I cannot find any scripture which refers to environmentalist ethics nor any scripture which implies environmentalist ethics. Of course, it is possible that mankind simply didn’t have the capability of violating this ethic, and so it was never mentioned. But the only verse that I’ve seen people attempt to leverage into an environmentalist ethic is exactly the opposite, it is a command to violate the environmental ethic. It is what is known as the cultural mandate he gave Adam and Eve, and later gave Noah:
And God blesseth them, and God saith to them, 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over every living thing that is creeping upon the earth.'
Genesis 1:28
Every translation uses the word “subdue” to describe what God commanded Adam and Eve. The word does not give the same impression as words like “oversee” or “steward”. Subdue gives the impression of control; it sounds like he was telling Adam and Eve to populate the earth and develop it. It doesn’t sound like a mandate to preserve the environment, but exactly the opposite, to change it.
A lot of the difference in how we can interpret the passage comes from how we understand this word, “subdue”. It helps to look at other contexts in which the Hebrew word appears.
”also them did king David sanctify to Jehovah, with the silver and the gold which he sanctified of all the nations which he subdued”
2 Samuel 8:11“and now, as the flesh of our brethren is our flesh, as their sons are our sons, and lo, we are subduing our sons and our daughters for servants, and there are of our daughters subdued, and our hand hath no might, and our fields and our vineyards are to others.”
Nehemiah 5:5And the king hath turned back out of the garden of the house unto the house of the banquet of wine, and Haman is falling on the couch on which Esther is, and the king saith, 'Also to subdue the queen with me in the house?' the word hath gone out from the mouth of the king, and the face of Haman they have covered.
Esther 7:8
I can’t find any passage in a Hebrew Concordance where subdue means anything like “oversee”, but exactly the opposite. When men subdue each other, it means to bring them into bondage. When God subdues something, he brings it under his control, to be used for his purposes.
What could God be commanding us to oversee anyway? Nature does not do anything unnatural, so there would be nothing to take care of. The only thing he could be saying is to protect nature from other people who want to violate it (subdue it). This would make sense if God weren’t giving a general command for all of mankind. If he were talking to Jews and telling them to protect the land from the non-Jews who want to violate it, then that makes sense. But in both mandates; the one he gave to Adam and Eve and the one he gave to Noah, he’s talking to all of humanity.
Simply put, the environmentalist ethic wants to switch around the order of creation. It wants man to be made for the earth, not the earth made for man. One might say that the earth was made first, and therefore man was made for the earth. But one can just as easily say that God was just preparing the earth ahead of time for man.
A lot of dispute comes from the common mistake of confusing descriptions with principles. What one person calls “destroying” another person calls “developing”. The two words mean exactly the same thing objectively. They two words describe in ways that lets each person sound like they’re applying some sort of moral principle. Because people are unwilling to let go of their moral principles, the debate easily devolves into dogmatic table pounding. It is not unethical to transform the earth simply because you describe it as destroying, or vice versa. It’s just a way of manipulating language to sound that way.
A lot of the dispute also comes from idealistic versions of what nature is; a sort of Pocahontas / Avatar interpretation of nature. This kind of talk is very cheap. It is cheap to think about nature as a loving caring mother rather than the reality that she’s an abusive parent. “Nature is red in tooth and claw” is an apt description given by Alfred Tennyson. This talk gets a lot more expensive when people actually have to live that way. Few are willing to live the kind of toil-filled and luxury-less life that would be needed to live naturally. Moreover, it is impossible to “fill the whole earth” with the “knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea”. Ask any economist, over the centuries the population was strictly limited by a lack of economic growth. The first fruits of economic growth was consumed by sustaining a higher population. This economic growth came from radically transforming our environment. Without making radical changes to the environment, mankind is limited to few in number who live in harsh poverty.
Some people cannot accept this because it doesn’t make sense to them that God would put mankind in such an unsuitable environment. There are two acknowledgements that need to made to make sense of this. The first is that the good life was always meant to have work. Work is not wrong or evil or bad. In a perfect world, there is work. And second, natural evil was not original in creation. Natural evil was introduced by God as a response to moral evil (why? See my post on Job and natural evil). Once we understand that work is part of the good life, and natural evil was not original in creation, then it starts making sense that mankind should work to relieve itself of natural evil.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t kinds of ways that we shouldn’t transform the earth. There is no quantitative limitation where it becomes unethical to transform the earth. There is no point at which we say it’s okay to farm but its not okay to mine. Or it’s okay to mine, but its not okay to mine depletable resources. Or it’s okay to mine depletable resources, but not too much (more than one arbitrarily asserts). But there remains a qualitative moral limitation on how we transform nature. Maybe we shouldn’t transform the earth to build weapons and kill each other. Maybe we should care about how animals are treated and how long they live if they’re being raised for food. Maybe we shouldn’t transform the earth in such a way that it pollutes the air of others. There are all kinds of qualitative limitations. And if one wants to call those qualitative limitations “environmentalism” then that fits with the cultural mandate. But the word is typically used to put some sort of quantitative restriction on how many trees can be chopped down before good becomes evil.
This distinction between qualitative and quantitative limitations on transforming the environment is another source of confusion. It is easy for an environmentalist to think that if there is no quantitative limitation on the environment, then we can kill puppies and detonate nuclear bombs. No no no! There are absolutely bad ways to transform the earth. But there is no “too much” transformation.
Scripture describes the paradise from which mankind came as a garden. But it describes the paradise for which mankind is to work toward, as a kingdom. That ought to be the mindset that is taken out of scripture.
