The Environment and Property Rights
inhabitants, as trees and brush are a good place for bandits and robbers to hide themselves?
The natural world was of no great interest to the tradition. We, in our own time, feel differently and have expanded Juda ism ’s protection of the natural world. This is an area of modern concern in which strong differences of opinion prevail, as in secular law, and the basis for a Jewish environmental law is still developing. However, in this area of the halakhah, the interpretation of the tradition is shifting toward protecting the natural world and its public use rather than the narrower property rights.