Confronting Today’s Assault on the Earth
When every day brings a new affront to justice and compassion, it can be hard to know where to focus one’s attention. U.S. citizens’ tax dollars are currently funding masked agents who terrorize, detain, and even kill hard-working immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. Those same tax dollars are funding military aggression overseas, even as the President and his party roll back civil and voting rights protections and attack racial, gender, and sexual diversity at home. In that context, it is not difficult to understand why many progressive people of faith pay little attention to environmental policies.
Yet the consequences of failing to take environmental issues seriously are growing. Worsening droughts and rising temperatures are fueling wildfires that are more frequent, larger, and more intense across Europe (especially in Spain and France this summer) and North America. There is widespread acknowledgment that these disasters result in part from human-caused climate change. Yet the U.S. administration’s hostility to policies that would address climate change remains clear. While Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement in his first term was briefly rescinded by the Biden administration, Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term to withdraw again, insisting that the U.S. would “drill, baby, drill” for the very fossil fuels that drive the climate crisis. In subsequent months, the administration withdrew from other organizations and agreements related to climate change while taking numerous steps to “boost ... fossil fuel production” and “curtail the growth of wind and solar energy.” Ominously, recent reporting reveals that the administration has not simply favored oil and gas companies but has encouraged industry executives to be more aggressive in challenging environmental regulation, with the likely effect of exacerbating our climate disaster.
In recent weeks, the administration has taken a number of additional environmental actions that may appear to have little to do with climate change. Yet a closer look reveals that these actions also seek to benefit extraction/fossil fuel and agricultural industries and the executives and shareholders who reap profits from them.
In early July, for example, the administration rescinded a decades-old guideline under the Endangered Species Act that required the protection of critical habitat for endangered species. This move ignores warnings from scientists that the leading cause of population declines and extinctions among endangered species is the loss of necessary habitat. Journalists rightly noted that the actual motivation for this change was “to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities” favored by business interests. Although this change is unpopular and being opposed, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum quickly followed by announcing that management of the endangered grizzly bear would be turned over to the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, three states whose Republican governors support policies that experts predict will undo the limited success conservationists have had in modestly increasing grizzly numbers under the Endangered Species Act. The administration also reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante) by nearly ninety percent, specifically in order to make fossil fuels and minerals beneath public lands available for extraction. The move was heavily criticized not only by conservation groups but also by tribal leaders who value the sites for cultural and historical significance. The Interior Department moved ahead as well with a proposal to reduce the protected area around Chaco National Historical Park in New Mexico (a “sacred site” for Pueblo peoples) in order to lease more public land for oil and gas drilling.
How should we respond to these and other recent attacks on environmental protection? As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, I am aware that the environmental legacies of Judaism and Christianity are ambiguous and contradictory. Ancient biblical texts cannot provide straightforward solutions to contemporary ecological challenges. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that the values represented by the biblical traditions stand in significant tension with the destruction of our environment for economic profit. The Psalmist tells us that “the earth is the LORD’s, and everything that fills it” (Ps. 24:1); it is not the property of capitalist oligarchs. This principle that the earth belongs to God rather than to humans already inspires advocates for social justice, for it underpins the vision of Sabbath and Jubilee (“for the earth is mine, and you are but resident aliens and sojourners to me” [Lev. 25:23]) and that vision’s emphasis on care for those who have fallen on hard times rather than on profit and the amassing of private property. But this same principle has environmental consequences as well, for it insists on allowing the land itself to participate in Sabbath rest (Lev. 25:4-5) and guarantees food for domesticated animals and wild animals alike (25:7). It coheres well with the claim of Psalm 104 that parts of the earth have been created “for” animals rather than for us (“the high mountains are for the wild goats, the rocks are a refuge for the hyraxes” [104:18]), that trees are created for birds (104:17) rather than for lumber companies or palm oil plantations, and that water is for the wild asses (104:11) and for the trees (104:16) rather than for data centers.
Of course, this vision alone may not persuade today’s oil barons, tech bros, or authoritarian leaders to change their ways. Even Psalm 104 acknowledges the presence of evildoers (104:35) who stand apart from the Psalm’s vision of the earth, its beauty, and its creatures. As Jeremiah 12:4 reminds us, the travail of the earth, the withering of its plants, and the disappearance of animals and birds all testify to human wickedness. But if those of us who seek alternatives to such wickedness can be reminded of the importance of the earth and its beauty in our religious traditions, we may also find it possible to confront the forces of death that are wreaking havoc on the earth and its creatures, both human and other-than-human.