Save the Bald Eagles, Save the World

On the first day of my internship, I found out that one of the issues I’d be working on was the Endangered Species Act. There was one problem: when it comes to social justice, I’m in it for the people. Not so much the bald eagles.

I’ve never been particularly interested in the environment for its own sake, but this winter, I started to read about climate justice, and I got hooked. Looking at the world through a climate justice matrix, climate change and social inequality are driven by the same unsustainable logic and must be addressed through coordinated action. And while we are working to address human suffering and inequality, the earth is now lashing out against its own suffering in a way we can’t ignore, telling us that our work has not gone far enough.

Confronting the reality of climate change will catalyze our efforts to restructure our society with an eye towards justice, compassion and sustainability. We must take bold action now—because if not now, climate change compels us to ask, when?

Now that’s an environmentalism I can get behind.

Climate justice quickly became the issue that kept me up at night, and I was determined to do something about it, to heed the call for action. That’s how I ended up interning at an environmental nonprofit through Machon Kaplan this summer, working on shoring up support for the Endangered Species Act.

Like I said, I’m not much of an animal person. Everyone loves the Endangered Species Act, but it’s hardly the issue that sets my intersectional feminist heart on fire. I couldn’t figure out how to get excited about it until I read this line from Talmud: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).

I came to understand that, even if saving the sage grouse doesn’t seem like it has much to do with global climate justice, the connections are there. Protecting endangered species requires habitat conservation, which often protects land that oil and gas companies want to drill on, leading to both material and symbolic victories over the fossil fuel industry. Fighting the fossil fuel industry is one of the biggest challenges in restructuring our economy to be clean and sustainable; that restructuring process is our best opportunity for breaking down systems of inequality and building a more just and humane society.

To me, Jewish ethics and spirituality are all about the connections between the small and the large, the eternal and the moment suspended in time, the value of a single life and the incomprehensible majesty of creation. Finding my path in social justice work, and now climate justice, has been all about finding a way to reconcile my own, limited power in the world with the unlimited scope of my vision for a better future.

One of my favorite Jewish teachings says that “it is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). I might not be able to right all the world’s wrongs and stop climate change in its tracks by myself. But if it will help a little bit, I can try, this summer, to be an animal person.

Click here to read the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ statement on endangered species, and consider calling or writing your representatives to ask for their continued support of the Endangered Species Act. You can learn more about climate justice here and here.

Claire Spaulding is a sophomore at Columbia University, where she is on the board of Kesher – Reform Jews on Campus. In her free time, she enjoys going on adventures in New York, checking out more books from the library than she will ever have time to read, and cooking with her friends. Her writing has been published in Daily Science Fiction, One Teen Story, and GayYA.org. She is a 2016 Machon Kaplan Participant.