We are powerless to prevent the global scorching that will ensue in the next 20 years: it is a consequence of carbon already in the atmosphere. We are powerless to prevent the extinction of species that have already passed the point of no return. Great swathes of the world have been devastated by pollution and over-industrialization. The world’s oil represents, as Thom Hartmann once put it, “a billion years of ancient sunlight,” and we will use up those resources within another generation or two.

Against these harsh facts we can merely acknowledge that what is done is done. And those of us who believe that the Jewish people can or could or should make a difference must reckon with a further level of insignificance. We, who were one percent of the world’s people a century ago, are today barely two-tenths of a percent of the world’s population. If every Jew in the world traded an SUV for a Prius and never boarded an airplane again, it would not halt, much less reverse, global scorching. Putting a solar-powered ner tamid in a synagogue is by itself a pinprick upon our planet. It is inconsequential, and we owe it to our own intellectual integrity to acknowledge this fact.

Why then do we do anything? Why is there a Jewish environmental movement? Why are Jewish institutions starting to green themselves? And in a professionalized community that respects evaluation, outcomes, and metrics, what are our ultimate goals?

We must begin by acknowledging that a considerable part of our present behavioral shift is rooted in embarrassment. We’re realizing that placing a plastic bottle into the world’s oceans for a century or more is a ludicrous price to pay for the five minutes it takes us to drink the bottle’s contents. We have grown up with behaviors that are morally indefensible. They are entrenched by custom, but they wither in the face of clear thought. So we are slowly becoming embarrassed by our own behavior, and we are effecting change as self-realization dawns. This is not a bad reason to change one’s behavior — I think it’s probably quite a good one — but it’s important to acknowledge what’s happening because we rarely seem to own up to this sort of thing.

After embarrassment, the next step is the desire to feel we’re doing something useful. Just as smoking became socially unacceptable, so now our institutions use recycled paper, we print on both sides, we reduce our disposables or switch to ones that are compostable. Yet if we add up the aggregate impact of all these activities they turn out to be fairly marginal. Even if adopted not just by every Jew but by everyone alive today, those activities wouldn’t halt our deeply dangerous experiment in climate change from spiraling out of control.

This is why we need larger and clearer goals. We need to integrate education, action, and advocacy. And it’s why we need a clearer strategy for what we’re trying to do. If we are serious about being or l’goyim (a light unto the nations), our goal must be a healthy and sustainable world for all its inhabitants. It means acting to slow the damage and then steadily working to ameliorate it.

The role of education, and the work of nonprofits and faith communities, is to touch people’s lives so that we act differently as citizens and consumers. But education is only the first step: action and advocacy are vital. When a government introduces a $50 fee to drive an SUV into Central London — a fee that will take effect later this year — they do so when a sufficient critical mass of public support endorses such a decision. When Wal-Mart or any other major business goes “green” in serious ways, they do so because they believe that competitive advantages will ensue, that a growing number of consumers want carbon-labeled products so that they can monitor and reduce their individual carbon output.

This is how Jewish education relates to broad issues. We need to steadily change what and how we consume, to connect this to Jewish tradition, and to place this within a larger series of goals. That’s why we ought to set the goal of reducing our carbon output by 80 percent, as a people, by 2030. That’s why we must lead the change effort in the U.S. and must support the work of environmental organizations in Israel. We must green our institutions and integrate this process with serious Jewish learning. We should address in particular food systems, transportation, and climate change: these three areas connect personal behavior, Jewish tradition, and the largest issues we face today.

Although irreversible damage has been done, changes we begin today will do good in the long run. Being Jewish is about having a time horizon that transcends the lifetime of an individual. Jews settled Palestine a century ago so that a State of Israel that they would never know might come to fruition. Honi Hama-agel famously planted a carob tree so that his heirs might enjoy its fruit. The seeds of a strategy for serious environmental change are the seeds we need to plant today.

