There is an ancient talmudic tradition that affirms that the world was created on Rosh Hodesh Tishrei, a day also known as Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. Our Mahzor also reminds us that the world was created on this day. So it’s particularly appropriate for Jews to stop and think about how we are celebrating this most ancient Earth Day, how we are honoring the birthday of our home, the planet earth.
Throughout the millennia, human beings have wrestled to survive and to flourish on our blue-green jewel of a planet. As our cultures matured, shaped by the climate and the terrain of their homes, we also fashioned different notions of what it means to live on the Earth. How, exactly, are we to treat our planet? What do we owe the earth, and what does it owe to us? What is our place in the world, what are our responsibilities and our privileges?
As the ages passed, three general ways of understanding the proper contours of humanity’s relationship to the earth emerged: as a machine to be used and discarded at will, as a living organism of superior worth to humanity itself, or somewhere in the middle — subject to the kind of human use that is constrained by larger ethical considerations. All three viewpoints can claim an ancient and venerable pedigree within Western Civilization, and all three are quite incompatible. In an age in which the choices that our societies make about how we use the earth’s resources, how we care for the diversity of living species, how we tend delicate and endangered bioregions, and how we respond to our own exploding population, underlying assumptions about what is proper in our treatment of the planet can have serious — and possibly life-threatening — implications for our own survival and the well-being of other living things. It is time, once again, to consider what we owe the earth and what we may legitimately expect from it.
The Earth as Machine
One view, rooted in some Stoic thinkers, sees the earth as a machine to be used for human pleasure and asserts that irrational creatures lack rights. According to this viewpoint, the earth is nothing more than the dirt on which we walk, its nonhuman residents are unthinking, mobile sources of protein, entertainment, or danger. That all was made for the sake of mankind influenced certain early Christian thinkers (notably Origen, Aquinas, and Calvin). In the early modern period, this mechanistic understanding of the world as a bag of tools ready for any human purpose reached its clearest expression, particularly in the words of Rene Descartes, who sought to find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens, and all other bodies which environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature (Discourse on Method, Part VI).
For Descartes, there was a wall of separation between humanity, on the one hand, and all other creatures and objects on the other. Consistent with his own premises, he thus held that animals were automata, and that “there can be no suspicion of crime when [people] eat or kill animals.”
The Stoics, Descartes and his followers weren’t entirely wrong. Humanity is indeed different from other living things (in our ability to conceptualize, to communicate across generations, to engage in introspection and to manipulate tools and technology, to name a few distinguishing traits). How we act does have a disproportionate influence on the world around us, and our willingness to see beyond what is and to strive for what might be, using the scientific method, has resulted in better and healthier lives for millions of people. Few of us would surrender the benefits of modernity to return to life in the wild, and an understanding of the earth as something to be used to heighten human pleasure is part of what has allowed us to fashion comfortable and civilized life.
Yet, there are clear dangers to this mechanistic viewpoint. Our interventions in the world often have unintended and disastrous consequences, even if we look only at the impact of those actions on people. Loss of farmland across North America is but one example of our sovereignty over nature exacting a frightening and unanticipated cost. As frightening as the results of our interventions may be, we ought to appreciate more than just cost-benefit considerations. As the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted:
Human beings have indeed become primarily tool-making animals, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of their needs… Nature as a tool box is a world that does not point beyond itself. It is when nature is sensed as mystery and grandeur that it calls upon us to look beyond it. The awareness of grandeur and the sublime is all but gone from the modern mind. The sense of the sublime — the sign of inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all — is now a rare gift. Yet without it, the world becomes flat and the soul a vacuum (God in Search of Man, pp 34ff).
Isn’t the world impoverished when a species disappears unnecessarily? Isn’t a beautiful glen or a majestic mountain something of intrinsic worth, something to be cherished and protected? We humans have a limited notion of self interest, and we endanger our own children and grandchildren for the sake of our short-term desires. Seeing the earth as a big bag of toys encourages rapacity and endangers human survival and the balance of life on earth. The time has long passed when this was an acceptable way to see our role in the world.