Green Theology: The various creatures have specific habitats

Psalm 104 is the equivalent within the book of Psalms to the first chapter of Genesis within the Pentateuch. It is the psalm of creation, and we might even call it the ecological psalm. I have already mentioned it because like Genesis 1 it celebrates the immense diversity of creation, and makes that a subject of praise to God. But there is another prominent feature of it.

As it ranges over the various categories of living creatures – mentioning each time the general category, such as wild animals or birds of the air, but then giving specific examples of each – it depicts for each a specific habitat that God has provided for each species: fir trees for storks to nest in, rocks for the rock badgers, forests for the lions, and so forth. There is even an allocation of the hours of the day: the night for the wild animals of the forest to hunt, the daylight hours for humans to do their work. All the various creatures have their place in God’s carefully designed whole, and humans have a place among others. In this observation of habitat there is also a recognition of interdependence.

The psalmist does not mean that trees were created only for birds to nest in, but he does see that some creatures depend on others for life. There is here at least a first step in the direction of recognizing what are now called ecosystems. We cannot consider each species independently of others, because they are so often  bound up together in a delicate web of interdependence. Preservation of species requires, as we now know, preservation of the ecosystems within which they live.

Human kinship with other creatures

All too often in the history of Christian thought and in the history of western thought humans have been elevated above the natural world as though we did not really belong to it. We have tried to relate to other creatures as demi-gods rather than as fellow-creatures, and the results have been in many cases catastrophic. But this is not a biblical view. Humans are distinctive among the creatures, but the creation narratives also make quite clear our kinship with other creatures.

Genesis 1 makes the point by placing the creation of humans not on a separate day, but on the day devoted to the creation of land animals. Being land animals themselves, humans do not get a day to themselves. Genesis 2 depicts our kinship with the other creatures of earth more vividly and emphatically. God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth. As so often in the Hebrew Bible an ontological relationship is signified by a play on words. Adam is not really a name, but an ordinary word for human being, and Genesis 2:7 says that God formed the human being (’adam) from the dust of the earth (’adamah), just as he then also formed every animal and bird from the earth (2:19).

We are earthy creatures, we belong to the earth, and we belong with the other creatures of earth. True, Adam only lives because God takes his earthy form and breathes the breath of life into him, but this too is the breath of life we share with all other living creatures (cf. 6:17; 7:15,22).

Had we paid sufficient attention to this, we could not have come to regard the earth and its creatures as dispensable, as though we did not really belong to it. Once we recover the sense of our kinship to all other creatures, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of other creatures on earth.

Humans and other creatures are fellow-creatures in the community of the earth

The notion of a community of creation is worth highlighting as a useful model for thinking about our place in creation. The term itself does not come from Scripture, but, like many of the terms we use to talk about what the Bible teaches, it encapsulates a way of thinking we do find in Scripture. Perhaps one of its most potent expressions in the Old Testament is in Genesis 9.

After the flood, in which Noah has preserved every species of land animal and bird, God makes a covenant with (as he puts it, speaking to Noah) ‘you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark’ (Gen 9:9–10). He later calls it a covenant between God and ‘all flesh that is on the earth’ (9:16). The other creatures are partners to the covenant, along with humans.

In this respect this covenant is unique among the biblical covenants, but the content of the covenant explains why it is. In this covenant God promises all earth’s creatures that he will never again destroy the earth and its creatures in a deluge. The covenant secures the earth as a reliable living space for all the creatures of earth. So all the creatures of the earth are interested parties. The earth is their common home. With them we form the community to which God has given the earth for our common home. We have no right to evict other members of the community from the home God has given us all to share.

Genesis has no illusions about this community. After the flood it remains a community within which conflict and violence constantly break out. These evils for which the flood was a judgment are not eradicated but they are restrained. A price is put on the lives of living creatures (9:2–6). All is not sweetness and light, but God nevertheless does not surrender the intention that his creatures should share the earth he has given them. The covenant is his first step towards the renewal and perfecting of the community of his earthly creatures.