The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
(Psalm 104:16-18, 24 New Revised Standard Version)
The diversity of creation is an occasion for wonder and delight, for people for today as for the ancient Psalmist. Not only the variety of living creatures -- their colors and shapes and remarkable adaptations to their environments and ways of finding food and mates -- but also the astounding complexity of the interactions that connect them in an intricate web of interdependence.
No wonder that contemplating creatures -- from the humblest spider to the mightiest whale, from an ordinary field mouse to the exotic tiger, from a field of daisies to a grove of majestic redwood trees -- has moved artists and thinkers to reflect on the world’s relationship to God and humanity’s place in nature. No wonder that awestruck believers have praised the majesty and wisdom of the Creator in their worship. No wonder that the faithful have found in the creatures of natural world -- lambs and lions, doves and eagles, trees of life and the grass of the fields -- images to express the deepest divine realities. No wonder that those who worship the Creator have heard in creation a multitude of voices of gratitude and praise to a life-giving Spirit.
Yet, as humans have become more and more of a dominant presence on this planet, those voices are being stilled, those images lost, obscured, or marred. There are many practical reasons for mourning the demise of species at human hands -- from the loss of potential medicinal cures and new varieties of crops to the loss of scientific knowledge. Some would argue that there are moral reasons to condemn causing or allowing a species to go extinct. But surely there is a deeply religious issue at stake here as well: The creation’s witness to the Creator, and the Creator’s own delight in the creation.
Like humankind, “otherkind” is also dependent upon the gifts of land, water, and air. Those gifts are increasingly denied them by unsustainable patterns of urbanization, agriculture, energy production, and resource use — the same patterns that threaten human health and lead to environmental injustice.
