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Jane Goodall, Spirituality and Biodiversity

I read an interesting piece recently which talked about Jane Goodall.  I like to confess up front, I like her.  She is an intriguing woman who has given her life to a cause that is very important.  I love the description of her as an English primatologist.  She is older than I am, having been born in 1934.  She spent 50 years living in the Gombe area in Tanzania working on behalf of the chimpanzees and garnered fame in her appeal to humanity to become concerned for the chimp’s long-term benefit.  

The British newspaper, The Guardian, ran some years ago a piece on Goodall’s fifty years in the Tanzania field.  She narrates on of her earliest stories from that world.  We are told she witnessed a creature “in the act of not just using a tool but of making one.”  Before her observation folks thought only human beings made tools.  Now she was challenging conventional wisdom.  In fact, she comments, “I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker…”  She adds, “yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action.”

Additional years of observation led her to recognize that chimps “embraced, hugged and kissed each other.  They experienced adolescence, developed powerful mother-and-child bonds, and used political chicanery to get what they wanted.”  That sounds like my little grandkids!  All of her work and that of many others set off a late 20th century and now 21st century consideration of evolution and the bigger role of all of life in our world, called earth.  That is where the most recent article comes into play.

This article reports on an appearance by Goodall at a Vatican webinar on biodiversity.  Goodall is featured, along with Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Roman Catholic leader from Ghana.  He is the Prefect for the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development---a Vatican office which considers issues of ecology and then like.  The focus for this webinar was the ecological challenges and threats to our world’s future.  That sounds ominous.  And it is, if we can believe some of these speakers.

I appreciate how Goodall frames the issue.  “We’ve got this one, beautiful, green and blue planet created by God.  How is it possible that the most intellectual creature to ever walk on this planet is destroying its only home?”  That is a very pointed question.  It points to us.  Anyone who has ever seen images of the earth taken from outer space can appreciate Goodall’s description of our wonderful planet.  It becomes a spiritual issue when Goodall claims this lovely home, our earth, is created by God.  I agree.

Our home is God-given.  In our everyday, busy lives, it is easy to forget that we are living on and from a gift.  We treat it as our own.  In fact, we “own” property.  I own a house and have keys so I can lock it, in order that no thieves come and steal “my things.”  We all see this as perfectly normal.  I don’t take issue with this, but I do grasp its implication.  If it is “mine,” then I can do anything I want.  And apparently, we are.  We are potentially destroying our gift!

I don’t have to worry.  I am old enough that I will be gone before I suffer any real loss.  But if Goodall, the Cardinal and others are correct, our planet could be in some dire straits by the end of the 21st century.  And my four grandkids likely will be alive, as will their kids and maybe grandkids.  Is that the legacy I want to leave them?  Do we want to be remembered as the ones who trashed the place?

Cardinal Turkson puts it spiritually in a clear statement.  “Today, there is a devastating deconstruction of God’s gift of creation…”  Both he and Goodall continue to chart some of the human actions that are causing this deconstruction.  Our way of life causes some species to become extinct.  Typically, humans shrug our shoulders and say, in effect, “who cares?”  It seems we should care.  Goodall tells us, "As one of these species becomes extinct, it tears a hole in that tapestry. And as more and more holes are torn, as these species become extinct with horrifying rapidity, in the end we're going to be left with a tapestry so torn that the ecosystem will collapse. And that is what we depend on for our lives.”

All this is important to me for two reasons.  The first is the one I mentioned already, namely, my grandkids and their offspring.  I want to be responsible for what I have now and what I pass on.  If I need to change my perspective and actions, then I am willing.  I want to pay attention to products I buy and how I live.  Some things are clear.  We need to move away from fossil fuels.  We can write it off with a “who cares.”

The other reason that why this is important to me is the spiritual one.  I would rather not become involved with God when God might ask, “how could you know and still be disrespectful and irresponsible?”  At some level, I don’t get to decide whether I am respectful.  And I cannot determine whether I am responsible.  After all, my life and this planet are gifts of God.  Am I responsive to those gifts?  And I grateful and can I live carefully and not carelessly?

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