Noah And His Ark Saved The World. Imagine That!

Now we face an even greater threat. Be Like Noah. Build your Ark. Be proactive. Save your planet.

“The single biggest threat to our planet is the destruction of habitat and along the way loss of precious wildlife. We need to reach a balance where people, habitat, and wildlife can co-exist — if we don’t, everyone loses … one day.”

If ever there was a time in history when people couldn’t come together, this is surely it. In the last three years a virus has taught us much about ourselves, how it feels to be alone, and isolated.

It’s not something we were necessarily prepared for. Rather it arrived without fanfare, and escalated to a point where we were afraid to get too close to each other.

This is something that never in our lives any of us has had to do.

Yet there is much we can learn from this

“When life hits us hard with what is unprecedented, we have to fall back on our cultural memory. What did we learn from the Greeks and the Romans? Once we look, we discover that the foundation myths of our so called “civilization” are essentially stories of war and catastrophe. Gods are always sending lightning or changing people into monsters or raping and pillaging. Even earlier than these traditions, we go way back to Gilgamesh and the Flood. They all speak of a world that was destroyed before it came back to life.

“Noah was the Man back then. God gave him an inside tip to start building an Ark. I wonder if he sold his shares too, or bought stocks in life preservers. The FEMA of the day might have built us all rafts had they any supply left from China, but this Babylonian story accepts the destruction of the world as inevitable. God had decided to start all over again, and all he needed was a remnant to survive. When the water subsided, he could repopulate the earth. Catastrophe was God’s hand sanitizer, to clean up this mess of a world so polluted with sin. It was the divine method of social distancing.”

Polluted with sin, or not…

So whether we see our world as polluted with sin, or not, there are many selfish acts we could clean up on, steps we might take in order to be an example to others, in order to save the planet as Noah did.

It’s so important to be aware of how our actions can have a positive or negative effect on the world that we live in right now, a world that will be passed on to future generations.

In reflecting on this I was reminded of an article I read recently about Mary Reynolds, a reformed Irish landscape designer.

Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland

“Mary is a proud patron of Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland (WRI) and strives to do as much as she can to re-educate people how to live in harmony with nature in their own patch of land — To become Guardians rather than Gardeners.

“One day Mary was sitting at her desk looking out over her garden when she saw a fox run past and We are the Ark was born.”

Mary talks about looking out the window one day and seeing a fox running across the garden, then some hares, and later she found other small creatures hiding, and she wondered why was this so.

Her answer was close by

A neighboring site was being cleared by a digger, and that had sent all the creatures (that we’re not always aware of), scurrying to safety, to find an Ark, if only for a time.

And isn’t that what we humans do! We keep clearing more and more land, to house more and more people, with little thought as to the homes that will be destroyed by our actions.

I see it happening here!

Diagonally across from our home, exactly the same is happening as I write. A large block of land that was surely home to many small creatures, is now being cleared, I’m imagining, to build four or more smaller homes, and there will be little space left for the trees and shrubs, and plants that naturally once grew there.

So essentially, so many creatures will need to relocate in order to survive.

And just as Mary realized from her neck of the woods, this local block will “be replaced with a monoculture of grass lawn that would get no use, support no life and would require constant maintenance.”

It’s what we have all tended to do, though when I look around I think it may be even worse here. So many suburban blocks, with larger-than-life mansions, sport greener-than-green synthetic lawns. It is hard to get into the heads of those who do so. But the reason is probably no more than that it has never occurred to them the reasons why it’s not a great thing to do.

If we were to educate them to the fact that, through our actions we are losing hundreds of species to extinction each and every day, would that raise alarm bells?

Extinction means forever

Extinction means forever lost, and that should worry us greatly when we consider biodiversity, that is, “the variety of all living things, and the systems which connect them.This includes all the planet’s different plants, animals and micro- organisms, plus the genetic information they contain and the ecosystems of which they are a part.”

What this means is that our planet is struggling.

Struggling to maintain life for us.

Struggling to keep our air and water clean.

Struggling to provide homes…and believe it or not, we humans are not exempt.

It’s a sobering thought, is it not!

It’s happening right now

All of this is happening right now, and many biologists warn that this is the greatest threat we have ever faced since dinosaurs took their leave of our planet.

What is a scarier reality is that, despite the fact that we humans have only been around for 200,000 years, a tiny blip in the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s history, we have had a greater impact on the Earth than any other species.

The truth is we must now clean up our planet.

We must find ways to ensure that every creature is given a chance to survive.

We must also ensure that we give life to, and protect the richest variety of plants and animals and vibrant ecosystems.

What we must never do is underestimate our role in all of this. Everything that you or I do, to protect what we have, is vital if life in all its forms, is to be preserved.

Building your personal Ark, which I will explain in another article, is one strategy we can use.

Trying to find ways where we can co-habit with “the planet’s different plants, animals and micro- organisms, plus the genetic information they contain and the ecosystems of which they are a part,” is a step in the right direction.

My hope is that you will journey with me to find the small ways in which we can all play our part. More importantly, my other hope is that you will be prepared to be a beacon of light now, and into the future.

“Because you’re here, reading these words, I already know that you are part of the solution.”

And finally, allow me to quote my all-time favorite environmentalist:

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”