Consider these recent developments:

*For the first time ever, this year's CAJE conference offered a full track -- 23 sessions -- on Jewish environmental education. Attended by 700 different people -- more than a third of the entire conference -- the sessions ranged from a field trip to Poudre Canyon to "Teaching God In Nature" to "Contemporary Environmental Issues as Seen through Jewish Tradition" to "Ecology and Kabbalah: Restoring Cosmic Blessing."

*Jewish nature centers have sprung up in the past decade in such places as the New York area, New Jersey, Malibu, and -- most recently -- near Atlanta. The oldest, the Teva Learning Center -- which has facilities in upstate New York and the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, offers educational retreats for students at almost 40 day schools in the northeast. Others like the Shalom Nature Center in California run an environmental day camp and extensive programming for college students.

*In a two-year-old program funded by the New York-based Nathan Cummings Foundation, more than 20 college students and recent graduates have been trained to teach about Judaism and nature at Jewish summer camps.

*Goldman and others are in discussion with several Jewish seminaries as well as the Jewish Community Center movement to create a graduate program that would lead to a masters degree in Jewish education and a certificate in environmental education.

On the one hand, Jewish environmental and nature education is about using outdoor activities like hiking and wilderness retreats to engage people in discussions about God and Torah.

But it also is about teaching people to care for the earth, using traditional Jewish concepts such as "bal tashchit," the idea that humans have a responsibility to care for the earth.

The Teva Learning Center, for example, does both, starting its program for sixth-grade day school students with an "awareness curriculum" that consists of exploring in the woods, while talking about Jewish blessings and prayers that express appreciation for nature.

"In day schools, kids have been saying these blessings forever and often it's become stale for them," said Nili Simhai, co-director of Teva. "Often, by the time they're hitting the teen years they're getting resentful of having to do it, and this puts a new spirit into it.

"This is a chance to say to kids that when we read this psalm and it talks about the glory of the mountains dancing, the person who wrote it wasn't inside mumbling it under his breath, but outside saying, 'Wow,'" Simhai said.

From awareness and blessings, the sixth graders move on to concepts like bal tashchit and ecological cycles.

"We also talk to them about community and Jewish wisdom, about how to treat other human beings as well as the planet," Simhai said. "The most important thing we try to do is give them a sense of connection to their planet and to their tradition at the same time."

The Shalom Nature Center's college programs have a less structured curriculum.

Kendra Striegler, a student at the University of California at Los Angeles, went on the center's weeklong canoe trip down the Colorado River last spring.

"What was really cool about it was if anyone doubted there was a creator before that trip, no way would they still," Striegler said.

"The experiences we had were so amazing that it just couldn't have happened by chance," she said, marveling over the "formations of rock, the way the sun would set over the valley, the whiteness of the sand on the sandbars."