“The World Was Given Us to Fix It”

This article explores the ecopoetry written by three women poets who also identify themselves as Jewish poets: Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. It examines whether they employ any or some/all of the “emancipatory strategies” characteristic of the ecofeminist re-imagination of nature and human relationships with the natural world, seeking to answer several questions: How far can these poems be considered part of eco-Judaism? Does the fact that their authors are women also make them ecofeminist works? Does the poets’ Jewish feminist identity contribute to their ecopoetic call for ecological change?

The Promise of Jewish Theistic Naturalism for Jewish Environmental Ethics

This paper seeks to explain the greater appeal of Jewish naturalistic theologies given our greater appreciation today of the ecological vulnerability of our world. By examining the theological writings of two prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers—Hans Jonas and Arthur Green. The paper demonstrates that their espousal of naturalistic yet theistic worldview in their interpretations and reconstructions of Jewish tradition shares significant affinities and promotes an ethical attitude toward the environment. First, I show that Jonas and Green reject reductive forms of naturalism and embrace a nonreductive or “expansive” style of naturalism. Then, I argue that their theologies intend to stimulate a sense of responsibility toward all creation by envisioning humans as partners of a non-omnipotent God. I conclude by noting the metaphysical, epistemological, and moral promises of theistic naturalism to Jewish environmental ethics.

Birds as Dads, Babysitters, and Hats

The commandment to send the mother bird from her nest before taking her eggs or chicks, known in Jewish tradition as shiluach hakan, is found in Deuteronomy 22:6–7. This essay addresses dominant perspectives on the mother bird mitzvah—its association with good luck, bad luck, and compassion—before showcasing rabbinic texts from Mishnah and Babylonian Talmud Hullin Chapter 12 that evince interest in birds as ingenious builders, as fathers and not just mothers, as queer parents and altruists, as rebel spirits who resist captivity even unto death and, finally, in birds as co-inhabitants of the earth whose lives are parallel to as well as enmeshed with our own. I offer here a bird-centric approach to the commandment, an effort to read it in a spirit of anti-anthropocentrism, drawing on animal studies scholar Matthew Calarco’s notion of indistinction.

Compassion and Self-Concern in Halakhic Environmental Decision-Making

The prevailing stance in Jewish orthodoxy is that environmental issues are extra-legal and not under the purview of halakhah (Jewish law). While considered important, environmental protection falls only under “midat haḥasidut” (extraordinary piety). This ultimately translates into environmental protection being treated as non-obligatory and only under the purview of righteous behavior rather than obligation. This has created a significant barrier to halakhically driven environmental decision-making. I argue that this worldview emerges from the process of conceptualizing the prohibition of bal tashḥit—“waste not,” the prohibition against wastefulness originating in Deuteronomy 20:19. This verse gave rise to two worldviews: one which was prioritized of not destroying the environment out of compassion for the non-human world, and another marginalized worldview that emphasized a self-concerned environmentalism which equates harm to the environment as self-harm. Privileging this latter worldview creates a pathway to advance Jewish legal discourse and align it with mainstream environmentalism.

As the Deep River Rises

The present essay seeks to offer a conceptual framework for grappling with climate change from within the sources of Jewish law (halakhah), a discourse rooted in the Hebrew Bible but developed in the rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity and then in medieval and modern codes and commentaries. Halakhah reflects deeply-held intellectual, theological, ontological, and sociological values. As a modus vivendi, rabbinic law—variously interpreted by Jews of different stripes—remains a vital force that shapes the life of contemporary practitioners. We are interested in how a variety of contemporary scholars, theologians, and activists might use the full range of rabbinic legal sources—and their philosophical, jurisprudential, and moral values—to construct an alternative environmental ethic founded in a worldview rooted in obligation and a matrix of kinship relationships. Our essay is thus an exercise in decolonizing knowledge by moving beyond the search for environmental keywords or ready analogies to contemporary western discourse. We join the voices of recent scholars who have sought to revise regnant assumptions about how religious traditions should be read and interpreted with an eye to formulating constructive ethics.

Why Do Muslim Youths Participate in Environmental Volunteering?

Understanding youth environmental volunteering participation is a crucial strategy for building a citizenry that can contribute to environmental conservation efforts. Thus, this research investigated the environmental volunteering values orientation held by Malay Muslim youths in Malaysia that motivated them to engage in environmental volunteering programmes. This study started with semi-structured interviews which were then followed by a survey. The interviews were conducted with 10 participants who are environmental volunteers. Based on the interview findings, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to 267 Malay Muslim environmental volunteers. The results revealed there are four values highly held by the Malay Muslim environmental volunteers that motivated them to participate in environmental volunteering, namely religious, biospheric, altruistic, and egoistic values, in that order. For this reason, there is a need to integrate religious values in environmental volunteering program to encourage communities to jointly engage in environmental conservation efforts.

Humanism and Sustainable Development

Just as other philosophies of life, humanism has to position itself in the societal debate on sustainability. In this article, various tendencies in humanism are discussed that may have contributed to our disturbed relationship with our environment. At the same time, it is also shown that humanism can do without these tendencies and that humanism has a unique voice to offer in the sustainability debate. Because humanists do not believe in a metaphysical afterlife, but instead believe that life only continues here on Earth, humanists in particular have a reason to ensure that the projects to which we contribute and which we cherish have the opportunity to continue to flourish in the future. Without the prospect of a sustainable development, our ability to attach meaning to our present lives diminishes, at least if we are looking for secular sources of meaning.