White does not provide adequate support for the thesis that the Judeo-Christian tradition, specifically the account of creation in Genesis, is to blame for the current environmental crisis.
In Genesis, man is instructed to ‘conquer’ the earth, and to ‘be master’ over other living things. However, it is of course true that nature could ‘serve man’ in an environmentally sustainable fashion. It is troubling to think that people would be inclined to interpret the account in Genesis in such a way that they feel obligated to recklessly exploit the natural world, and it does not seem that the emergence of Christianity should have encouraged people to engage in this kind of exploitative behavior. Contrarily, the Judeo-Christian tradition can be seen as promoting that mankind be good stewards of the earth, as we can see in the second account of the creation which says, “Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it” (v. 15). White does not give consideration to this prominent statement in Genesis, which seems to promote the conclusion which is the opposite of his own.
While being told to ‘conquer’ the earth may have in some way contributed to Western man’s sense of entitlement to use the earth’s resources as he wishes, it has not been adequately supported that this is the main historical cause of mankind’s exploitation of nature or for our environmental crisis. He has offered conceivable correlations between the account of Genesis and mankind’s understanding of himself as being superior to the rest of the living things on earth, but he does not establish that this responsible for the exploitation of the earth as opposed to other possible factors.
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