The authors of the bible lived in a world extravagantly furnished with animals, species that have now mostly disappeared.  Gazelles and wild goats were common in the hills of Canaan, and the book of Judges expresses no astonishment that Samson came upon a lion among the vineyards of Judah.  Job discloses that crocodiles wallowed in the waters of Jordan.  Tigers could still be found in northern Persia, Mesopotamia up until the early centuries of the Christian era.  But even before the Jews went down into Egypt, elephants, rhinoceroses, and giraffes had mostly vanished from the Nile Valley.  And two hundred years before Jesus was born, leopards had been eradicated from their range in Asia Minor, while wolves and jackals were limited to the remote mountains.  Now the only place you might see lions or gazelles in Israel is at the 250-acre Safari Park in Tel Aviv, from an enclosed tramway.

The Fertile Crescent, which Genesis identifies as the location of the original Garden of Eden, really was a paradise at one time or at least amazingly lush.  As Evan Eisenberg describes the region in The Ecology of Eden:

Mesopotamia (the country currently called Iraq) became the bread basket of the Middle East.  The agricultural surplus was made possible by the annual flooding of the rivers and by an extensive system of canals, dikes, and levees, that trapped the waters during the spring runoff and then delivered them to the parched land when and where moisture was needed.  

But disaster was in the making.  Deforested hills brought increasing silt into the flood plains, slowly raising the water table and bringing more brine to the surface of the ground, where high temperatures and rapid evaporation left a thick layer of salt.  The only solution was to leave the land fallow and unirrigated, to let water tables fall.  But this was politically and strategically impossible.  As the seat of world power, Sumer depended on its harvest to feed its growing armies and expanding population.  

The Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel preserves a memory of the debaucle that followed.  The ziggurat, a stepped pyramid of sun-fired brick was the chief architectural ornament of Sumarian cities like Ur and Kish, the tallest man-made object of time.  Like skyscrapers in the modern city, the ziggurat demonstrated human mastery of the environment and our ability to marshal the resources of nature to achieve our own ends.  But by 2000 B.C. there were alarming reports in Sumer of "the earth turned white," distinct references to the increasing salinization of the soil. And within two centuries, the Sumarian Empire had expired.  Paradise had vanished.  We were expelled from the cradle of civilization, not by God but rather by our own hand, and not for partaking of forbidden fruit, but for pushing nature past its allowable limits.  No cherubian with flaming swords were placed on watch to prevent our re-entering the Garden, for none were needed.  The land had become a barren desert, incapable of supporting life, and it remains desolate to this day.

The Bible says the Tower of Babel was destroyed when people could no longer understand each others speech.  But perhaps the catastrophe took place because human beings had forgotten how to speak an even older and more primal language---because they could no longer communicate intuitively with the earth and her creatures.  In either case, hubris was involved.  People imagine they had godlike powers to shape the natural world in their own image.  The question is now whether we can learn from the past.  Will we merely repeat the stories that have been passed down, or revise them, to write our own religious history?  

Surely the great Book of Life cannot already be drawing to a close, with so much still in store.  But if our planet has a future, then the chapters that remain to be written must do more than reiterate tales of times gone by.  There can be little doubt that our sacred literature is in need of renewal, born of the dawning ecological consciousness that all creatures are interrelated and that all life is sacred.