The Heart of Jewish Ecology: An Integrative Framing of the Human Niche
Bringing Forth a New Framework for Approaching the Human Place in the World
“Religion is the essential act of holding fast to God”
- Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God, 1952
This article is the culmination of a series outlining the structure of the human niche. If you have not read the previous article in this series, you can do so here. In this final part, we will move from the realm of Jewish philosophy and mysticism into an ecological theory of humankind. The niche weaves together all our relationships – be it to other people or other species, to stories or tools, places and ideas – and reveals the active role we play in shaping our place in relation to the biosphere and the cosmos. From myth to science, and from ancient mysticism to modern ecological awareness, this final article will reveal how our cognitive niche intersects with our technology. Weaving through social and ecological relations, an integrative portrait of human ecology will come into view.
Mapping Our Niche
If you’ve followed this series so far, you will have seen how humankind — in all our beautiful diversity and creativity — actively participates in the creation of our many niches, at once opening up new opportunities for coexistence and creating new potentials for conflict. Changes in our niche, be it in our environment, our cognitive faculties, our tools, or our society, reverberate throughout the whole of our niche, reciprocally causing change in our bodies, brains, cultures, and environments. This might leave you wondering: given all the different places, social roles, and ways of living, how could anything universal be said about the human niche – something so inherently variegated, locally-adapted, and particular?
Through the past two parts of this periodical finale to our series, I have described the journeys that led us to this point – in both my personal experience, and the evolutionary unfolding of the Jewish people and G-d. We left off with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the Great Chain of Being: how then can we adequately imagine our place in the cosmos without comparing ourselves to angels or beasts, freeing us from being servants to some human king or otherworldly Lord? Both of these diagrams map out G-d’s relationship to this world, visualizing our relationship with our wider environment — be it social or spiritual, gendered or racialized — to help us locate our place in the grand schema of Reality. But can a religious ecology — that is, a scientific approach to our home which we can hold fast to — be constructed that does not rely on hierarchical assumptions about G-d or man’s natural domination over all?
By reinterpreting these diagrams in light of human ecology, we can see that in each case, the theologians, philosophers and mystics are making claims about humankind’s place in the natural world. In each case, we see that our place affords us powers and responsibilities that are particular to humankind – sustaining our relation to G-d or Nature depends on our ability to navigate these unique facets of the human condition with ethics and grace. We must now understand that the human niche weaves our bodies and minds together with our tools and environments into a community that spans across social and ecological relations, creating the foundation upon which all human endeavors unfolds. Grounded in the physical world — through our bodies, brains and minds, and into our social, ecological, and technological relationships — all our actions, relationships, and creations are made possible.
An Intuitive Approach to the Niche: a Sevenfold Framework for Approaching the Human Niche
I came to this model in the summer of summer of 2022 while I was living in the Chihuahuan desert and researching ecological communities. In considering the manifold ways we perceive, relate to, and understanding our surroundings, I was compelled to create this diagram. Months earlier I had read Iriki and Taoka’s 2012 paper on “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction” which I outlined earlier in this series. After struggling to understand and represent our constructed place in the world I created this:
Each of the 7 colored domains represents levels of the human niche, each of which is in reciprocal integration with each other. Each of these domains serves as an enablement, allowing us to perceive, understand, and interact with the world beyond ourselves. Blurring the lines between particular and universal, self and species, an image of G-d comes into view wholly beyond the limits of our conceptual domains.
Think for a moment about your cognitive niche, or rather, the cognitive domain of your niche. What does it mean for this domain of the niche to be linked primarily to the neural domain and social domain? Cognitive ecologists generally describe the contemporary structure of the cognitive niche as “advanced linguistic consciousness”: all of our thinking is rooted in our social context — the words we bring to mind to explain things depend upon the social environment, our personal community in which you developed (Davies). Yet, this is always filtered through the lens of your evolved physiology and neural apparatus: your whole neurological system, connecting your body to your senses, stimulating conscious awareness through brain activity. This is what allows us to feel and understand the meaning of the words that fill in the central column of this diagram: each word connects one domain of the niche to another, allowing us to conceptualize its whole interconnected structure.
Already, we are bringing our corporeal niche into this portrait, as simply sensing and feeling our place in the world depends on both our physical body and the wider environment in which we are situated. Yet truly understanding what we perceive depends on our ability to differentiate and identify bodies, especially those of other organisms. We come to understand who we are in the world through our living relations. Be they human, animal, plant, or microbe, our connections to other beings are what build and sustain us. It is thus our ecological niche that grounds our ability to engage creatively with our circumstances, and to build the vital routines that sustain our community.
Human Ecology
If you’ve followed the integrative logic of the framework this far, you might still be wondering: how does our ecological domain differ from the environmental? To start, you should be noticing that these niches are not distinct things, but lenses, and many things need to be seen through multiple of these lenses to be properly understood. Levins and Lewontin’s description of the environment, in their 1997 article, “Organism and Environment,” can help: to paraphrase, the physical world is not an environment if there is no organism to experience it. They go on to say, “The entire niche is described by the sensuous life activities of the [organism], not by some menu of external circumstances. Organisms do not experience or fit into an environment, they construct it.” All this to say: our environment grows precisely through our living. An environmental niche can only be understood in relation to the organism that experiences it; feeling the weather, seeing the landscape, understanding that we live in a world.
