The awesome, tenuous, fragile, complex connection with life

In the course of the day out on the Reef I had several conversations with Andrew, our guide. Young, agile, tanned, he grew up in Queensland. After earning a degree in environmental sciences he went to work in the mining industry which he described as a “numbing” experience. While “ecologically sustainable development” is the official mantra, it means nothing when “economic profitability” is compromised. Profitability always takes precedence. He went back to school for a Masters in Marine Biology and is now doing Reef tours to build up the required hours for his skippers ticket so that he can compete for a position on a Southern Ocean (Antarctic) research vessel.

Andrew talked with passion about the Reef, the value and place of it in the global community. While the largest of the reef systems in the world, it is the youngest, maybe 200 million years old. At the current rate that we are destroying it it will be dead in 40 years.

Rainforests originally stretched to the shoreline the whole distance of the Reef. Now large portions of this reach of land have been cleared to make way for sugarcane fields and urban development. The monsoon rains that were held by the dense rainforest floor now cascade over dramatic mountainside waterfalls and move quickly through the cane fields, picking up and carrying into the ocean massive amounts of silt, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, upsetting the ecological balance, and killing the coral. And with the coral, all that lives around it and depends upon it.

Then there are greenhouse gases, produced in excess by our gas guzzling habits. Remember -- Australia is the world's largest producer. Don't get smug -- Canada is second. As global atmospheric temperatures raise the temperature of the seas, the alga which grow in the coral producing oxygen vital to the coral, overproduces and burns the coral. The coral expels the alga. And then it suffocates. Vast portions of the Reef are displaying extensive coral burn.

Furthermore, Andrew went on, global warming is melting the polar ice caps, pouring vast amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic, diluting its salinity, and thus inhibiting the capacity of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream to sink to the bottom of the ocean off Britain and Portugal where it is pulled back to the Caribbean basin and re-circulated. The Globe and Mail ran an alarming article this weekend on research showing that the Greenland ice cap is melting much more rapidly than previously thought. The ultimate result will be the stopping of the Gulf Stream and its massive transfer of energy from the tropics, bringing catastrophic climatic changes upon the world. This has happened before. It resulted in the Ice Age. A rather extreme way to solve global warming, no?


Friday we hired a guide and went into the Daintree rainforest. Ron also spoke with passion about the ravaging of the forest and the impact upon the Reef, the moneyed interests and political machinations that perpetuate the destruction, and his fear that it is too late to turn it back. Densely vegetated, humid, teeming with birds and animals, with snakes and insects, it is a wild territory with a complex interweaving of dependencies and interdependencies. Just like on the Reef. We toured some 300 km in Ron’s 4WD, fording roaring rivers, climbing to the top of the mountain range, riding in a river boat during a blinding lightning storm in search of salt water crocodiles hiding in the mangroves, and hiking a forest trail. At low tide we ran barefoot out onto the beach from where we could look back towards the towering rainforest covered mountains shrouded in mist.

We spotted two adult male cassowaries and their chicks. Related to the emu and the ostrich, these flightless birds, little changed since prehistoric times, were hunted to near extinction and their natural habitat, the rainforest, was cut down. Now protected, this endangered species is making a slow come back. More than seventy species of trees in the rainforest are dependent upon the cassowary to distribute its seed. Without them they would only exist in limited areas, diminishing their chances of surviving. There are another eighty species whose seeds are also spread by the cassowary. Seeing one is rare. Seeing four is unheard off. Ron regales us with stories of how after the female builds the nest and lays the egg, she “buggers off”, leaving the male to tend the nest, incubate the eggs, and rear the chicks for till they are a year old.

Like Andrew talking about the Reef, Ron is impassioned when talking about cassowaries and taipans, crocodiles and sulfur crested white cockatiels. “We just don’t get it, do we?” Ron proclaims with frustration.

Sad, isn’t it? We just don’t get how awesome, tenuous, and fragile our complex connections with life are. I’m not ready to give up, though. We can get it. We can choose the vehicles we drive (oh, that BMW is fading), how our energy is produced (“Wattle Point” in Ontario!), whether or not we will continue to use styrofoam and plastic dishes in our church, blue, grey, green boxes . . . .

I raised with both Andrew and Ron the amazing capacities of our natural realm to regenerate, the sense that God's Will for Life is tenacious and more durable than our capacities for destruction. They both agreed. The capacity is beyond anything any of us can begin to imagine. But Andrew was quick to note that we have used this awareness as a license to rape and pillage the earth, assuming that all will be restored tomorrow.

I was reminded of Jeffrey Pugh's comment, in his book "The Matrix of Faith", when discussing Augustine's concept of original sin. He describes Augustine's doctrine as an awareness that we are a people "in love with [our] own destruction." (p. 53).

Is this so? Are we destined self-destruct? Do we, literally, love ourselves to death as Augustine thinks we are condemned to do?