Three key things we should be doing

• All Jewish organizations should create a health and sustainability commission. The goals should be to green the institution, to reduce our carbon footprints by 80 percent in the next 20 years, and to integrate this process with the organization’s broader mission.
• We need to build a much stronger Jewish environmental movement, with a strategy for grassroots organizing, a clear framework for coordinating advocacy work nationally, and stronger relationships with the Israeli environmental movement and other faith-based environmental movements in the U.S.
• “Learning leads to doing.” This is a key Jewish understanding. We need to learn where our food comes from, where our waste goes, and how Jewish tradition connects to key contemporary issues. The more serious the learning, the more profound will be the impact.

In April of 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney was quoted in an interview asserting that “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” He was roundly excoriated by the environmental community for this view. Seven years later, in the midst of skyrocketing energy prices, increasing climate change, and global food shortages, most people in the U.S. continue to live as if the environmental crisis can be dealt with through acts of personal virtue confined to consumer choices.

On this issue most American Jews are no different from other Americans. We belong to the highest-consuming nation in the world, the least energy efficient, the largest producer of greenhouse gases; we are part of our society that consumes the most, and yet we act as if changing a light bulb, using our reusable bags from Whole Foods, planting trees in Israel as carbon offsets, and buying more organic food will solve the climate change crisis.

While many Jewish organizations have policy statements that call for significant environmental action, those same organizations up until now have failed to implement these policies. Over the past 18 months, the interfaith environmental organization GreenFaith has been touring the film An Inconvenient Truth . Following the viewing and discussion, the group gives out pledge cards with five, increasingly difficult actions — from changing light bulbs to buying a low-mileage car or hybrid. Though this and other groups are helping people see how to do things to make a difference, it is not enough.

Jewish environmentalists are stuck — for the most part — in an apologetic approach, which posits that religious traditions as such supply all the needed theological resources to address the environmental crisis. Although the first Jewish theological response to the crisis was written 40 years ago, yet the same biblical and rabbinic texts continue to be cited and discussed in our writing.

This lack of new theology reinforces the idea that environmental actions can remain a personal virtue. By emphasizing tikkun olam, Jewish environmentalism has not moved beyond a stewardship ethic that privileges human needs. And we have not seriously embraced the ethic of environmental justice that connects the degradation of the environment to racism and economic inequities. Jewish theologians and ethicists for the most part have not been part of the significant critique of modern capitalism and globalization that has been coming from process theology, liberation theology, and ecofeminism.

It is time for Jewish environmentalism to move beyond an apologetic theology and an ethic of personal virtue to become more engaged with the many creative ideas that have been emanating from religious and environmental movements. New Creation theology, which emphasizes the interconnection of all people and all life, must become the foundation of a far bolder Jewish ethical response. As the environmental crisis grows more serious, we must help people understand how our lifestyles affect the lives of millions of other people in this country and around the world, how our lives contribute to the extinction of thousands of species every year, and how we are literally consuming the earth.

British writer George Monbiot claims we must set a goal of 90 percent reduction; this will not be achieved by only changing light bulbs. Monbiot puts forward a moral choice: continue to live the way we do and have millions of people die in Ethiopia (from drought) and Bangladesh (from rising seas) or radically change.

Do we continue to resist or deny that choice because we project, as Monbiot points out, “the future as repeated instances of the present”? We all believe that we will not be affected; we will find a way to survive or that somehow something will save us. If we all change a light bulb, the Messiah will come. The midrash that Jewish environmentalists love to quote has God saying, “See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.” It is time to heed that call.

The convenient truth about the Jewish people is that when we put our minds and capital to work, we can make miracles happen. There is no more noble cause than saving humanity itself, ensuring that God’s covenant not to wipe out the planet with rising waters will be — in some small measure — because of our actions. 

Saving the earth itself from global warming, and the billions of people and animals on it, is not just environmentalism. It is global survival. Of the trillions of cosmic opportunities for life to flourish, this third rock from the sun may be the only expression, the only experiment, to grace the universe with the possibility of collective moral choice.

