Environmental disaster in the Hebrew Bible follows moral collapse: the betrayal of the covenant punished by flood, earthquake, storm, drought, crop failure, plague, and war: the land laid waste, its inhabitants exiled.1 A covenant (brit, or bris) in the Bible is generally a treaty in which both parties, whether human or divine, agree to cooperate with one another, and to limit their behavior in certain ways. The archetypal symbol for the covenant between God and Abraham, and therefore for Jews throughout history, is circumcision (Genesis 17: 11): the word for covenant and for circumcision is the same (bris). Whereas a covenant among tribes or nations may take the form of a social or political alliance, a covenant between people and God is in effect a reward for moral behavior:2 the natural world acts as a kind of bank from which rain is drawn in its season and crops grow plentifully, and the thousand natural shocks to which life is prey are kept at a distance. To be in harmony with Nature is to be obedient to God. Human beings, though imperfect, should imitate divine moral attributes: āAs He is merciful, so should you be merciful; as He is gracious, so should you be gracious; as He is righteous, so should you be righteous.ā3 Immorality is a breach of the covenant: Nature becomes the agent of divine punishment. Part of the fascination of the Hebrew Bible is the repeated breaches of the covenant. In the chronological sequence from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Kings/Chronicles, the narrative backbone of the Bibleāfrom the exile from Eden to the exile from the kingdomāhuman nature is laid bare in all its flaws.
And therefore, environmental abnormality in the Bible follows moral failing; environmental pollution betrays moral pollution: the fire and brimstone, the drowning flood, the smoke and heat and sulphurous fumes of sin.4 Humankind, though divinely created, is self-corrupted: open to insight, penitence, and self-correction, drawn to self-destruction. The originality of biblical sin stretches from casual disobedience to brutal child sacrifice in idolatrous practices, with stories and poems filled with human failings of all kinds, including incest, adultery, theft, and murder. Human misbehavior literally scars the landscape: the earth does not erupt randomly under geological pressure, but under moral pressure; the skies do not open haphazardly with rainstorms flooding and destroying life, but with a punishing storm of moral judgment. The environment and morality are oneāthe ugly face of corruption. As rare as rainbows is loyalty to the moral covenant. Only Eden is divine, the earth given into human hands is the image of human frailty, of blood, sweat, and tears. The covenant betrayed, a once-fruitful Eden withers into the landscape of the Cities of the Plain, āburnt stone and salt, a land unsowed, bare of plants and grassā.5
The idea that natural disaster follows human immorality is not confined to the Bible or to theological dogma. It is deeply imprinted in human psychology, and persistently mirrored in literature. Shakespeare, in Henry V, laments the combined human and ecological disaster caused by war. It is ironically the āenemyāāthe French Duke of Burgundyāwho, after Franceās defeat in the battle of Agincourt (1415), speaks most profoundly the truth of war. War leaves countless widows, orphans, and the wounded in body and spirit, as well as fertile land unsown and wasted (āfallow leasā). Children grow wild as weeds, thorns, and thistles on the land they tread. Instead of thirst for knowledge, they thirst for blood in ignoble savagery.6 This ādefectiveā human nature has been the same since the Fall from Eden:
ā¦ all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleachād,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forward disorderād twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages, as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing and stern looks, diffusād attire,
And every thing that seems unnatural.7
The power of this speech is in its grief for a ruined natural world as a beloved living thing, torn from oneself by the evil of war; and as such it foreshadows similar laments, louder and louder since the Industrial Revolution. Modern writers, including the Romantic poets, novelists such as Ćmile Zola, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and John Steinbeck, and playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhovāeven those detached from or hostile toward organized religionāportray environmental disaster as a sign of moral collapse.8
The Bible weeps for the alienation from Nature, for the loss of innocence, the twisted dark of the human heart. The natural world demands reverence, being divinely created, a gift to humankind. Human dominance is temporary and conditional. The environment mirrors a universal struggle between good and evil: the good created āin Godās imageā, a universal standard of law and justice, alive in nature; while injustice spoils the earth. The natural world should be loved as God should be loved, and as one should love oneās neighbor. Justice, truth, and loving kindness are the rhythms and cycles of the earth. The environmentāthe sun, moon, and stars, the mountains, rivers and seas, day and night, the turn of the seasonsāis natural law.9 In human hands, the lawful world constantly slips away. Man can destroy the earthāor recreate Eden. Human injustice and strife are, in this perception of a moral natural world, unnatural. To repent from evil is to return to Nature.
