What’s the sound of a bird worth? Clearly nothing, according to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company as it destroyed the Arkansas habitat of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. And the only way you will even see or hear a Kaui O bird is by an old recording; we don’t even have the song of the Bachman’s warbler, a beautiful bird with yellow breast.
Just in the last forty years 22 animals and a plant were removed from the endangered species list because they don’t exist anymore. So, who cares about a fish in a pool, a grouse on the prairie, or even some plant that isn’t sold at the local nursery? After all, there’s money to be made!
Thanks to corporate greed and the politicians paid off from it, we’ve managed to lose literally billions of birds, not to mention important habitat that protects us all. As developers continue to expand their building into wetlands and shore lands destroying the habitat of birds, mussels, and other sea life we will reap the whirlwind because there will be no buffer against the next Sandy. But the developers and corporate interests will be long gone.
Prayer for the Day
Searching for your voice, O God, we miss it in the world around us
For we do not realize how you speak through your creation;
Unsure of how to respond to the demands of those in power,
We often hesitate rather than taking bold steps.
Shake us from our uncertainty and the excuses we create:
So we may live faithfully according to your Gospel.
In the name of him who came to show us the way,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen
Thoughts for the Day
What a tragic irony, that the more we understand of biology, the less we have of it to learn from and enjoy. What will be the legacy of this new century - to cherish and to protect Nature or to see butterflies and zebras and much more vanish into legend like the thylacine, moa and dodo?
Sean B. Carroll, evolutionary developmental biologist, University of Wisconsin
Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.
Elizabeth Kolbert, American science writer, from The Sixth Extinction
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
And all their host by the breath of God’s mouth.
God gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; and put the deeps in storehouses.
Psalm 33: 6-7