The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas: From Adam to Michael K

David Aberbach asserts at the beginning of his study that, in the Hebrew Bible, “the natural world is seen through the awe and wonder, fear and hope, of individuals” (vii). That ecological vision has inspired poets and writers ever since—although he notes that the Bible also shows how humans destroy their habitats and often disregard the immorality of their actions—human immorality results in natural catastrophes throughout biblical texts. But it was the Industrial Revolution and resulting crises of poverty that posed greater environmental threats and “pushed environmental dilemmas to the foreground in literature and the arts, and to an unprecedented degree in legislation” (vii). That’s the territory that Aberbach covers in this broad study—environmental promise and degradation, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and world history. Environmental issues are fundamentally moral issues, Aberbach asserts, because, as in the Hebrew Bible, “human weakness” is the “root cause of all that goes wrong with the natural world” (3).Readers wanting to indulge in new perspectives on The Grapes of Wrath may be disappointed by the thinness of the Steinbeck material in his text, which includes a two-page overview of “Environmental Abuse in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.” Aberbach suggests that “nonbeliever” Steinbeck returns to the “Hebrew Bible in depicting environmental disaster in language of sin and curse, of exodus and longing to return to a lost Eden” (165). Of course the Joads seek a new beginning in Edenic California, imagining orange groves and grape vines, the juices of those grapes oozing through their fingers. California means abundance and perhaps land ownership and a new home for Ma Joad. The sins they confront in this fallen Eden are human generated—power in the hands of a few, waste of resources in order to prop up California’s agricultural powerhouse. The dispossessed suffer. A new Eden eludes the Joads.And one may question Aberbach’s easy assumption that Steinbeck was a nonbeliever, reiterated two or three times in this study. Perhaps not quite. Shall a writer who is best termed a pantheist, a man with spiritual heft, be dismissed so easily as a nonbeliever, simply because Steinbeck eschewed organized religion? That he drew on the Hebrew Bible is without question; that he did so only as an atheist is open to interpretation.Steinbeck aside, Aberbach’s restless study is intriguing throughout. His wide-angle gaze on environmental moral dilemmas—“particularly after 1789,” as industrialization took shape—takes in Adam, modern Hebrew literature, Karl Marx, and J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, a novel that draws on the Bible as a “spiritual refuge, in its conception of a lost paradise, which human beings can strive to recreate, . . . [Michael] treats the earth lovingly” (170). While Aberbach touches on an eclectic mix of texts and authors, a reader may wish for a more pointed explanation of why he chooses some texts rather than others (Zola to Conrad to Lawrence in two pages—all personal favorites?). I yearned for a bit more context.And yet, the rather haphazard selection of books and ideas, presented in rapid fire, keeps the reader engaged throughout. This study reveals a curious mind casting a wide net over the world’s literature as well political and social thought to consider how human agency has impacted the environment. He grounds those pointed references to the central text in question, the Hebrew Bible, to demonstrate, again and again, that environmental crises are moral crises, as the Bible suggests: human actions and environmental health are inextricably bound together.Since the Industrial Revolution, in particular, writers have noted that environmental problems can be seen as moral quandaries. To demonstrate that point early on in his study, Auerbach cites, in a single paragraph, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie. (A more pointed Cooper reference might be The Pioneers, where Natty Bumppo turns away in disgust after witnessing the settlers slaughter hundreds of pigeons flying over Templeton—now Cooperstown. The settlers’ greed and zeal destroy natural abundance.) In the same meaty paragraph, Aberbach references Kafka, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Hardy, and T. S. Eliot. Meatiness is a quality this text has in abundance. Moral dilemmas coupled with environmental crises are to be found everywhere in literature and political thought, of course. It is Aberbach’s strength that he nudges us again and again to see the scope of that particular history.The first two thirds of this book largely focus on the Hebrew Bible itself in chapters titled “The Environment and the Betrayal of the Covenant,” “Nature and the Biblical Calendar: Festivals and Psalms,” “Sacred Landscapes in Exile,” “The Bible, Charity, and Agricultural Law,” “Energy and Its Abuse,” and “Environmental Disaster in the Bible.” But each chapter also notes later texts where those same biblical themes loom large, for example Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as depicting “a brutal assault on the environment” or Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which depicts the ways in which industry corrupts the land and the people. Wordsworth, “inspired by the Hebrew Bible, saw the mountains as the image of the hidden eternal mind and power of Nature” (35). That referential approach is both the strength and possible weakness of this study. At times one yearns for more in-depth analysis of the texts he introduces, rather than breezy references and at times over-long quotations, as well as scattered passages in Hebrew.Many points are thought provoking. “In the Bible, love of the natural world is sharpened by loss” (73). Aberbach then asks, “In which ways does loss affect the imagination of nature?” He briefly mentions Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”; Heathcliff’s restlessness in Wuthering Heights as concomitant with Bronte’s own losses—or Pip’s suffering in Great Expectations as a reflection of Dickens’ childhood terrors. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus “describes a quest for unity and harmony in the natural world” (77), which may have been grounded in his own childhood losses. Such tantalizing references invite the reader to add to the list. Perhaps that openness is one of this book’s strengths. We want to expand his scope even further as we consider moral dilemmas and environmental health.One chapter considers trees: “The regard for trees in the Hebrew Bible has many parallels and influences in later literature” (81). A reference to Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown seems made to order here. Another chapter considers energy, “The fear of what human beings might do with energy is evident in some of the most ancient literature that has come down to us” (92). Aberbach asks readers, again and again, to recognize the biblical roots of many of our contemporary concerns with environmental degradation.In the Psalms, as Aberbach reminds us, “the natural world is a moral force: nature is judge, the ocean roars with justice, the sun shines with righteousness, the morning dew is gentle in brotherhood, the fertility of the earth is the force of truth” (87). That’s a lovely sentence, and it’s bracing to be reminded of, or to reinforce, our awareness of the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of human actions and environmental justice. Aberbach’s energetic study, weighing in at 171 pages, does just that.