Intricate web of life unraveling… a weekend reflection
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Posted on May 19, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
The really awful predictions about rapid, massive extinction appear to be true…
Words of Jeremy Kerr, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada. I found them in an article from Inter Press News Service (IPS - I highly recommend it as a news source).
Sometimes the grief overwhelms me. It is hard looking at this every day. We have become so desensitized to the natural world around us, outside of which there is no us, that we can’t feel this terrible and sorrow-filled thing happening all around us — 
the disappearance of species, the disappearance, or theatened disappearance, of the creatures with whom we share this planet.
Putting aside for the moment what may be most essential — the need to rediscover our spiritual bonds with the entire Earth community, the separation from which has led us to the brink of ecological destruction — the reality is that there is a point where, as the fabric shreds here and there, as species disappear here and there, the fabric begins to lose strength and resilience, at some point (and this article shows it may not be far in the future), it will simply come apart.
And we, too, will fall through. The fabric will not be able to hold this most destructive species in all the chain of life.
This article notes that this is not new news — the unprecedented scientific collaboration that produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment a couple of years ago “warned that up to 30 percent of all species on Earth could vanish by 2050 due to unsustainable human activities.”
Once again, we are being told that we will be living on a totally different planet by 2100, and our children and their children will be the living witnesses of this — not a future I would have wished for them.
We must recover the sense of our place within this natural world, we must rediscover the experience of being part of a vast chain of life, everything interconnected, folding into and out of one another in the ongoing evolutionary adventure of this glorious planet, unique in all the observable universe.
Then maybe, just maybe, we can awaken from this nightmare when one species horribly misconceived its role, thinking all this as mere product and resource available to us for our use, and eventually for domination by the wealthy and the powerful over every resource from which profit could be made.
I want to give the last word of this weekend reflection to Rachel Carson, whose 100th birthday we honor this month (born on May 27, 1907), 
especially here in Maryland where she spent a good part of her life, dying at her home in my neighboring suburb of Silver Spring at only 56. A noted marine biologist, she is arguably one of the leading voices to give birth to the contemporary environmental movement.
She once wrote:
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
We of this generation who have squandered that gift, who let the trappings of a consumer culture destroy it, we, we must commit to giving our children that gift. 
We must take them by the hand out into Nature and allow them that wonder.
Then maybe, just maybe, we can find within us the spiritual strength to change how we live, wholly, radically, in time for there to still be wonder for these small children to pass on to their own in the generations to come.
From Rachel Carson:
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Instead of spending a summer in carbon intensive and energy wasteful consumer activities, maybe this is what we could do with our children. Maybe we adults could take children by the hand to the parks and streams and nature centers nearby and allow them time for that rediscovery. The future of life on our planet may depend upon it.
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feelthe breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
And this:
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’
This post is dedicated to my Godson, Aidan
Technorati Tags: Rachel Carson, species extinction, fabric of life, Earth community, wonder of nature, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
Photo credit: Photographer: Ian Britton
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3 Responses to “Intricate web of life unraveling… a weekend reflection”
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Very nice essay.
“Then maybe, just maybe, we can awaken from this nightmare when one species horribly misconceived its role, thinking all this as mere product and resource available to us for our use, and eventually for domination by the wealthy and the powerful over every resource from which profit could be made.”
That sums it up well. I wonder if the terrible species loss we’re experiencing will turn out to be the thing which will wake people up to the ecological crisis. Though, sadly, it will be too late to avoid a great many losses as they’re happening right now, I do think it may be a key topic to emphasize. I just can’t imagine it wouldn’t move people to realize the kinds of losses we face, not to mention the risk to ourselves as cascade effects occur.
Thank you for this. I wonder, though, if people will be able to experience the grief unless they stop and ‘listen’ to what is happening in the natural world all around us. To do that, they have to slow down their lives and get out into nature, even if it is just the park down the street. Otherwise, I fear that folks get numbed by the long list of endangered species — it’s in the news and in the head, not the heart.
I do believe that if folks could ‘feel’ the loss, experience the distress that is so obvious in nature right now, and if they/we would tune in again to our own biology and interconnectedness with the creatures around us, we might have a chance of doing exactly that — waking up. But we have to shut off the noise of this crazed culture and go sit under a tree, and then pay attention, really pay attention.
Margaret
Yes, true. Well put.