Bal tashchit begins as a rule of war: when you besiege a city, you may not cut down its fruit trees to build siegeworks, for is the tree of the field a man, that it should come under siege from you. The rabbis generalised it into a broad prohibition on destruction — Maimonides lists breaking vessels, tearing garments, demolishing buildings, stopping up a spring and spoiling food, and the Talmud applies it to burning fuel wastefully and to tearing clothes in grief beyond what the law requires. Samson Raphael Hirsch, writing for German Orthodoxy in the 1830s, turned it into a general ethic of not treating the world as one's own property, and his formulation is quoted by every Jewish environmental organisation that exists. What it has not become is enforceable law about the modern cases. No beit din has ruled that flying is a violation; the arguments about consumption, aviation and disposable goods are made in the language of bal tashchit and land in the category of piety rather than obligation. Orthodox, Conservative and Reform environmental groups all use the verse and none of them can make it bind.