ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss the origins, goals and activities of the Green Sabbath Project, a campaign to adapt the ancient biblical shabbat as a remedy for our collective environmental crises. Commemorating the creation of the world, this weekly practice has been indigenous to Western culture for nearly two millennia. It emerged from the holistic spiritual ecology of the ancient Israelites, who were devoted to the intertwined well-being of land and people, and opposed to internal socioeconomic inequality and the empires of the region. The economy in which shabbat was practised sought to ensure a circular or slow system, prevent unhealthy inequality and counter anthropocentrism. In our time, a weekly green sabbath or earth day that is properly practised—as radical intervention and not mere lip-service—offers a weekly interruption from the suicidal economic fantasy of infinite growth, a divestment from fossil fuels, investment in family and local community, rewilding, respite for both humans and other-than-humans and a ritualised forum for meditating on how we want to live. Green sabbaths could constitute a model and a foretaste of an ecologically sane world to come.
