| ECOLOGY PLUS |
| Creation sings God's praise. |
| How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all. 104:24 |
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| In 1962 biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book tracing the effects of pesticides - DDT in particular. Until then, DDT had been treated like a wonder chemical, sprayed almost at random to kill pests. Carson showed how it worked its way up the food chain, killing larger animals - like songbirds. If no birds were left to sing, we would have an ominously "silent spring." Until then, ecology had been a word known only to specialists. But with Carson's book, ordinary people began to take an interest in what only biologists had known: the delicate balance of nature, in which each creature is intertwined with every other. The ecology movement had begun. The Value in "Useless" Creatures Ecology was new, but its ideas were old. You could have learned its basic principles from Psalm 104. It shows appreciation for every aspect of nature, even creatures like wild goats, lions, and the "leviathan," the whale or sea monster. The Israelites, as herders and farmers, had no romantic idealization of the outdoors. Nobody who herds sheep thinks of them as soft and fluffy pets. But to the poet who wrote Psalm 104, creatures that are no "use" to anyone still have intrinsic worth - especially to God. The author saw how the world fits together, everything in its proper sphere. At night wild animals hunt; at daybreak humans go out to work. The rain falls, nourishing crops for people and grass for cattle, but also watering the forest to provide a place for birds to nest. Ecology is God's Work The intertwining of nature is not, for the psalmist, like a complex machine, dangerously sensitive. Things fit together |