Watching Al Gore’s movie with Arab and Jewish students at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, on the kibbutz where I live, put into context this challenge. Are Arabs and Jews going to keep fighting on the deck of the sinking Titanic? Or will a greater vision for humanity transcend immediate conflicts?

As Jews, we must transform ourselves from the misunderstood Light Unto the Nations, as Isaiah beckoned, to a Renewable Light Unto the Nations. Our first fundamental challenge is to ensure that the Jewish state, which is home to seven million people, becomes carbon neutral. Unfortunately, the government’s stated goal is for only 10 percent of Israel’s energy by 2020 to be generated by renewables, primarily solar. This is unacceptable. The European Union, most of whose member countries have half the sunshine of Israel, has set a goal of 20 percent renewables by 2020.   

If Israel sets a goal of 40 percent renewables by 2020, it would capture the imagination of our youth, entrepreneurs, scientists, philanthropists, and financiers. It would cast Israel not only as a responsible nation but also as a shining example of what can be accomplished by coordinated global action.  

There is plenty of sunshine and land in the Negev and Arava deserts to power this revolution. We need, though, the political will of world Jewry. Linking UJC and Keren Hayesod allocations to Israel’s compliance with at least a 20 percent renewables goal would send a powerful message to Israel’s leadership, as well as to the next generation of Jews. Such linkage should be accompanied by a World Jewish Action Plan that offers Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide carbon offset opportunities.

Imagine that each year on Tu B’shvat, Jewish families and institutions calculate their carbon footprint and then invest in efforts in the Jewish state to offset that footprint. For example, planting trees in Israel has long been a global Jewish effort. And although forests breathe in the carbon dioxide, which is a powerful carbon offset activity, the majority of trees planted up until now are pine trees, which throw off acidic needles. After a century, the pine forests essentially poison their own roots and die. Future plantings should emphasize Mediterranean Oak and other trees that will work better with the Israeli ecosystems.

Every synagogue, JCC, school, and institution should figure out its footprint, put solar panels on its own roof — with great new naming opportunities — and also set aside funds to invest in Israeli renewable science centers or companies. Furthermore, Partnership 2000 communities (created between Israeli and world Jewish communities) could adopt mirror strategies. When the solar panels are named in Boston, a similar array can be named in Haifa, Boston’s sister city.  Jewish buildings worldwide and Israeli homes and buildings should adopt green building codes, for which they can have the privilege of hanging on their doorpost a green mezuzah that certifies to the world that the building complies with best environmental practices.   

Israel must renounce nuclear power as an option and challenge others in the region to do the same. The Middle East must become a nuclear-energy-free zone. We live in an age of accurate long-range missiles and of daring terrorism. The planet, and especially the Middle East, does not need any radioactive power targets. Nuclear energy is the power of war; solar energy is the power of peace. By taking the nuclear energy option off Israel’s table, Israel can offer her neighbors a regional solar energy solution. When raised with a minister of one of Israel’s neighbors, he responded: If you help us make solar energy more economical than nuclear[energy], we will give up our nuclear energy exploration program. For the sake of Israel’s immediate security, it is time for global Jewish political muscle to be flexed to promote solar and other renewables throughout Israel and the Middle East.

Israel, as a public face of world Jewry and Jewish values, must not only declare herself a responsible member of the world community when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions but also provide leadership on this front.  It is notable that major accomplishments in this field — such as plans for electric cars and Israeli-built solar thermal plants in California — so far have come only from private industry. The truth is that today there is no commercial solar energy in the Jewish state. And the plans for renewables in Israel do not reflect the aspirations or potential of the Jewish people.  What would Isaiah say?

Andrea Cohen-Kiener: Does your mandate for climate change come from Genesis?

Rusty Pritchard: Yes, but as an Evangelical Christian, I often go to John 3:16 which starts off, “for God so loved the world.” Most Evangelicals hear that word “world” and think it means all the people in the world. But the word is cosmos. And it fits with the story of creation in Genesis that God loves his whole creation.

