ABSTRACT
Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” (1967), and Andrew Furman’s “No Trees Please, We’re Jewish” (2000), provide 20th-century benchmarks by which to examine 21st-century shifts in environmental consciousness in faith-based organisations. Beginning with White’s indictment that the ecological crisis has its roots in “the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation,” an ecocritical investigation of shadow texts in a variant Bible (Old Testament and Hebrew) reveals the historical impact of self-serving translations. The eco church “Tahlee” in rural New South Wales, and the eco synagogue “Finchley Progressive” in urban London are examined for their attitudinal differences within the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. The rise of these action-focused organisations (both following the “A Rocha” ecological practices framework) in part addresses and mitigates White’s 1967 indictment; both focus on a wider creation-care, although Liberal Judaism’s environmental practices are largely extensions of its mitzvah and tzedakah anthropocentric ethics. Furman’s statement that “the natural world rarely muscles its way into the margins of the Jewish-American imagination” provides a segue for a green media overview of the environmental imaginative terrain of diaspora Jews and Hollywood films. The chapter reveals a slow movement, from the 20th to the 21st century, in the material spaces of faith communities, towards hope in the manner Bill McKibben means when distinguishing between hope that is wishing, and hope that “implies real willingness to change.”
