Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders … Heart-driven scientists whose notebooks, smudged with salt marsh mud and filled with columns of numbers, are love letters to salmon. In their own way, they are lighting a beacon for salmon, to call them back home.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Burning Cascade Head” in Braiding Sweetgrass.
What if changing our perception of God has the potential to change everything?
Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation
He stood and endured reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven
… we’ve been told (in Genesis (1:26)) that God gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”; and “dominion” has all too often been taken to mean carte blanche.
But this view of life is surely not what the authors of Genesis intended, and is foul, and must be proclaimed as such. It is also of course self-destructive, for if we destroy the biosphere then we will destroy ourselves, as many a society has demonstrated in the past and is happening now on the grand scale. We need, post-haste, and with all possible energy, to proclaim the alternative view, reflected not least in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism, and by all manner of pagans: that “All life is one” – and that we need truly to treat all other species as fellow creatures. In other words, we need to adopt a morality and a metaphysic that are biocentric (or ecocentric or gaiacentric).
Colin Tudge, Campaign for Real Farming