Cohen-Kiener: We need to acknowledge our grandeur and our smallness simultaneously. I’ve experienced a resistance in the Jewish community to environmental efforts; I’ve heard often over the past ten years, “we have more important issues to address.” Have you experienced similar speed bumps?

Pritchard: The biggest speed bump is a limited conception of God, and a comfortable conservatism that is scared of change. I ask people, “what is it that conservatives should be conserving?” Of course we need to conserve natural resources, families and the ability of families to make a living. We need also to conserve beautiful places, including small towns and farms, all that makes human civilization good and beautiful and diverse. We can respect diversity because it’s a blessing from God. That takes us past the shallow conservatism of fearing new ideas and deeper to a conservatism that says we ought to do our best to take care of the natural world.

Cohen-Kiener: In my community, there are primarily two speed bumps. First, my people are a minority and there’s a natural tendency toward particularism — taking care first of oneself, one’s people, one’s family. The universalism of environmental makes some Jews feel it’s not an essentially Jewish issue.

Pritchard: Even though it’s not demographically true, Evangelicals also feel like an embattled minority culture. Our dominant myth is that we’re a faithful remnant that acknowledges the truth even though the world has gone another direction. Until recently, our community viewed environmentalism as a liberal issue, or as a popular fad. But because our theology says that God’s character can be seen in the created world, many conservative Christians are beginning to be concerned about creation care. In that view, destroying creation and permitting ecological degradation are like ripping pages out of scripture.

Cohen-Kiener: Let’s talk about the pervasive value of consumerism in our culture, our deep hungers of the spirit and flesh. Our culture is so illiterate about the hungers of the spirit that we try to fill up that hunger with a new car or fancy vacation. And we’re polluting the planet in that effort. We need a counterbalance to consumerism.

Pritchard: I agree. We have such a fundamental addiction to consuming. The Jewish Sabbath is an antidote to that hunger. It helps us test what we can give up from material culture. The Sabbath idea jumps out of every part of Scripture — the rhythms of rest and satisfaction and enjoyment of the created order are meant to pervade all of our lives. There are weekly rhythms and cycles of seven years and the jubilee cycle of 49 years, all celebrating the sufficiency and the providence of God, where we rest and enjoy and encounter with delight the works of God. The Fourth Commandment requires not only your rest, but the rest of all of your household, including everyone who works for you and all of your animals. And the land itself. It demands we not push to the limits our ecological systems or the people who work for us.

I’ve just returned from a pastors’ conference in New York City where some of the urban churches are trying to reclaim the idea of cities as good places. Evangelicals generally hold an anti-urban bias that comes from a vision of our faith as a remnant existing outside of the mainstream of culture. There’s an inability to see cities as places that need investment and work, as places to build meaningful community. In a highly urbanized culture we have to rethink our environmental work — conserving not only wilderness or endangered species but also building sustainable communities. I wonder whether there’s something to learn there from Jewish tradition, which thrives in cities.

Cohen-Kiener: A city is a manmade place as opposed to the wild. It raises questions about how to create sustainable structures.

Pritchard: The pastor of Church of the Redeemer in New York City, Tim Keller, is trying to redefine a city to include small towns throughout the agricultural landscape. He envisions multiuse, walkable, human settlements that have density and diversity. Those settlements can be megacities or smaller places where people live in community, and where culture is created. God either wants us in the country or in the city, but I’m not sure we should try to mix the two, as in a suburb.

Cohen-Kiener: That brings us to another, related, issue, environmental justice, and questions about air quality, transfer stations, garbage dumps, what’s called source point pollution, which is almost always located around the world in nonwhite population centers.

Pritchard: The worst stuff gets dumped on the poorest communities and on ethnic minorities. Within blocks of our church there’s a toxic waste facility, a trash transfer station, chemical plant, an impoundment lot for towed vehicles.

Cohen-Kiener: When we talk about environmental justice we need to do so in partnership with the poor and with the “other.” If there was a garbage transfer station in the western suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut where I’m sitting right now people would be much more avid in their support of reduce, reuse, recycle and pre-cycle. The technology and the market forces would come into play more quickly if the consequences were borne evenly and appropriately.

