Adam and Adamah: Jewish environmentalism's harmonious human (Val Plumwood, Charles Long)

This thesis is concerned with how people understand what it means to be human---what I call "human identity"---and the role religion plays as both the roots of and remedy for the environmental crisis because of what it communicates regarding human identity.; Val Plumwood addresses human identity and concurs that the problem is found in its dualistic construction, which is rooted in a form of understanding and handling difference found in classical logic that constructs the world in such a way that all must be either p or ∼p, resulting in hierarchies and dualisms. The two primary features of dualism are exclusion and incorporation. Plumwood and Charles Long explore exclusion and incorporation as they manifest in human identity. They then provide tools for creating an alternative model for human identity that is grounded in a way of understanding difference that does not result in dualisms and hierarchies. In this alternative model the relational self counters exclusion and the mutual self counteracts incorporation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...