After detailing exemptions from military service in exclusion of a draft and prescribing the killing of combatants in warfare (which does not mean what some people think about sexism in the respective treatment of men and women here [1]), Deuteronomy 20 provides commands concerning treatment of the environment. During sieges of cities, verses 19-20 say that non-fruit trees can be used for making equipment of benefit to the military operation as a campaign stretches on, but that fruit trees should not be eaten because they can provide food. These plants should not be treated in the same way due to their ability to sustain people. The passage rhetorically asks if such trees are people that they would need to be besieged.
The environment should not be totally devastated in military efforts, no matter how long the offensive lasts or how useful the cutting down of fruit trees might be in performing a siege, with the exact boundary between the permissible using of natural resources and the sinful kind being declared. The fruit trees mentioned in the text are at least in part to be spared, however, because of their utility of a different kind for the human soldiers. Their fruit can be eaten and provide sustenance for righteous warriors, an entirely kosher category of food—though plants are alive like animals, the only prohibited subcategories of food in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are specific types of animal flesh.
As part of nature, fruit is among the material things that God either directly created or allowed to come about, and something connected with the broader environment that has moral value by virtue of God making it very good in an expression of his divine power (Genesis 1:1, 1:31). It is still the case that general nature itself, but even then not necessarily plant life [2], is seemingly just a vast but inanimate physical thing, though panpsychism is logically possible. The people that dwell in the universe are the ones made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) moreso than even the animals that share the breath of life (7:22-24) with people (2:7). In light of this, a major aspect of the Biblical obligation to preserve or protect the environment is that doing so is good because it helps the people living within it.
There is explicit environmentalism in this portion of Deuteronomy, though Genesis 1 already describes the universe and the living things in it as very good left to themselves. At the same time, that environmentalism absolutely hinges somewhat on the usefulness of what the environment offers to its human inhabitants. This ramification, even on a pragmatic level as opposed to a moral one, is integral to Biblical environmentalism despite how the planet, from its local land to its atmosphere, would not require human presence in order to be very good on the Christian worldview. Yahweh is good, and he created the universe to reflect this in its initial state in the words of Genesis. Humans remain the higher creation.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-torah-on-treatment-of-wartime-male.html
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