In Our Hands
We’ve got the whole world in our hands.
And we’ve had it in our hands, to some extent, all these 300,000 years since our species evolved into existence upon the earth. I don’t know enough biology or natural history to say definitively, but it seems to me we might say that homo sapiens appearance was the beginning of a trophic cascade that continues still today. In a way that was, at the outset, neither good nor bad, the addition of homo sapiens as a top predator triggered a trophic cascade, which is an “ecological phenomenon…involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through [the] food chain, which … result[ed and still results] in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.”*
I said in my meditation last week that we are not in control of the weather. That is true. We can’t make it rain or snow in a specific location or at a specific time at our will. We can’t change the course of a storm or prevent it from developing in the first place. We can’t bring an end to a drought. Yet as Unitarian Universalists we hold interdependence as a core value, acknowledging our place in the great web of all existence. And as people who respect science, we understand that human-caused climate change has and will continue to contribute to the frequency and severity of catastrophic weather events—weather events that impact not solely human lives, but the lives of just about every bit of flora and fauna on and in the earth and seas. We have the whole world in our hands—just any species has the whole world in its hands simply by virtue of being part of the interdependent web that affects all of the interdependent web, and more significantly, because our awareness that our actions harm that web—and have done so disproportionately from the Industrial Revolution onward–means that we have the capacity to stop the harm. Or at least reduce the rate and severity of harm.
Experts on how to minimize our injury to the planet, to all life upon it, abound in the world, the country, Savannah, and even in our congregation. I’m not one of them. As a theologian and spiritual leader, however, I know that relationship–intimate, respectful, mutual relationship–must always be one of the primary first steps toward any harm reduction and healing. Services like this one, celebrating the animals in our lives, honoring the way their existence blesses us, and proclaiming our love for them, remind us of the preciousness we hold in our hands. Almost every experience that brings us into awareness of any of the not-us parts of the great web–forest bathing, camping, birdwatching, hiking, leaf peeping, snorkeling–awaken and deepen our relationship with the world we have in our hands.
Evidence abounds about ways encounters with the not-us part of nature benefits our wellbeing–from lower our blood pressure to improved mental health. Evidence also abounds, unfortunately, about the myriad ways our encounters with the non-us part of the natural world is harmful to that great, delicate, interdependent web–from destruction of habitats to causing mothers to abandon their young. So it might be reckless to suggest that intentionally bringing ourselves into contact with nature is a primary way toward harm reduction. Yet I believe this is also true: our human encounters with the non-human creatures of our earth, our respectful, joyful, tender, awestruck encounters, can also be of great and untold benefit to those non-human creatures we encounter and all the ones we never encounter, too–precisely because we are changed, we are blessed, we are reminded we are not alone and we are reminded, if only momentarily, of all that we hold in hands. And once reminded of the solemn and inestimable responsibility we bear, we are more likely and better able to order our lives in ways that honor and protect all that we hold in our hands. May it be so. Amen.
