Conservationist Calvin DeWitt sees the Bible as our earliest environmentalist treatise: “an ecological handbook on how to live rightly on earth.”

The newly published Green Bible drives that message home by highlighting all verses with ecological and conservationist themes in green ink. It’s a variation on the red-letter editions of the Bible that highlight the words of Jesus. The green edition includes an index of environmental topics, a foreword by Desmond Tutu, a “trail guide for further study,” and “inspirational essays by scholars and leaders,” among them DeWitt.

Perusing the text and zeroing in on the green passages makes for an illuminating kind of exegesis. Most of Genesis is printed in green, concerning as it does the natural world and humankind’s relationship to it. When God says, “‘And have dominion over the fish of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (1:28), the Green Bible and its contributors interpret “dominion” not as free reign, but as responsibility.

The Book of Jeremiah is more to the point, recasting the Old Testament God as an angry environmental activist: “But my people have forgotten me … making their land a horror.” (18:15-16).

The Green Bible hopes to remind the faithful that adherence to their faith includes a responsibility toward God’s creations—an increasingly common theology reflected in the emergence of Christian environmental initiatives. Environmental awareness in this edition also encompasses a mindfulness of the earth’s other human inhabitants, and every exhortation to love thy neighbor, every reminder of our interconnectivity, is printed green. An example comes from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians: “There may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for each other. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:25).

Whether or not books established the environmental agenda, Stephen Bocking writes in Alternatives Journal, “they certainly record its evolution.” Examining nearly six decades of environmental tracts, Bocking sees trends and revelations in a genre that graduated from relative obscurity to a coffee table mainstay.

No survey of environmental literature can get off the ground without a hat tip to Aldo Leopald’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), but from there, Bocking charts an impressive course, weaving over 25 influential authors into his modest, 1,500-word essay. As a professor of environmental and resource studies at Trent University, Bocking’s familiarity with the genre is palpable, but even more valuable than his fluency is his knack for canny observation.

Environmental lit is vital, Bocking argues, because “only in books do authors have the space to explore big, complex arguments—especially those that connect distinct worlds of ideas,” such as Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), which called for beneficial collaboration between architects and ecologists. It can be confounding, as well: “It is worth remembering that every book is framed by subjective ideas about how the world works,” Bocking writes. He sees evidence of Cold War anxieties reflected in some texts, rebukes others for “expressing a convenient ideology, while masquerading as objective analysis.” He also observes the way gorgeous coffee table books “are implicitly defensive; they inspire action through visions of what may be lost,” although he reflects that they “neglect those places where humans and nature live in harmony,” as well as the front lines in the battle for environmental justice.

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Image by gabofr, licensed under Creative Commons.