Intersectionality and Periwinkles?
God owns the planet and all its riches; the earth and every creature belong to God. – Psalm 24:1 (adapted)
Jill Lapore, wrote in The New Yorker, March 19, 2018, about Rachel Carson:
“[Her] house, on an island in Maine, perches on a rock at the edge of the sea like the aerie of an eagle. Below the white-railed back porch, the sea-slick rock slopes down to a lumpy low tideland of eelgrass and bladder wrack, as slippery as a knot of snakes. … ‘The shore is an ancient world,’ Rachel Carson wrote from a desk in that house.”
On that table, she coined the word ecosystem.
Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die.”
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the Iraq & Afghanistan wars, plus interest and veterans’ care expenses will eventually cost more than 8 trillion dollars. We spend all the money and there is nothing left to spend.
“Wildlife,” Rachel Carson once wrote with an intersectional eye, “is dwindling because its home is being destroyed, but the home of wildlife is also our home.” Nothing, she would say, is separate from anything else—and all of it belongs, not to us, but to God, the one who is truly rich.
Prayer
Dear God, shall we call you ecosystem or would you prefer another name? Amen.
About the AuthorDonna Schaper is Pastor at the Orient Congregational Church on the far end of Long Island, New York. Her newest book is Remove the Pews: Spiritual Possibilities for Sacred Spaces, from The Pilgrim Press.