Judaism

Awareness of the ecological crisis has transformed all academic disciplines, including the humanities, the disciplines that inquire about values, norms, meanings, languages, and cultures. Beginning in the 1970s, but increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s, a growing number of humanities scholars have begun to argue that ecological matters are not marginal but foundational to their disciplines. Thus historians traced “connections between environmental conditions, economic modes of production and cultural ideas through time” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, xxi) and explained the interplay of physical nature and human culture. Philosophers and ethicists explored how humans should interact with the environment as well as the theoretical justifications of these directives, extending the scope of moral considerability to non-human nature and identifying objective and universal ground, or grounds for environmental value. The result was the emergence of distinct strands of environmental thought-Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Ecofeminism-each with its own analysis of the causes for the ecological crisis, the salient ethical dimension, and the proper response to the crisis. And literary scholars applied the science of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature, giving rise to what has been known as “literature-and-environment studies,” “green cultural studies,” “environmental literary criticism,” or “ecocriticism” (Buell 2005, 11-12; Garrard 2012). Ecocritics tie their cultural analyses to “green” moral and political agendas, while insisting that the study of “the relationship of the human and the non-human throughout human cultural history” (Garrard, 5) be based on familiarity with the science of ecology. Problematizing and erasing the boundaries between the “human” and the “non-human,” ecocriticism is closely linked to other interdisciplinary, postmodern, and critical discourses such as animal studies, trans-and posthumanism, and postcolonialism. The sub-discipline of animal studies (also known as “human-animal studies”) exposes the destructive impact of the traditional assumptions about the exceptionality of humans and emphasizes the cultural significance of animals; the discourse of trans-and posthumanism endorses genetic engineering and the human-machine interface that will presumably usher a new phase in human evolution; and postcolonial ecocriticism seeks to demonstrate that the western colonial enterprise perpetuated harmful human inequalities as well as environmental abuses.