Lonely in a Hot World

Two things that I read yesterday resonated in the most poignant way and I had to share them with you. In Parabola, an article by Thomas Berry quotes Chief Seattle as having said

"when the last animals will have perished, humans would die of loneliness."

Berry goes on to illustrate the importance of the natural world to humans by reflecting on the needs of our children, especially toddlers and pre-schoolers. How else can we communicate with them in any meaningful way, without the use of pictures and stories of humans and animals?

These present to the child a world of wonder and beauty and intimacy, a world sufficiently enticing to enable the child to overcome the sorrows that necessarily they experience from their earliest years....We consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven and for the moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region...

How lonely will we and our children be when this is no more? The connection is with an article published in Nature in 2004, which predicts that, worst case scenario, 60% of all species will be extinct by the year 2050. Chloe will be 55 and Conor 53. What kind of world are we leaving them? Will they see a fox and her baby along the side of the road when they drive home from a night out, like I did the other night? Will they be able to take their children to Glacier Park to see mountain goats? Will hawks and turkey vultures soar over the valley?

More from Berry:

The animals can do for us, in both the physical and in the spiritual orders, what we cannot do for ourselves or for each other. These more precious gifts they provide through their presence and their responsiveness to our inner needs.