Back to the Garden

One of the great coups of the modern world is its success in convincing us that we have no stories except the stories we chose when we had no stories. Beyond the fact that this is itself a story, the amount of storied infrastructure necessary to sustain this story is quite remarkable. Today, I want to unsettle one of the many stories that is largely a matter of settled "fact" in contemporary discourse. My purpose here is not simply to overturn the story, but rather to complicate it sufficiently in order that we can at least begin to question its settled nature and see just how silly some of our unquestioned assumptions can be. Today's story began, as near as I can tell, with the 1967 essay by Lynn White Jr., in the journal Science   "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis." This essay is widely cited as a short-hand for blaming Christian anthropocentrism for our current environmental and ecological woes. Often, it seems that the people who cite this es...

When the Zionist movement began within the Jewish diaspora, it is interesting to note that there was significant debate about what place to secure as a home for the Jewish people, but there was agreement that the Jewish people needed a place to call home. Of course the Holy Land will always loom large in the Jewish imagination, but leading thinkers in the early Zionist movement were open to the possibility of a Jewish state in other locales such as Argentina. The argument was that at the root of the problems and persecutions of the Jews was the problem of placelessness. If only the Jewish people could have a place of their own, then many of the problems tied to their precarious status as a perpetual diaspora could be resolved.  The state of Israel has not brought about the promised end to these problems. Jews are still reviled (though perhaps not as candidly in polite company). Worse still, the Israeli sponsored apartheid of Palestinians has undercut their own construction of pl...