In Zolaās Germinal (1885), the environmental damage done by the contemporary French mining industry is symptomatic of moral corruption: the countryside robbed of its beauty, the earth pocked with slag-heaps and ruins, coated with soot from blast-furnaces, hardly a tree in sight, the foul air and water destroying the health of the inhabitants.10 Bonnemort, a dead man walking, 50 years a miner, since age seven, spits out gobs of black phlegm, fruit of his toil and of the coal dust he breathes. In this ruined land, the people are little better than animals, and at times worse treated. In the mines children under 12 work alongside their parents and older siblings. Yet the miners are unbroken, and their young leader, Etienne Lantier, has not lost hope that they will overcome their enemies, and truth and justice will prevail. The novel ends with the miners buried alive underground but germinating, pushing outward in revolutionary pregnancy, a symbol of human and environmental healing combined:
All around him seeds were swelling and shoots were growing, cracking the surface of the plain, driven upwards by their need for warmth and light. The sap flowed upwards and spilled over in soft whispers; the sound of germinating seeds rose and swelled to form a kiss. Again, and again, and ever more clearly, as if they too were rising towards the sunlight, his comrades kept tapping away. Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.11
Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1899), depicts a similarly brutal assault on the environment, with far greater human cost. Black slaves are worked to death by the Belgian colonial authority to build a railroad through the Congo jungle for the rapid transport of goods, especially ivory. Ivory is collected by traders such as Kurtz, a paragon of Enlightenment idealism, whom Marlow, the storyās narrator, is sent to find. He finds a ruthless, all-powerful dictator engaged in genocideā āExterminate all the brutes.ā Conrad leaves no doubt of the malevolence of environmental destruction and the human āheart of darknessā, the transformation yet again of an Eden into a wasteland. The earth is dynamited, and work on the railroad brings no good but leaves a detritus of ruined vegetation, exploded rock, broken trees, and carcasses of decayed machinery, with the destruction of the lives of countless natives (the total was in the millions). Conrad describes dying slaves moving like the phantom MusselmƤnner in Primo Leviās description of Auschwitz inmates:
They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete death-like indifference of unhappy savagesā¦ I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowlyā¦ Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.12
This āheart of darknessā is not confined to Africa but is wherever humanity is, cut off from the light of Eden. Heart of Darkness begins with Marlow saying that London is āone of the dark places of the earthā, and it ends with the rivers and seas of the earth seeming all to lead āinto the heart of an immense darknessāāthe human heart.
Conradās equation of environmental ruin with human immorality is echoed by Lawrence in The Rainbow (1915: ch. 1). In English prose bordering on poetry richly colored with biblical cadences, Lawrence portrays a late 19th-century Eden in the North of England, where human beings were still at one with the rhythm and cycle of Nature:
ā¦ heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birdsā nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.
Into this idyllic rural world, Lawrence writes, industry spewed its poison, turning its inhabitants into the living dead. Lawrence, a minerās son, follows Zola at the end of The Rainbow in finding hope for Nature corrupted by industry. Ursula Brangwen seeks āthe creation of the living Godā, a renewal of the covenant (Genesis 9: 13) among the Nottinghamshire miners buried alive in their coffins, in blackened homes corrupt with pollution, the blackened hills, the ādry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the landā:
And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.
In The Gra...
