In 1971 Patrick Moore was a PhD candidate in ecology at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
He and a number of students committed to peace and the preservation of
the earth, meeting in the basement of a Church, formed the organisation Greenpeace
which ultimately became a global powerhouse.
Everybody’s heard of
Greenpeace. The very name makes you feel
good. As did the causes in which they
involved themselves with such drama and courage. They chartered a ship and set sail for Alaska
to prevent the US government from conducting a test of the hydrogen bomb. They did not prevent that test, but shortly
thereafter the Americans announced that they would cease all hydrogen bomb
testing. So Greenpeace declared victory
and set out in search of another cause.
They found it in protecting the
whales. Whales were endangered, yet Japan
and the Soviet Union insisted on hunting them.
Greenpeace took to placing themselves between the whalers and the
whales. The image of these brave young
people, daring the Japanese and Soviet whalers to shoot them with their
harpoons, was compelling. I don’t know
about you, but I remember quickly agreeing to donate to the group when their
fund-raisers phoned me. Thanks to
millions of such responses to their fundraising calls, Greenpeace grew into powerful
organisation.
Environmental issues have always
resonated with me, perhaps because of when I came of age. I was too young for Vietnam. The civil rights war was won, the sexual
revolution concluded. So the environment
became my cohort’s defining issue. Earth
Day had first been celebrated in 1970, and now we had an organisation –
Greenpeace – to rally around as the saviour of our planet.
Environmentalism was just so good,
so right, so…Jewish. Reviving a
Kabbalistic tradition, we began conducting Tu B’Shvat Seders. Generations of Jews had planted trees in Israel
as an expression of Jewish solidarity. Now
we embraced trees and nature as a way of expressing concern for the earth. The New Year of the Trees, Tu B’Shvat, turned
into a Jewish Earth Day. On Pesach, we
recite the Ten Plagues that Hashem inflicted upon Pharaoh for his obstinacy in
not Letting His People Go. On Tu
B’Shvat, we recite the ten plagues that we inflict on the earth because
of our poor stewardship. Litter,
Waste, Non-biodegradables, Deforestation, Destruction of Habitat, Chemical
Spills and Runoff, Farming Methods that do not Preserve the Soil’s Integrity,
Nuclear Waste, and War.
We study the laws of Bal
Tashchit, meaning Do Not Destroy. They
are based on a verse in this week’s Torah reading, in Parashat Shof’tim,
in the 20th chapter of Deuteronomy:
When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to seize
it, do not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them, for from it you
will eat, and you shall not cut it down.
Is the tree of the field a man that is should enter the siege before
you? Only a tree that you know is not a
food tree, it you may destroy and cut down, and build a bulwark against the
city that makes war with you, until it is conquered.
This passage is talking about
something specific and of limited application.
But one of Rabbi Ishmael’s 13 Rules of Torah Hermeneutics is Prat
u’Klal – that is, from a specific case we can construct a general
principle. The verse is only prohibiting
one from cutting down fruit trees coincident to a siege. But from it, we derive a series of laws
against wanton waste of natural resources.
So environmental issues have long
resonated with me. I’ve tried to
incorporate a mindset of not wasting into my daily life…and imposed it on my
family! There’s always someone in the
house who goes on crusades about turning off unused lights and unwatched TV’s. Well, I was That Guy. Even when we lived for years in military
housing where we paid no utility bills. I
would go around the house, turning things off as a matter of principle.
So, when people really started
talking seriously about Global Warming, I took notice. It was after Al Gore lost the election for US
President to George W Bush. In his
search for meaning in life, Gore lit upon the Global Warming issue and embraced
it fully. His documentary film, An Inconvenient
Truth, was a global blockbuster. An
Inconvenient Truth, and the mindset that it helped popularise, changed the
way that many people think about the earth.
But there’s only one problem. The
real Inconvenient Truth is that the planet is not in a warming
trend now. And even if it were, the
planet has experienced cycles of warming and cooling. They weren’t caused by mankind. And the planet survived.
Over the years since Gore told us
that we were driving our planet into oblivion, more than a few scientists
chimed in tot the cause. But a growing
number – including prominent voices in climatology – have refuted it. They’ve countered that the ‘science’ represents
as much commentary as fact.
And that’s the problem with the
concern for the environment today. It
has become such a Feel-good pseudoscience that the lay person – that’s you and
me – has a hard time separating fact from fiction.
That’s why Patrick Moore left
Greenpeace. Over time, he was the only director
with an academic background in the hard sciences. Yet the organisation’s board was taking stands
that made no scientific sense. Like the
banning of DDT. Yes, chemicals do affect
the environment. But DDT helped to
control malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and kept millions of children in Africa
alive. Like the banning of
genetically-modified foods. Golden Rice –
rice fortified with beta carotene – can also save the lives of millions of the
world’s poorest children per year. Yet
Greenpeace, and other guardians of the planet such as HRH Prince Charles, tell
us that all GMO food is evil. The environmentalist
community today sees humanity as the enemy of the earth. You hear this message pounded every time you
watch a naturalist documentary on TV, or visit a zoo or aquarium.
The Torah’s message is quite
different. Way back in the first chapter
of Genesis, in verse 28 after Hashem created man and woman, he decreed: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth
and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea, the bird of the sky, and
every living thing that moves on the earth.
It is one thing to look at our stewardship of the earth and declare that
we could do better. Take any human
endeavour and it is possible to say that we could do it better. It is another thing entirely to declare that
man is evil and the enemy of the earth.
That’s why I’m not an
environmentalist today. Like scientists such
as Patrick Moore, I’m tired of wealthy ‘intellectuals’ dictating to the masses
how they should live. I’m tired of
hearing the likes of Prince Charles taking nourishment out of the mouths of the
world’s poorest. I’m tired of leading
scientists arriving at a conference to sign a declaration on global warming in private
jets. I’m tired of Al Gore’s inconvenient
truths and demands that we radically change the way that we live, whilst he
lives in a mansion that consumes more energy in a month than many of the world’s
poorest will over a lifetime.
Bal Tashchit, the Torah’s laws of avoiding waste, do not counsel us to run around
screaming the sky is falling…er, I mean, the sea is rising! These laws, and the principle behind
them, do require that we look at our actions and ask ourselves if there
is a reasonable way to achieve what we want or need with less expenditure of
resources. They do not counsel the
manipulation of science to sell a mindset.
That’s just wrong. It has
resulted in thinking people everywhere, looking at every new ‘scientific’ declaration
with much skepticism. And who can blame
us? Shabbat shalom.
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