Creation and Ecology: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel and the Environmental Crisis

In this book Ronald A. Simkins addresses the current environmental crisis and what the Bible might contribute in response to it. The environmental crisis includes loss of biodiversity degradation of the soil and especially climate change. If left unchecked these trends will bring about the collapse of human civilization. These environmental problems are interrelated and share a similar cause: the exploitation of the natural world through an economy structured by capitalist relations of production and powered by the burning of fossil fuels. Through our economic relations we have depleted natural resources polluted natural environments and altered natural processes. These problems are a product of our political economy which entails not only our politics ideology and religion but primarily our economic system. Because the crisis is economic at its core Simkins first sets the Bible within its own economic context exploring how the biblical ideas of creation--an understanding of the human relationship to the natural world--were the product of the ancient Israelite political economy. Then Simkins places the biblical tradition in conversation with the current environmental crisis. The result is a far richer view of creation in the biblical tradition and a better understanding of what is at stake in the current environmental crisis.