The advance of science and technology has resulted in extensive harm to the environment. While there is considerable controversy as to the extent of this injury, and as to whether this artificial imbalance is significantly more than nature's own traumatic eruptions, it is widely accepted – ever since Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring – that there is indeed a very real problem that must be attended to. To take but one example – the elimination of species from the earth: In the next half century – less than one human lifetime – the Earth could lose blue whales, giant pandas, tigers, black rhinoceroses, and millions of lesser-known species. Entire ecosystem types could be damaged beyond repair. Humans are only one of the Earth's 10, 30, or even 100 million species. The world is always changing. We are now in a period of extraordinary biodiversity loss. In The Diversity of Life, Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson estimates that 5–20% of tropical forest species will be extinct in the next 30 years, or somewhere between a half million and 20 million species. A paper in the July 21, 1995 edition of Science estimated that current extinction rates are 100–1,000 times their pre-human levels. – from “Threats to Biological Diversity: A Scientific and Political Overview,” COK/L/Summer 1996As Jews we should be particularly sensitive to the disappearance of whole species, because one imperiled species of the family of Homo sapiens is – the Jewish people...The environmentalist movement, like all other high-minded and serious efforts to improve the lot of mankind or the world as such, tends to become overly fashionable, and falls into the hands of moralizers and cause-seekers who do not fear exaggeration or one-sidedness. As a result, there is developing a reaction against the alleged excesses of the movement – as, for instance, the advocacy of recycling garbage. In an article in the New York Times Magazine of June 30, 1996, John Tierney writes:Believing that there was no more r…