A friend of mine with both expertise in geology and a passion for religion shared with me a talk he gave about the intersection of the biblical story of creation and the scientific theory of creation. He reads and mines the first chapters of creation with an environmental eye as I once read and mined the first chapters of creation with a feminist eye. It is forever remarkable to me how pliable, how full, how unendingly revealing those first few verses are. So now I too return to our founding text with a new agenda, to learn from it how we, as human beings, are to live in this complex, teeming yet all too fragile world.

As my friend reviews the march of life, both as it is depicted in the parade of days in Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, and in the geological record here on earth, he says that, “each kind of organism settled into its role, ceas[ing] to be alone and becom[ing] a member of a mutually dependent community… The first ecological community invented the basic rule of ecology, a rule that still shapes the way we live today: No complex creature can live alone.”

For anyone who knows the biblical text of creation, these words jump off the page, singing with familiarity. In Chapter 2:18, after creating the human and putting him in the garden, God recognizes the problem: There is no other creature there. It is only then that God creates all the other animals, culminating in the creation of woman.  “Lo tov heyot adam livado” it says in the Hebrew: “It is not good for the human to be alone.”  “No complex creature can live alone.” The two sentences are practically translations of one another.

But we needn’t stop there. In the first chapter of Torah, Genesis 1, this same message is given in its own way, its own idiom. Day after day of God’s creating, God looks out upon his latest handiwork and proclaims, “It is good.” (True, on the second day, when the waters were divided into the waters above and the waters below, there is no proclamation of goodness. But that is made up for on the third day when God says, “It is good,” twice.)

Each installment of creation, each discrete step, feature and creature are judged to be good in their own right. Before humans came into the picture, each incremental stage of creation was bestowed an independent value of goodness by God.

And yet, that was not enough. At the very end of creation, at the end of the sixth day, after all the air, land and water; after all the vegetation; after all the animals and creeping things; after man and woman were created, only then is the ultimate blessing conferred on creation: “And God saw all that he had created, and behold, it was very good.”

Life is composed of discrete beings, distinct creations that are born and live and die distinctly. But they can only do that when embedded in a teeming world of interdependence. Complex life cannot live without complexity. “Symbiosis is,” as my friend says, “in a sense, the ecological equivalent of covenant.”

All life is bound together, covenanted with each other. To protect ourselves we must protect the other; to protect the one we must protect the whole; to protect the whole, we must protect the parts. It is the moral, ecological, Jewish, biblical thing to do.