In God’s world, we are merely caretakers

St Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge in Florida is one of the oldest wildlife refuges in the United States. Established in 1931 as a wintering ground for migratory birds, it encompasses 68,000 acres and includes several Gulf of Mexico coastal habitats, such as saltwater marshes, islands, tidal creeks, and the estuaries of seven north Florida rivers.

I was fortunate to visit there a few years ago when they were preparing for what they described as the magic of the monarch butterfly migration – a natural event that occurs each year around this time. This amazing and beautiful creature with a 4-inch wingspan and weighing less than a gram undertakes the longest migration of any species, covering over 4,800km from southern Canada to southern Mexico. Unlike other animal migrations, each monarch butterfly is on its own. There is no parent to follow.

Its annual journey is a complex, inherited behaviour pattern, not a learned process, just one more indicator of the complexity and wonder of the planet we call home.

Extinction

Sadly, however these important pollinators are in danger of extinction. Experts believe they have declined by between 90 and 99 per cent since 1990. David Attenborough says that our food crops depend on insects which are in massive decline, a situation that “threatens our ability to feed ourselves, control our climate and puts us at greater risk of pandemic diseases.”

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Tomorrow’s psalm (8) makes it clear that we have responsibilities for creation and to whom we are accountable: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? … You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”

The psalmist leaves us in no doubt: this is God’s world and we are merely caretakers who, according to the recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are failing in our duty.

Our planet is in deep trouble and we don’t need another report to tell us that; wildfires and flooding on every continent combined with crop failures and rising sea levels all point in the wrong direction. Monday is the feast of St Francis, the patron saint of ecology. Fr Richard Rohr, himself a Franciscan, tells how he was surprised that soon after he joined, he was told that he could not cut down a tree without permission from the superior. “It seemed a bit extreme,” he writes, “but then I realised that a little bit of Francis of Assisi had lasted 800 years. We still had his awareness that wilderness is not just “wilderness”. Nature is not just here for our consumption and profit…. It’s no longer an object and you’re the separated and superior subject, but you shared subjectivity with it. For so long creation has been a mere commodity at best, a useless or profitable wilderness, depending on who owned it.

Consumption

With the contemplative mind, questions of creation are different than those of consumption and capitalism, and they move us to appreciate creation for its own sake, not because of what it does for me or how much money it can make me”.

Since the industrial revolution we have behaved as if we owned the planet but now climate change is demonstrating to us the consequences of ignoring the significance of things we considered insignificant. There is a strange irony in the possibility that modern self-worshipping humanity could be brought to its knees – in prayer perhaps? – by the disappearance of something as tiny and seemingly insignificant as bees and butterflies. “Posterity will someday laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature the more I am amazed at the Creator.” Louis Pasteur.

GORDON LINNEY