Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader (review)

Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader, edited by Martin D. Yaffe, is an anthology that endeavors to represent fairly the ‘‘state-of-the-art’’ on Judaism and environmental ethics in a philosophically respectable manner. In large measure, it succeeds. The majority of its essays, first published in journals of Judaic studies and environmental ethics, are from the 1990s, while the earliest, from the forester and founder of the Wilderness Society, Aldo Leopold (1887–1949), dates from 1920. Max Oelschlaeger rightly describes Leopold as ‘‘perhaps the most influential environmental ethicist in American history’’ (1994, p. 3), an accolade owing principally to the conclusion of his posthumously published book, A Sand County Almanac (1949). However prescient and provocative, Leopold’s ‘‘land ethic’’ was never expressed in anything close to a systematic ethical theory. The holistic environmental ethic that did take shape drew sustenance from embryonic ecological sciences, reflections on his wilderness experiences, and, interestingly, an English translation of Tertium Organum (1912) by the Russian philosopher and mystic P. D. Ouspensky (1878– 1947). Oddly, the essay by Leopold selected for this reader, ‘‘The Forestry of the Prophets,’’ was written some years prior to the full flowering of an ecological and environmental ethic that envisioned species functioning, in one of ‘‘[his] favorite metaphors, like parts of an engine’’ (Nash 1989, p. 64). Moreover, his ‘‘land ethic’’—and here we detect the influence of Ouspensky—intimated something akin to the Gaia hypothesis later formulated by the scientist James Lovelock, in which our planet as a whole has the properties of a cybernetic-like self-correcting system and a living organism. Given the anthology’s avowed aims, this essay has little to recommend it save the tongue-in-cheek appreciation by a modern forester of the of the biblical prophets’ practical knowledge of forestry. The editor, Martin Yaffe, is Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas, now home to the Center for Environmental Philosophy (publisher of the journal Environmental Ethics). Perhaps the essay by Leopold mentioned above was included to compensate for the drubbing Leopold suffers in Yaffe’s rather long introductory survey to this anthology. Yaffe takes Leopold to task for venturing beyond ‘‘his own technical discipline forest ecology’’ in order ‘‘to criticize the ethical principles he claims to find in the Hebrew Bible,’’ principles Leopold found wanting in his imaginative (but not unprecedented) attempt to extend the compass of urgent moral concern and ethical consideration to include animate and inanimate (inorganic) objects and processes of the natural environment. To be sure, Leopold’s writings display the virtues and vices that frequently attend the work of ‘‘public intellectuals’’ with little fealty to disciplinary expertise outside their own area(s) of specialization. Leopold wrote in the first instance neither as an ethicist nor as a biblical scholar well-versed in hermeneutics; hence one is not surprised to learn that his ‘‘alltoo-hasty critique of what he takes to be the biblical view is highly selective and dubious.’’