Think of it: There are over 300,000 houses of worship in America! If every one of them engaged in a serious effort to conserve energy, to recycle goods and purchase recycled goods, to use compact fluorescent light bulbs, to help clean up their neighborhoods and plant trees, to speak out on environmental policy for their 140 million congregants -- what a transformation of the environmental issue we would see!

As Jews, we know why we must be involved.

La'adonai ha'aretz um'loah -- "The Earth is the Eternal's and the Fullness thereof." What we own, we own in a trust relationship with God, requiring that we protect the corpus -- the body -- of the trust, i.e. G-d's creation. This mandate resulted in an extensive array of Talmudic environmental regulations aimed at keeping the water and air clean; preventing pollution; containing wastes; encouraging, under the rubric of baal tashchit, conservation of resources; requiring the migrash, belts of green, planted around urban areas. All these testify to the unmistakable obligation of Jews to address environmental concerns.

The picture of the whole earth taken from outer space is the defining image, the icon, the revelation of our generation. And as we see it from afar, this blue-green home, with its great forests and seas, mountains and creatures, is sweet and precious -- and good, the way God created and beheld it: kee tov -- "and it was good."

But just at the very moment in human history when we see with clarity, wonder, and awe how precious is God's creation, we are suddenly confronted by startling evidence of its peril. And of damage already being wrought: By our own hands, by our ignorance, and by our indifference, affecting all of us, indiscriminately: Global warming, ozone depletion, the escalating eradication of entire species of life, destruction of our rain forests, runaway world population.

The Midrashic commentaries on the Bible recount:

In the hour when God created the first human, God brought the human before all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said, "See my works, how fine and excellent they are! …For you have I created it…. Do not corrupt and desolate my world -- for if you destroy it, there will be no one after you to set it right again.

Our common task is to ensure that God's mandate is heard today by all humanity. For this Earth is our garden, and this time we face not expulsion but devastation. And that we cannot, we dare not, allow, neither for our children's sake nor for God's.