Pritchard: Maybe we need a public policy that puts toxic waste treatment facilities and landfills only in the zip codes with the highest per capita income.

Systems and institutions can be sinful in ways different than individuals, who are filled with flaws like jealously, pride, and rage. Environmental issues open a window onto the economic and social systems that are unjust and often racist. As an economist, I think our public policies and the ways businesses operate will change once they face the costs of the pollution that they now get to dispose of largely for free. Climate policy may involve getting the right price on carbon dioxide so that it becomes a part of the price of all of the goods that we buy and sell and therefore we implicitly take it into account even if we aren’t explicitly looking for the greenest option. It must hit us in our pocketbook. We need to think explicitly about challenging businesses to be not just responsive to price signals and creating value for their shareholders but to think about ethics in a much broader sense and to allow their business models to be contaminated by their sense of morality and not pretend that there is this huge divide that businesses are sort of amoral institutions.

Cohen-Kiener: Influencing minds and hearts is going to open a very powerful, passionate, articulate, empowered wellspring as we reexamine what we really need, what we really want, what really makes us feel wealthy and safe. It’s going to look like spending less and having less. It’s going to feel like more wealth. The root of this sin is disconnection. And the cure is connection.

Creation has been the neglected question in modern Jewish theology. Partly because the issue did not fit well with the particularist agenda (“How are we different from our Christian neighbors?”), but also because we feared taking a clear position either supporting or opposing evolutionary theory, Jewish thinkers have remained mostly silent on the subject of life’s origins. In contrast to prior ages, when theologies of creation served as the great font of life’s meaning, moderns seek to separate the search for meaning from the question of origins. Since we can no longer say that the world was created “for the sake of the righteous,” or “for Israel,” or “for Torah,” we find meaning in a Jewish life that has all too little to say about the big questions of how and why we all got here.

I believe that the urgent ecological agenda of the current century will change that situation quite radically. One of the most important roles of religion in the coming generations will be to affect our behavior with regard to the natural world and its resources. Humanity’s very survival demands a reeducation regarding consumption, population control, and a host of other issues — all having to do with our place in the fast-changing balances of the biosphere within which we exist. This conversation will perforce return us to the question of our place in the natural order and the process that led us to our now inescapable responsibility of stewardship over the existence of much more than our own species.

The current debates in some Christian circles about Creationism and Intelligent Design leave most Jews cold. We are not fundamentalists or apologists for untenable theories of origin. Jews have embraced science since the beginning of the modern age; we accept Darwin and the developments of evolutionary biology since his time. It is to physicists rather than Kabbalists (though they sometimes sound similar!) we turn to try to understand being’s origins in the first emanations out of the black hole of primal nothingness.

But what does all this have to do with God? Assuming that the word “God” points, however inadequately, to ultimate reality and not merely to a human idea or a social construct, God surely must have some place in our thinking about how life came to be. Do we believe with the I. D. people that life is too complex to have developed on its own, that there must be a great brain with a plan behind it all? Or are we with the current Pope and the more sophisticated (or “casuistic”?) Catholic thinkers who accept evolution as described by science, but insist that it must be willed by God to work that way?

I want to suggest a different sort of function for religious language. Once we enter the world of “God,” it seems to me, we are no longer engaging in scientific or even philosophical discourse. There is nothing here that can be demonstrated by logical proofs or scientific experimentation. We must accept that situation fully and honestly. To speak of God is to address ourselves to a different level of discourse, to appeal to a quality of mind that has much more in common with the mythopoetic imagination than it does with rational truth-claims.

To be fully human, however, is to live on more than a single frequency of mind. Poetry, music, and contemplation are all geared to address us on a rung of mental reality quite different than that of scientific discourse. This is the inner place to which religion speaks. It reveals a more profound truth about reality than does science, but it cannot express that truth in a cold, discursive prose that is alien to its mythic way of thought.

