"The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it" (Psalm 24:1). The Bible begins with God delighting in his creation and calling it good, and it gives human beings the task of caring for it (Genesis 2:15).
These seven stories about creation and the environment, retold in our own words, include strange creatures of the deep sea, a famous speech of uncertain origin, a killer whale that helped whalers, a roadside experiment, two very different fishing boats and the letter that helped launch the modern environmental movement. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- Giant Jellyfish of the Deep: Creatures Made for God's Delight
- The Speech Attributed to Chief Seattle
- Old Tom and the Whalers of Eden
- The Drivers Who Swerved to Hit
- "Lord of the Beasts"?
- Two Boats: From the Sea of Galilee to the Supertrawler
- Olga Huckins and the Letter That Sparked a Movement
Giant Jellyfish of the Deep: Creatures Made for God's Delight
In the mid-1980s the marine biologist Bruce Robison was lowered into the ocean in Deep Rover, a one-person submersible. He sat inside a clear acrylic sphere with lights on the front and a small bank of controls beside his seat. As the craft sank, it turned from a solid shape into a shimmer and then vanished from view of the ship above.
Hundreds of metres down, the water was inky black. Tiny glowing creatures streamed past like fireflies. Then, out of the darkness, appeared an enormous, almost transparent animal, many metres long, trailing countless tentacles. Soon there were others around the submersible.
If this were a Hollywood film, the creatures would have attacked, and the sub would have returned scarred by tentacles. Instead they simply drifted by. They were real: giant siphonophores, colonial relatives of jellyfish that can grow longer than a blue whale and live deep in the ocean. Hardly anyone knew they existed until scientists began exploring the deep sea in submersibles.
Why do such creatures exist? They make no contribution to human well-being. We do not eat them or make medicines from them, and for most of history we did not even know they were there. Scientists estimate that millions of species, many of them in the oceans and on the deep seabed, have still never been described. Why do they exist at all, when most of them will never be seen by a human eye?
Perhaps they are a rebuke to a kind of human self-importance: the assumption that God's interest is in us alone, and that the world exists only for us to enjoy and use. Their very existence suggests that God's love, interest and pleasure extend to millions upon millions of living things, on this planet and wherever else life may exist in his universe.
That is exactly the point made in Psalm 104. In verses 5 to 18 the psalmist describes how God has made the world well watered, so that fields are fruitful and people have food to eat. But God also makes sure the land is productive for the wild donkeys that live in the desert, where no human could survive, and for the wild goats high in the mountains. The earth is fruitful not only for human beings but for all the creatures that live on it.
In verses 19 to 23 the psalm speaks of the rhythms God has built into creation: the seasons, the moon, night and day. Then it makes a striking observation. Daytime is for people to go out to their work, but night-time belongs to the animals of the forest, who prowl and hunt. It is their God-given time and space, mentioned with the same dignity as ours. A few verses later, the psalm pictures the great creatures of the sea playing in the ocean, simply for the joy of it.
Takeaway: Creation is not only for us. God loves and delights in countless creatures we will never see. That should humble us and shape the way we treat his world.
Source: Accounts of Bruce Robison's deep-sea research; illustration by Scott Higgins based on Psalm 104.
The Speech Attributed to Chief Seattle
Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, made a speech in 1854 when the US government was seeking to buy his people's land. It was given in his own language, and the only record of it came from notes taken by a settler, Henry Smith, which were reconstructed and published in 1887.
In the 1960s and 1970s that speech was rewritten and expanded several times. The best-known modern version, often presented as a letter to the American president, owes much of its wording to later writers rather than to Seattle himself. Historians agree that the exact words cannot be traced back to him.
Even so, the sentiments of the famous text have moved millions of people. It contrasts a people who see every part of the land as sacred with newcomers who treat land as something to buy, use up and leave behind. It speaks of the noise of the cities, where there is nowhere quiet to hear leaves unfurling in spring or an insect's wings.
It speaks of the air as precious because every living thing shares the same breath: animals, trees and people. It describes the shock of seeing buffalo left to rot on the prairie after being shot from passing trains, and warns that if all the animals disappeared, human beings would die of a great loneliness of spirit.
Its most quoted lines insist that the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. Human beings did not weave the web of life, but are only one strand in it, and whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. Every pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods is described as holy in the memory of the people.
Takeaway: Whoever wrote these words, they echo a biblical truth: the earth belongs to God, not to us. We are stewards, not owners, and what we do to creation we ultimately do to ourselves.
Source: Speech attributed to Chief Seattle (1854), as reconstructed by Henry A. Smith (1887) and later rewritten; see Jerry Clark, "Thus Spoke Chief Seattle", Prologue (National Archives, 1985).
Old Tom and the Whalers of Eden
In Eden, a town on the far south coast of New South Wales, an old whaling station is now part of a museum. Visitors can read the remarkable story of a pod of orcas, or killer whales, that formed a working partnership with the local whalers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The best known of them was a large male the whalers called Old Tom. When baleen whales passed along the coast, the orcas would herd them into Twofold Bay. Old Tom would then swim close to the whaling station and splash and leap to alert the whalers, who would launch their open boats.
According to the whalers' accounts, Old Tom sometimes even took a boat's rope in his teeth and helped tow it towards the whale. The men would then harpoon the exhausted animal, which thrashed in pain and panic until it died. Afterwards the carcass was left for a while so the orcas could take their reward, the whale's tongue and lips.
Today most people find the slaughter of whales deeply troubling, and attitudes to whaling have changed dramatically. Psalm 104 offers a very different picture of these great creatures. It says God formed Leviathan, the great sea creature, simply to frolic in the ocean (Psalm 104:26). The sea is its playground, and it exists for God's enjoyment and as a celebration of his creative power.
