Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction (Ecology and Justice) - Softcover

Rigby, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626985502 ISBN 13: 9781626985506

Verlag: Orbis Books (USA), 2023

Inhaltsangabe

This book practices an ancient form of theological reflection—the hexameron—on creation and attends to current concerns for the wellbeing of creation amid changing climates, anthropogenic pollution, and, possibly, the next mass extinction event. Rigby takes each day of the Genesis 1 creation narrative as the launching point for critical theological engagement with early writers like Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan, with contemporary concerns about the state of our planet’s well-being, and with faith-based initiatives from around the world that are contributing to the healing and restoration of the world. By attending to planetary well-being, Rigby’s unique and striking approach to the hexameron captures both the devastation of current anthropogenic climate change and the precious hope for salvific healing in Shalom.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Cologne, where she directs the research hub Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH). Her interdisciplinary research interests include environmental literary and cultural studies, environmental philosophy, and religion and ecology.

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US$36.00

RELIGION / Christian Theology / General

RELIGION / Religion & Science

RELIGION / Christian Rituals & Practice / General

Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction

Ecology & Justice Series

Cover design: Diane Mastrogiulio

Cover art: Leonard French, Seven Days of Creation: The Seventh Day. Used with permission.

Cover photo: David Paterson, Dorian Photographics

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ISBN 978-1-62698-550-6

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

“How long will the land mourn?”

Jer. 12:4

The Road to Kunming

In April 2020, villagers in the southern Chinese province of Yunan were amazed by the appearance of a herd of elephants in their midst. These itinerant elephants, it turns out, had ventured forth sometime the previous month from the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve around sixty miles farther south on the border with Laos and Myanmar, and they were still set on heading north. By the time they reached Yuanjiang County, over 250 miles from the reserve, a couple had turned back, but more had been born. Traveling night and day, nourishing themselves on pilfered crops, raided grain stores, and subsequently, gifted food put out to steer them away from human habitations, in early June 2021 they arrived, stressed and exhausted, on the edge of the provincial capital Kunming, a city of over eight million residents nearly four hundred miles from their home. There, they were finally intercepted and coaxed to turn around to retrace their weary steps to the reserve.

By the time they entered the final leg of their homeward trek in August, China’s by now world-famous wandering elephants had consumed a whopping 180 tons of corn, bananas, and other food laid out for them; they had caused 150,000 people to be temporarily evacuated from their homes; and their damages bill was variously estimated at around $1 million.1 They had also focused the world’s attention on the precarious plight of Asian elephants and other endangered animals during the very year in which the UN’s fifteenth conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 15) was due to meet in China. As it happened, the conference had to be postponed, first for one year, and then another, and was eventually relocated to Montreal, where it finally took place in December 2022. But COP 15 was originally to have been held in Kunming, and at the inaugural session held in October 2021, a short-film made by the Yunnan government TV station was screened, which celebrated the trek of the Short-Trunk Clan as a successful instance of human-animal conflict resolution.2

While Asian elephants are known to roam, none from the Xishuangbanna Reserve had ever traveled so far out of their terrain into more densely populated areas and toward a cooler climatic zone for which they are ill-suited. It would surely be unduly anthropomorphic to assume that this herd, led by one or more matriarchs, as is the way with elephants, had a specific destination in mind. Looking on remotely from my own human perspective, however, and with an eye for symbolism, their trek struck me as something like a protest march, perhaps even a pilgrimage of sorts: one that cried out for our attention. It was as if these elephants had come to Kunming as emissaries of the wider communion of creatures: making their presence felt at the city gates in the lead-up to the crucial conference at which the assembled delegates were to thrash out urgently needed measures to arrest the cascade of extinctions that is accelerating around the world as biomes are destroyed, the planet warms, and the abundance and diversity of Earth’s freeliving animals, plants, and fungi continue to dwindle.

Meanwhile, another entity was on the move. It too had set out from a location in China, probably the infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province. By the time the elephants from southern Yunan had started heading north, the novel coronavirus identified by Chinese medical authorities in January 2020 had gone global. And by the time they arrived back in the reserve, it had been decided to defer the major face-to-face meeting of COP 15 yet another year.

How are we to hear what Pope Francis has called the “cry of the earth” when we are enclosed within exclusively human worlds of concern, communication, and, all too often, conflict?3 How are we to apprehend the Earth’s cry when ever more of us live in proliferating cities that are remote from the places, people, and other beings who provide for our pressing daily needs? This is, to be sure, no easy feat for most of us. But once you have attuned your senses, opened your heart, and enlarged your mind, you will begin to hear this cry issuing ever more urgently from near and far, and in a variety of keys and media. The wandering elephants of Yunan might not have been intending to make their voices heard at COP 15: but their epic journey was, on one level, a cry of distress on the part of the elephants and a wake-up call for humans. Yet the story of their quest offers inspiration as well, for it also bears witness to the will to survive, the potential for ecological recovery, and the possibility of social reorientation.

Asian elephants have been doing it tough. Found across a variety of habitats, including grasslands, forests, and scrublands, from altitudes of nearly ten thousand feet down to sea level, they once ranged across about five million square miles, from the Middle East along the Iranian coast into the Indian subcontinent and China and beyond into Southeast Asia as far as Borneo. Thanks to the seeds that they distribute over large distances in their dung, they play an important role in maintaining plant diversity and shaping ecosystems. While the western populations in the Middle East had probably become extinct around 100 BCE, with those in China already largely eliminated some six hundred years ago, it is only in recent decades that increased human encroachment on their homeplaces and disruption of their lifeways—exacerbated by the illegal trade in their body parts—especially tusks and skin, has landed the Asian elephant on the Red List of Endangered Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Meanwhile, fragmentation of their habitat is bringing them into more frequent conflict with local communities, leading to human crop and property damage, injuries, and even deaths, in turn inciting revenge killing of elephants.4

Once widely distributed across southern China, by the mid1990s fewer than two hundred Asian elephants survived there, principally in the Meng yang section of the Xishuangbanna Reserve. Within this refuge, their population has begun to recover, and although they still only constitute less than 1 percent of the global population, free-living Asian elephants are now thought to number nearly three hundred individuals in China. Thanks to strictly enforced legal protections, the growing Mengyang population has also been recolonizing neighboring areas. During this same period, however, their forested habitat has declined by some 15 percent, while conservation policies favoring a denser canopy cover in that which remains have effectively reduced their food supply by shading out their preferred forage plants. Add to this a severe drought, almost certainly linked to climate change, and it appears likely that the troupe that headed to Kunming, like that which dispersed south from Mengyang around the same time, were in search of new territory to support their growing population. In a further twist to this tale, elephant experts surmise that it was the lull in human activity occasioned by the pandemic that initially lured them further afield.5

The case of the Kunming elephants, then, exemplifies many of the contradictions that currently beset human interrelationships with other living kinds. Their quest for new territory testifies, on the one hand, to a conservation success story, and, on the other, to ongoing pressure on wildlife habitat, not only from the expansion of agricultural, urban, and industrial land use, but also, increasingly, from human-caused global heating. Moreover, the expanding elephant population, not unlike that of wolves in parts of Europe and North America, in combination with habitat fragmentation, is leading to more frequent...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Orbis Books (USA)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626985502
• ISBN 13: 9781626985506
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 203
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Logos Europe; contact@logoseurope.eu; ; Rue Nicolas Possin 9; La Rochelle; 17000; Frankreich