Our age is urgently in need of a new religious language, one that can take the account of origins that has shaped our age and view it through a deeper lens, one that will see it as sacred drama, not merely as a series of meaningless accidents. This poetic reframing of the tale will have to capture the human imagination, inspiring us to live as we must, to love the world around us, and to find our place within it.

The daunting task I set out for the new religious poets may be made easier by pointing out that it has all been done before. The author of the grand opening chapter of Genesis tells a tale of harmony, of creation by a single God who expresses approval and delight for all that He has made. Behind this tale, well known to both the author and his readers, was the familiar creation myth of the ancient Near East, one in which sky gods fought a great battle against the older gods of the sea, slaying them and setting out the earth on their carcasses. It is a tale of violence, aggression, and bloodshed, all quite hidden in the Genesis rewrite. We live in an era when a new creation account has taken hold, this one too filled with competition for survival among rival forces, fights to the finish, and constant extermination of weaker species.

A bold reframing of this tale is needed, one that will nourish a creative civilization much as Genesis did for so many centuries. The repeated affirmations of Genesis 1, “…and God saw that it was good,” combined with the open-ended concluding phrase, “God rested from all the work that God created to be done,” offered the message that ongoing human creativity had the potential to enter into this sphere of divine blessing.

It is natural that we Jews, bearers of the old tale for so long, should want to take a hand, along with others, in composing this next narrative. If we have anything to say about it, this new myth will also speak of human dignity, of divine love for each creature, and of the value of rest and reflection about the very much unfinished task of creation, the ongoing sacred drama that is the tale of all our lives.

Last year the New York Times ran a despairing series of articles on how hard it was becoming to prosecute street crimes because of witness intimidation. Cooperating with the prosecution could mean a death sentence for a witness, or her family. If this weren’t bad enough, a perverse “no snitching” ethic began to pervade hip-hop culture, in part fueled by minority communities’ sometimes justified mistrust of the police. A mainstream rapper named Cam’ron told “60 Minutes” he wouldn’t go to the police even if he knew a serial killer were living next door.

Cam’ron was posturing, but community activists and anti-violence advocates noted that a gangsters code had become, as one put it, “a cultural norm.”

Earlier this year, members of the Spinka Hasidic movement, including one of its grand rabbis, were indicted on (and pleaded not guilty to) a series of federal indictments for conspiracy, mail fraud, and money laundering. Some in the Hasidic community were scandalized — in part because the case was said to be based on tips from a Spinka insider. “People are very shell-shocked about the whole thing on many levels,” a representative of the Orthodox Union told the Forward. “Number one, that our neighbors and friends are implicated, and number two, that an act of mesira on this level was perpetrated by one of our own.”

In Jewish law, mesira is the prohibition against turning over a fellow Jew to the civil (presumably non-Jewish) authorities. It reflects the reality in which Jews lived for centuries, when secular cops and courts were hostile to Jews, and prisons worse. The Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law, treats a “ moser,” or informer, as an akum — someone outside the Jewish community.

There are exceptions, important ones. A public menace can be handed over to the authorities, as can someone who is physically or even psychologically abusing another.

The last point is central to a topic most likely to set off debates over mesira: the sexual abuse of children and other vulnerable people. A spate of highly publicized abuse cases has exposed a rift between communal leaders who would prefer that such cases be handled “internally,” and victims and their advocates who insist that invoking mesira has become a way to protect the reputations of the accused and their employers.

Some rabbis have heeded this frustration and issued opinions reminding their followers that it is permitted to inform authorities in such cases. Victims’ rights advocates say that’s not enough — “permitted” is nowhere near as strong as “required.”

While schools, organizations, and religious authorities wrestle with the question, some enterprising journalists have investigated and exposed instances of abuse that may never have reached the authorities. The New York Jewish Week and the Baltimore Jewish Times have done important work in this regard, giving voice to victims. The reports are inevitably met with outrage. Members of the community have accused the papers of character assassination and worse. Just as inevitably, these same communities undertake a process of soul-searching and recognize that victims need to be encouraged to speak out, and abusers brought to justice.

