the re-enchantment of nature

"We will not fight to save what we do not love." Stephen Jay Gould

In our efforts to educate and motivate people, we dare not overlook the power of aesthetics. We know that love is a greater motivator than fear. So even as we need to face and teach the truth about the degraded state of the earth today, we need to speak of the beauty and irresistable power of nature. Great nature writers are out there: in addition to the well-known, among them John Muir and Aldo Leopold, there are also lesser known ones (at least, those I am just discovering): Annie Dillard, "Teaching a Stone to Talk", and Richard Nelson, "The Island Within."

So along with knowing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and creating the top ten list of things we all can do to reduce our carbon footprint, we need to discover our favorite nature writers, and share them with others.

And more: we need - as a people - to re-discover and re-create Jewish nature narratives that move us today.

Surely we can find powerful proclamations about nature at the end of the book of Job; and in Psalm 104. We should mine those, for they have the ability to move us to awe. But we also need contemporary narratives, stories, of nature - both in Israel and around the world, from a Jewish pen and a Jewish perspective. And how wonderful if we could find hidden treasures of such narratives in the vast still-undiscovered writings from somewhere in our tradition.

Perhaps we can begin with what we have: the blessings we say about early blossoming trees and upon hearing thunder and seeing lightning, upon seeing unusual creations of all kinds, should be as familiar to Jewish children as is kiddush and ha-motzi. Maybe even more so.

We need to re-enchant nature - so that it will be loved, and people will fight for it.