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It’s widely understood that the world would remain unsullied by ecological devastation had Adam and Eve remained in the Garden of Eden. This is not necessarily because humans would have remained grazers, for Genesis 2:5 suggests that humans were brought into being at the same time as rain and crops, and that the purpose of humans was to work the soil. Nor is it necessarily because humans would never have reproduced. Many interpreters in the Christian tradition define the knowledge of good and evil as sexual, and treat the fig leaves as proof that Adam and Eve were newly aware of sex. But this interpretation doesn’t hold water. We were ordered to be fruitful and fill the earth when we were created (Genesis 1:28) and we know that Adam and Eve were mortal (Genesis 3:22). Presumably, God did not create humans just in order to let them die out right away.
Intuitively, we trust that God maintained a balance in the the Garden of Eden. And God’s punishment for eating from the tree of good and bad indicate that something really terrible began in the world. But what is the source of our ecological problems?
We can start with a complaint made by doubters over many centuries. They posit that Adam and Eve did not know the difference between right and wrong moral behavior before eating from the tree, and therefore that they could not be blamed for disobeying God. The answer to this is quite clever: Adam and Eve did not need the tree of good and bad to have a moral sense. That came implicitly with their creation in God’s image. They always had the mental capacity to understand that disobeying God was wrong.
What the tree of good and bad granted them was a sense of sensual refinement: an appreciation for good and bad in the sense of high-quality and low-quality consumer items. We know that the immediate effect of eating the fruit was to develop a desire for clothing. Over time, this would evolve into a taste for fine silk as opposed to coarse cloth, and then for leading fashion designer goods made in unsustainable ways using exploited labor. We want the latest model of car, well-seasoned meats prepared in expensive cookware, and McMansions with a scenic view of a landscape we’re despoiling.
What can we do to tame the consumer impulse that we brought on ourselves by eating from the tree of good and bad? A compassion for the poor will help—a sense provided by the prophets that it is worth sacrificing our own luxury to care for the real needs of people on the edge of survival. The Sabbath and the Shmita years also teach us not to constantly turn nature into consumer goods, but to appreciate what is in front of us for what it is. We need not return to Eden to appreciate that the world is very good.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.