Takeaway: The Psalm moves us beyond seeing nature only in terms of what we can get from it. It ends by asking that the Lord might "rejoice in his works" (Psalm 104:31). God enjoys his world, and so should we.
Source: Eden Killer Whale Museum; history of Old Tom and the "killers of Eden".
The Drivers Who Swerved to Hit
How cruel are we, really? According to a report by the Australian science writer Karl Kruszelnicki, researchers at Southeastern Louisiana University once tested this with rubber turtles and snakes placed on a road. Some decoys were placed directly in the path of traffic; others were put well off to the side, where a driver would have to go out of their way to hit them.
Most drivers, the report said, took care to avoid the decoys, and a few simply did not notice them. But a small minority, around six per cent, deliberately swerved to run them over, including ones far off the road. One truck driver was reported to have crossed into the opposite lane and onto the shoulder just to flatten a turtle.
We have not been able to trace the original study, but later experiments found similar results. In a 2007 study in Ontario, Canada, about three in every hundred drivers hit reptile decoys on the road, while a similar number stopped to rescue them. In a widely publicised informal experiment in 2012, engineer Mark Rober found that about six per cent of 1,000 drivers left their lane to hit a rubber animal.
Takeaway: Most of us would never swerve to hit an animal, but many of us have a mean streak that shows in other ways: harsh words, gossip, mocking someone's weakness. "The righteous care for the needs of their animals" (Proverbs 12:10), and how much more for people.
Source: Karl Kruszelnicki, Great Moments in Science; later road-decoy studies including Ashley et al. (2007) and Mark Rober (2012).
"Lord of the Beasts"?
The Scottish naturalist Gavin Maxwell, famous for his book about otters, Ring of Bright Water, told a story recounted by John Stott.
Two young otters had been brought to Britain from West Africa. One morning a Church of Scotland minister, walking along the shore of a nearby loch, saw the cubs playing at the water's edge. He took out a shotgun and shot them. One died instantly; the other died later in the water.
When a local journalist asked him about it, the minister saw no moral problem at all. The Lord, he said, had given man dominion over the beasts of the field.
Takeaway: "Dominion" in Genesis was never a licence for cruelty. Humans are made in the image of a God who cares for every sparrow (Matthew 10:29). To rule like him is to care, not to destroy.
Source: Reported in John Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today.
Two Boats: From the Sea of Galilee to the Supertrawler
In 1986, during a drought that lowered the water level, two brothers found the remains of an ancient wooden boat in the mud on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Archaeologists dated it to around the time of Jesus. About eight metres long and just over two metres wide, it was the kind of boat the first disciples might have fished from when Jesus called them.
In the same era, shipyards were building a very different kind of fishing vessel: factory supertrawlers more than a hundred metres long, able to cross oceans and process hundreds of tonnes of fish a day. Their nets are not cast by hand but are vast meshed structures stretching hundreds of metres, and they find fish not by experience and eyesight but with sophisticated sonar.
Between them, the two boats sum up an environmental challenge of our time. People have always put pressure on the natural world; even in the ancient Mediterranean some species were heavily overfished. But the scale today is unprecedented. Industrial fleets can strip one fishing ground after another, moving on when stocks collapse.
What is happening in the oceans is mirrored on land and in the air. Many species are disappearing, dead zones are spreading in coastal waters overloaded with nutrients, and the climate is changing as a result of the greenhouse gases we produce.
Takeaway: The disciples left their nets to follow Jesus, the one through whom all things were made. Following him today includes caring for the creation he loves, rather than plundering it.
Source: Scott Higgins, A Beautiful World: Christianity and Creation (2014); history of the Sea of Galilee boat.
Olga Huckins and the Letter That Sparked a Movement
In January 1958 Olga Owens Huckins of Duxbury, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to The Boston Herald. Her area had been sprayed from the air with the pesticide DDT to kill mosquitoes, and afterwards she found dead birds on her property. She sent a copy of the letter to her friend, the marine biologist Rachel Carson.
That letter prompted Carson to investigate the effects of chemical pesticides. The result was her book Silent Spring (1962), which documented the damage being done to wildlife and ecosystems and brought the young environmental movement into the mainstream. Carson warned that altering the delicate balance of nature without understanding it could only end in disaster, and she criticised the arrogance of a worldview that treated the earth as ours to do with as we pleased, as though nature existed simply for human convenience. "The 'control of nature'," she wrote, "is a phrase conceived in arrogance."
A few years later, in 1967, the historian Lynn White Jr. published an influential article in the journal Science titled "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis". He argued that the combination of science and technology had given humanity unprecedented power over nature, and he blamed Western Christianity for the attitude behind its misuse. Christianity, he claimed, had taught that humans, made in God's image, were separate from the rest of creation, which existed only to serve human purposes.
Both Carson's and White's arguments have been debated ever since, and many Christians have pointed out that the Bible teaches care for creation, not exploitation. But their challenge remains: how do we see the world, and how do we treat it?
Takeaway: One letter from an ordinary person helped change the world's thinking. Christians can lead the way in showing that being made in God's image means reflecting his care for all he has made.
Source: History of Silent Spring; Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science (1967); Scott Higgins, A Beautiful World (2014).
Final thoughts
Giant creatures of the deep, a speech about the sacred earth, a whale named Old Tom, drivers on a country road, two otter cubs, two fishing boats and a letter about dead birds. Each asks how we see God's world: as a storehouse to plunder, or as a gift to treasure and protect.
What is one practical step you could take this month to care for God's creation?
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These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.