Mesira has its function in Jewish law and culture, and the security we currently enjoy as American citizens doesn’t erase a long history of persecution by civil authorities — nor prevent its return. But when the laws of mesira clash with the pursuit of tzedek, justice, the choice seems clear.

Reviewed by Haim WatzmanIt’s hardly surprising that Hayyim Nachman Bialik chose a bird as the central image of his first published Hebrew poem. For a Diaspora Jew caught in Europe, longing for another life, a bird symbolized freedom and the ability to soar over physical, political, and psychological barriers.

It’s also not surprising that Bialik didn’t know, or at least didn’t tell us, what kind of bird it was who brought him a message from his brothers in Zion. Bialik tells us all about his conversation with the bird, but nothing about the bird’s markings, habits, the shape of its beak, wings, and tail, or the peculiarities of its song.

Poor birds. We so frequently press them into use as symbols that we often forget to see them. It’s a rare writer who can combine an appreciation for the bird of literature with knowledge of the bird as an animal. One of those rare writers is Jonathan Rosen, who now offers us a wonderful account of his observations of and thoughts about, American woodpeckers, Israeli hoopoes, and many more in between.

Rosen is a writer by trade, a novelist, journalist, and editor. He tells us (perhaps once too often) that his upper middle-class Jewish upbringing prepared him for the life of an intellectual, not a naturalist. But his love of poetry came together with a love of science, and that led him to writers who wrote and thought about nature — in particular, Henry David Thoreau. So he was well-primed when, twelve years ago, a chance comment over a Shabbat lunch in Manhattan — “The warblers will be coming through Central Park soon” — induced him to sign up for a birdwatching course at the Audubon Society.

Thus began a saga that reached a climax when Rosen flew to Louisiana in the hopes of spying a bird that most people thought already extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker. This, the largest of North American woodpeckers, occupied a narrow ecological niche, eating the grubs that attack recently dead trees. These birds require old-growth forests with plenty of trees several centuries old, so that enough old trees die regularly to be attacked by insects. And they need a warm and moist area where dead trees decay quickly. Ivory-bills used to flourish in the Mississippi delta, east Texas, and the Florida panhandle, but the last old forests in these areas were clear-cut in the mid-20th century. The last adequately documented sighting of an ivory-bill was in 1944, but occasionally birdwatchers and hunters report seeing them. It was one such sighting, in 1999, that impelled Rosen to embark from the Upper West Side to a mosquito-infested swamp in hopes that he, too, would be granted a view of this elusive, and possibly non-existent, bird.

He wasn’t. The ivory-bills either weren’t there or weren’t showing themselves. But Rosen tells a fascinating story of his sojourn. And like the whirling, intermixing flocks of migrants he sees on a trip to Israel’s rift valley, he interweaves his own story with Thoreau’s observations at Walden Pond; with the story of America’s great bird painter, John James Audubon; with the observations of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace; with speculations on evolution and the nature of the world; and with much else besides. He also quotes a lot of fine poetry that helps the reader both see birds as natural objects and conceive of the meaning they bear in the human mind.

Impressively, and unusually for a book of this sort, Rosen explicitly rejects Thoreau’s pretense that a writer can negate himself, recording the landscape as it is untouched by human action, thought, history, and current events. “I cannot belong to that school of nature writing where you set off with a knapsack and nothing else — seemingly without parents or children or religion or tradition or friends or country.” The September 11 attacks and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada are part of his birdwatching experience, as are his dying father, his family, his religion, and his own biography.

Factually, birds do not sing for us. “They sing not for our pleasure or their own, but for intensely practical reasons,” Rosen reminds us — they must mark out territory, attract mates, deter predators. But how can we not seek a message in their song? How can we not make them ours? “Sing, my bird, of wonders from a land in whose spring eternity resides,” Bialik pleads in his poem. Rosen seeks, and hears, a more subtle and complex message, one for the birds, and human beings, of our age.