God’s creation is beautiful and good.
Think for a moment about your favorite place in creation. If you are like me, it’s hard to choose just one spot. Is it a spectacular view of a mountainside? The huge expanse of the ocean? The starry sky at night or the Northern lights? Or is it the lake outside your cabin? A walk in your neighborhood? Fishing by a stream? Or maybe it’s your garden in the summer when it is at its fullest. Whether it is something large and spectacular or small and precious, there is no wrong answer. And yes, you can have many spots that are your favorites because all of God’s creation is beautiful and good.
But sometimes there are problems in creation. We used to have streets lined with beautiful elm trees – but then Dutch elm trees disease swept in and infested tree after tree. I remember being so sad every time I saw an X on an elm tree. I remember thinking, it looks healthy to me… but it had the bug… and it was next for the chain saw.
Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist, was working for a logging company in British Columbia in the late 1970s. She was the first woman working for a logging company and so she was excited to be there. She was very familiar with the industry, having grown up in a family of foresters, but this company operated differently than her father and grandfather. They would go into the forest and cut down a tree here and there. The company went in with big machinery and was clear cutting the trees and then replanting the Douglas fir that they wanted to harvest again.
But as happens in nature, other trees started to grow too, especially birch trees – and they were considered weeds. So, the foresters sprayed them with herbicide to get rid of them. They assumed the birch were competing with the Douglas fir – especially for sunlight. But when they did this, and they weeded out the birch trees, the Douglas fir trees ended up coming down with a root disease.1
Now, I must admit, I also thought that there was competition in nature for nutrients and for sunlight between the trees and the other plants. I assumed that nature worked on a Darwinian theory of the strongest would survive. But Suzanne Simard, and ecologists like her, have discovered that there is a lot more cooperation in nature than we have assumed.
Simard writes “I really thought, we're doing something wrong here. And so, I wanted to know whether the birches were somehow protecting the firs against this disease and that when we cut them out, it made it worse.” She discovered that “birch and fir were sharing carbon below ground — much against the prevailing wisdom that they only compete for light.” She also found that “the more that birch shaded Douglas fir, the more carbon was sent over to Douglas fir… In this way the ecosystem was maintaining its balance — the birch and fir could coexist because of this collaborative behavior.”2 In another study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect. "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest." In addition, she found that the fungus that was on the forest floor was also helping the growth of the plants and when that was bulldozed over and removed, all of the trees suffered too.
God’s creation is beautiful and good – and it is resilient because God made it collaborative, cooperative, and interdependent. God’s creation of plants and animals depend upon one another. There is beautiful harmony in nature. And sometimes… I think we forget that the collaborative, cooperative and interdependent nature of God’s creation includes to us too.
Simard’s study of trees became personal after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She learned that one of the chemotherapy medicines that she was being treated with came from “a substance some trees make for their own mutual defense.”
In the Genesis story, God charges people to care for the earth and all that is in it. We sometimes forget how much the earth and all its creatures care for us. So, what if we thought about ourselves in a more collaborative and cooperative relationship with the earth. How can we respond to the care that we receive?
Just as each tree and each bird and bee makes individual contributions to the wellbeing of the world around it, it turns out that we make lots of decisions every day that affect God’s world too. Some of them feel small – like recycling and composting. It costs us a bit more money, but you’ll notice that the cups and plates that we buy here at church are compostable. When I go on a walk, I try to remember to bring a bag along to pick up garbage. These are simple and seemingly little things. But I noticed the difference after our clean-up crew came to pick up the church neighborhood a few weeks ago. Simple personal choices add up. After all, our first responsibility is to care for our corner of the world. But…we can also advocate for bigger choices to care for the earth and one another with our legislature. Just a few emails, letters and phone calls can make a difference to how an elected leader votes on an issue.
God’s creation is beautiful and good. Creation is beautiful to our eyes as we look at the beauty around us. God’s creation is beautiful and good as we listen to the bird’s song and the rustling of the trees. And God’s creation is beautiful and good to our noses – have you smelled the lilacs or the lily of the valley lately? God’s creation is beautiful and good to the touch – feel the soft green grass or the sand on the beach between your toes. In all these ways, and even more in the way that all the parts of God’s creation work together in a collaborative, cooperative and interdependent way, God’s creation is beautiful and good.
And God wants you to enjoy it and care for one another and the world we live in. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Sunday, June 4, 2023 Faith-Lilac Way Lutheran Pastor Pamela Stalheim Lane
1https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/04/993430007/trees-talk-to-each-other-mother-tree-ecologist-hears-lessons-for-people-too. Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.