Coral and the Search for God
You’ve probably heard the term, “canary in a coal mine.” Since early mines had little ventilation, miners reportedly brought caged canaries into new parts of mines as an early warning system.
Canaries, it is said, are especially sensitive to harmful gases. As long as the canary sang, the miners knew their air was safe. If it died, the miners, too, were in mortal danger.
I’ve been watching a series on Netflix called “Chasing Coral.” I know, it’s probably not among the most popular programs, but the photography is breathtaking and the information remarkably interesting. It’s about the disappearance of coral, and coral reefs, from our oceans. Its message: the death of coral is a canary in a coal mine.
The series documents the rapid loss of coral in places like the Great Barrier Reef off Australia where 29 percent of coral died in 2016 alone. Scientists say the kill-off is due largely to a rise in water temperature of 2-3 degrees Centigrade in just a few years.
This may not seem like much but that’s 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective, imagine it refers to your body temperature, rising from the normal of 99.5 to 103.1 or 104.9, the Fahrenheit equivalents.
There are lots of canaries on our planet, indicating a serious problem with global warming, and there’s a strong consensus among scientists that it’s mostly caused by human activity. Here’s what I found on the National Public Radio site and other media just in the last few days.
- Drought and hunger. Nomadic herders have lived off the vast expanses of grass in Kenya’s Rift Valley for centuries and herding is the only means of survival for lots of people. But as the climate has changed, the grass has died and a way of life that has existed for centuries is in danger. Resident James Tukay, 45, has seen drought after drought in recent years. “I can’t explain what is going on. I don’t understand why the climate is changing,” he said.
- Coastal flooding. The giant crack that’s been racing across Antarctica Larsen C ice shelf finally broke it between July 10 and 12. The result was an iceberg the size of Delaware, weighing a trillion metric tons. Satellite images show that more of the remaining ice shelf is preparing to break off, creating more, smaller icebergs. And a new crack has formed close to where the old crack left off. It’s headed for Bawden Ice Rise, which is a critical anchor point for the ice shelf.
- The explosion of the algae population combined with warming is shrinking Greenland, 85 percent of which is ice. If it all melted, say scientists, sea levels would rise by as much as 20 feet in some spots worldwide, inundating coastal cities.
- Loss of species. Global warming is causing a dramatic loss of animal and plant diversity. Kauai Island in Hawaii has lost more than half of its species of native forest birds. Scientists say it could be an early warning for the other Hawaiian Islands. Although they are uncertain of the numbers, most scientists believe the rate of species loss is greater now than at any time in the history of the earth. Within the next 30 years as many as half of existing species could die in one of the fastest mass extinctions in the planet’s 4.5 billion years history.
Ok, but I don’t live in Kenya, Hawaii or Greenland nor on the coast, and I doubt I ever come in contact with the species that are going extinct. Why should I care? And what’s all this have to do with the search for God?
Just this. You can’t expect to find God if you lack respect for what is, arguably, his/her greatest gift, our common home. In his document, On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis quotes a prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi in which St. Francis refers to the earth as “sister.”
Writes the Pope: “This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.
“We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth; our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.”
Francis of Assisi, writes the Pope, “helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.”
