Co-written with Tony Juniper, an expert advisor to The Prince's International Sustainabilty Unit, and Ian Skelly, who regularly helps His Royal Highness articulate his vision in words, the book is truly Charles's personal vision, distilled after decades of working for environmental reforms. (For brevity, I'm going to take the liberty of referring to this well-known author and public figure by his first name alone, if I may be forgiven for doing so.)
The book is lavishly illustrated with color photographs, but it's no coffee-table book. It's a serious, highly personal revelation of Charles's own feelings and hopes for the planet.
To summarize his own sacramental attitude towards nature, Charles uses an epigraph from William Shakespeare's "As You Like It":
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
A fuller quotation is:
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
’This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
(II.i.1–17)
Harmony is a deeply felt evocation of a marvelous outlook that I find myself sharing ... though mine is still a-forming, while Charles's has been in formation since he was a very young man.
Charles's Very Broad Discussion
Prince Charles's book is quite broad in its discussion of where we need to be going, environment-wise. It is spiritual and practical at the same time. Charles gives us a great deal of the history of how our anti-nature attitudes formed in the West. He also tells of the rich trove of traditional wisdom about nature that we can uncover when we look at other, non-Western societies down through the annals of time. In our own cultural tradition, moreover, there have long been what might be termed minority voices who've extolled what our dominant attitudes have disparaged.
I want to avoid, for the moment, trying to emulate the vast scope of Charles's vision and just pick out little pieces of it that help me, and I think will help others, get closer to seeing the earth as a sacrament.
The Beautiful Marbled Cone Snail
The first little puzzle piece comes from Charles's discussion of the sea snail called the "marbled cone," officially Conus marmoreus, and its many kindred species:
Here is what Charles has to say about these lovely marine predators, who are up to about six inches in length, and who are presently under very real threat of extinction:
One group of animals that appears to be especially rich in potentially useful compounds is cone snails. These predatory creatures live on tropical reefs and in mangrove forests, mostly in the South Pacific region. There are about 700 different species and each is believed to manufacture 100-200 different peptide toxins [a peptide is like a protein molecule, but shorter] to coat the paralyzing harpoons they use for hunting. Although only about six species and about 100 toxins out of a possible 140,000 have been studied in any detail, it seems they offer the enormous potential of providing the basis of future painkillers and treatments for epilepsy. Some scientists believe that cone snails may contain more useful medical compounds for humans than any other group of creatures on Earth. And yet they, too, are under threat because coral reefs are being eroded by development, pollution and climate change, and also because mangrove forests are being cleared to make way for shrimp farms and other coastal developments.
Beauty and Practicality
Why should we care about the fate of cone snails? The reasons are basically two:
- They're truly beautiful examples of the millions of living kinds that God has made.
- They have untold and untapped practical value to humankind, if we let them survive.
In the discussions I usually encounter of environmentalism, it's usually one or the other that gets emphasized. And when it's couched in terms of other than practicality, the discussion is often one that tells how "neat" or "cool" or "scary" a certain animal is ... as in many discussions one reads of sharks or snakes, for example.
It's not always easy to think of a shark or a snake or a barb-throwing venomous cone snail ("Cone-an the Barb-arian"?) as a thing of beauty.
Or, put better, as a sentient being of beauty, not just a thing. We don't exactly know how sentient a snake or a snail is, of course, but in my estimation there is some sentience in all critters. And that is a beautiful fact about the world we all live in together.
No comments:
Post a Comment