In coming to understand our place in the world, we come to realize that our possibilities for acting are not limited by the behaviors we’ve seen before. We come to see the world as a “landscape of affordances,” with each other thing — be it an inorganic material, another organism, or a tool we’ve inherited — enabling new potentials for action (Rietveld and Kiverstein). In community, we build ourselves a home, a way of living in relation to the land and water. It is here — in relation to each other and our shared environment — that we can imagine new ways of engaging with and explaining our world. Only in this intimate relationship does technology arise: we build technological niches – ever-expanding in new words and concepts, cutting-edge tools and techniques.
By connecting the technological and cognitive domains of our niche, and weaving through the whole manifold of our living relations – this spiral diagram reimagines what it means to conceptualize the structure of the human niche. Through it, we can both recognize ourselves as individuals, and as a whole species. In the words we use, the responsibilities we carry, the impact our environment has on us, and that we have on others, our niche is both distinct and interwoven with the life of all others. When our society shifts, or a new technology disrupts existing ways of living, it reverberates across our whole world, driving forth the evolution of all other facets of our niche in the process.
Over the past 3,000 years, our collective understanding of the cosmos, and our place in it, has come so far: from dreaming the Earth as the center of everything, to realizing we orbit but a single star on but a speck of dust; one of nearly an infinite number of worlds. Likewise, we went from seeing gods in everything to seeing G-d as otherworldly – detached from the physical cosmos.
The history of Judaism, G-d, and the evolution of cosmology – from culturally-distinct stories to an empirical science – offer us a landscape through which a spiritual science of the life of humankind can be radically opened up and grounded in the natural world. Through Jewish Ecology, I hope to do exactly that: exploring the social ecological context in which our ideas regarding love and freedom, mythology and theology, nature and ethics have developed, such that we can ground them in Reality and Truth.
Ecology offers us a path toward recentering the heart of what it means to be human within human thought. Through this radically new concept of the human niche we can begin to see the contours necessary to bring an understanding of G-d’s presence, G-d’s emergence, and G-d’s emanations back into our sciences. By bringing the metaphysical back into the view of the sciences, our human ecology can give us the tools to integrate ancient wisdom and modern knowledge into a holistic living Science. But the question still remains: how can we use the powers we gain by technology and science for the good? How can we inspire ourselves and others to take responsibility for our shared home? How can all of us live well together on the Earth?
We must always remember that we are One. One community, One living, evolving legacy, home on our One Earth. And yet, we are many: infinitely diverse, each rooted in particular relationships, in our own particular niche. Yet, in our diversity, there is unity. Regardless of religion or culture, gender or species, we all have a place here: a unique niche built in a unique web of relations. In this age of social ecological crisis – of global warming and catastrophic wars, of cut-throat capitalism and full-throated apocalypticism – we must realize the immense responsibilities we bear living here in this moment of change. In finding and building a place to belong, in rooting ourselves in community and committing ourselves — in our deepest act of freedom — to embody our love for our place here on the Earth, we begin to heal the fractures in our broken world.
Our continued well-being depends on our ability to steward our relationships, our homes, and our traditions, and to find new ways in which we can coexist together. May this realization guide our actions, encouraging us to engage actively in our communities, develop healthy relationships to each other and our environment, and continue to cultivate a niche that supports our souls in service of our present, and the future of all life.
“If extended to the earth as a whole, [the covenant] would spell out the obligations of humanity toward the earth and its inhabitants as one manifestation of humanity's obligations to God.”
- Hava Tirosh Samuelson, “Nature in the Sources of Judaism”, 2001
This concludes the first movement of Jewish Ecology, which I hope helped you feel rooted in our shared home: the Earth. Did you find this interesting? Transformative? Problematic? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below!
Thank you for joining me on the journey through Jewish Ecology. This blog aims to build a participatory dialogue in which important ideas at the intersection of Judaism and ecology can help us root ourselves in the World. This blog is not just for Jews; I aim for these articles to be accessible and impactful for anyone that is interested in building up an understanding of the role that spirituality, philosophy, and ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the World. If you can think of someone who might enjoy these articles, please consider sharing this blog!
Works Cited:
Davies, Oliver. “Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place”, in Culture and Brain. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-016-0039-2
Levins, Richard, and Lewontin, Richard. “Organism and Environment”, in Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455759709358737
Rietveld, Erik, and Kiverstein, Julian. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances” in Ecological Psychology, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2014.958035
I am not familiar with Bill Plotkin’s work, though the premise that the self discover, or soul work, leads us to find our niche is very aligned with my own thinking. I’ll have to check his writing out!
As for the fraught concept of a hierarchy, I much prefer Ken Wilber’s notion of a “holarchy”, which recognizing how an emergent whole can exist as a composite made up of discrete individuals, without subsuming the the individuality of the “parts”. This gets us away from confusing a hierarchical system of command and control with an integrative system in which individuals come together and create something in which all are included. This is an important difference, and I’d love to keep discussing this with you.
I'm curious if you're familiar with eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin's work. In his book Nature and the Human Soul, he defines the human soul in healthy, eco-soulcentric cultures as an ecological niche. That niche is discovered via soul work and developmental practices, and is expressed through one's social role. So, for example, two people could be elementary school teachers but have different ecological niches that they occupy.
That word "hierarchy" is so fraught and carries so much baggage in the West. When I encountered Christian Hermeticism via Valentin Tomberg (and central to his thinking is the reality of the celestial hierarchies), I had to take the time to think through this concept instead of immediately dismissing it. I almost wonder if the concept of keystone species would help us better understand what hierarchy (and the orientating activity it entails) is from an ecological standpoint.