people think that humans are an invasive species. I think that is at the root of all of this. If we don't see ourselves as invasive to the world, then the world's better. But if we think of ourselves as being invasive, our actions as being invasive, and our future as being invasive, then that is a very bad thing.
David Valerio: It's a huge issue. People who think that humans are the virus are just going to lose, because they're not going to be here in 30 years. Which is already happening. But there's a more general lack of realization that we are entangled in creation. This comes back to our fundamental Judeo-Christian view of the world. We are not this abstracted animal that is just killing everything. We have valuable and good things to do on Earth.
Sure, we've had problems in the past, but if you're going to view the world in such a static, negative manner where the only thing we can do is repent and make sacrifices to Gaia, the Earth goddess, by stopping the use of fossil fuels or whatever. It's just not tenable as a line of action. It doesn't bring life, it doesn't bring joy, and it doesn't bring all of the good things that we know are out there in reality.
It's clear that there are a lot of different priorities in the world, and climate is one very small part of it. This isn’t to say that climate change will not have a lot of negative impacts. It will. But it's not the apocalypse. And there are other things that matter—children, life, beauty, truth, and goodness.
So I'm glad that you're coming into this space with fresh eyes. I think people who are relatively new to the space can see the incoherencies at the heart of a lot of the work that some people do more clearly.
This all sounds negative. I'm not trying to bash anybody. I just think that having conversations like this and pointing out the flaws in existing thinking is valuable. It's good to actually get these thoughts out in the open. I'm sure a lot of people have similar views but aren't willing to express them.
As we're getting to the close here, what are you most excited about right now? Going forward, what are you striving to achieve in your life and work?
Sydney Rodman: I'm more excited about my personal life than work, as it is just an extension of my life. But in terms of climate, I'm excited for the good people to win. A lot of my environmental thoughts come from not just Judaism, but how the Jews are treated today.
I'm excited for the good people to keep doing good things, and for bad ideas to be washed away. It's the same approach as when we confront terrorists—we're not celebrating the death of a person, but we're celebrating the life of the people they target and how precious that is. We don't celebrate the death, but we don't get confused about what we're standing for.
A lot of young people are corrupted these days, whether that's because of social media or something else. There are a lot of people in my generation that have really bad ideas, and they're doing environmental non-profits/startups and faking their numbers. There are people who are gaining notoriety but are taking up space. Eventually they're going to leave and we'll be able to re-populate with who's supposed to be there, not these invasive people.
David Valerio: The Catholic view is that we hate the sin, not the sinner. There are a lot of evil ideas and evil spirits that animate people. It's a great thing when those evil spirits are cast out, and the good that humans are capable of is brought out. Our society has a lot of demons in it right now, unfortunately.
I'm very optimistic, however. There are a lot of people our age who have bad ideas and are members of a death cult as we were talking about earlier. They live in a culture of death. But there are also a lot of people our age that are choosing life. They are choosing beauty, goodness, and truth, and are choosing to live in such a way that positively affects the world and people around them. That's where all change comes from. If we live good, devout, holy lives and people see us and our relationships, our marriages, our children—they'll be inspired to make a change. That's really the only thing we can do.
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