Drakes Estero Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore

All of it is sacred. (Psalm 19)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

April 21, 2024

We arrived early at the trailhead with muffins for breakfast. A lone picnic table sat on a rise. There was no one around.

We sat and ate in the quiet. Noticed a movement in the sky. A peregrine falcon arrived and perched on a near fencepost. It had a mouse for a meal.

I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. Nor could I contain my smile. Sara knew the source of my delight. Oh, she observed. You’ve never seen one, have you? I had not.

She knew the backstory. When I was nine years old, I had a poster of a peregrine falcon above my desk. I sat beneath it and wrote letters on the bird’s behalf. It was an endangered species, I had learned in school. Then I went to the public library and learned more.

The peregrine falcon had come close to extinction. The use of the pesticide DDT affected its ability to reproduce. In 1970, the year before I was born, there were almost no breeding pairs in the eastern United States. A number of people worked to save the bird by lobbying to ban DDT two years later and beginning a captive breeding program to help the species recover. As a boy, I followed the falcon’s progress and wrote letters to my representatives in Washington. I urged them to continue supporting the Endangered Species Act, the banning of chemical pesticides, and the protection of critical habitat. I also tried to explain just how wonderful peregrines were. I looked up at my poster, then down at the page, and I described the bird’s beautiful yellow eyes, its barred white chest, dark gray wings, and black-capped head. I may have included details about its range, the speeds it attained in flight, and so on. After all, I was a nine-year-old boy. But the heart of the matter was that I was asking my representatives to care. I was asking them the love the bird and the natural world as much as I did.

This explains why I couldn’t stop staring or smiling as we had breakfast with the peregrine falcon. I felt a childlike delight rise in my chest, a real and true sense of wonder. Sure, I knew that the falcon had rebounded so successfully that in 1999 it was removed from the endangered species list and declared recovered. But to actually see one in the wild was something else. I think I smiled all day.

After we packed our trash and the falcon abandoned its mouse bones, we set out for the day’s hike. We had chosen a trail that would take us through the Drakes Estero Marine Wilderness; its classification included the highest level of federal land protection, meaning it was to be left free of any further human imprint. We walked through the forest and along the shore, passing meadows of eelgrass and shallow sandbars that served as nurseries to local fish. Shorebirds lined the water and harbor seals barked in the distance. We saw only a handful of other hikers all day, and it was easy to imagine the world without humans in it, or at least to celebrate the more-than-human world as we took it in over every rise and around each bend.

Yet we don’t really have to travel so far to find ourselves regularly astonished by natural wonders. Most mornings, I go for the same four-mile walk, and I always see something new. In fact, I feel that after twelve years I am only beginning to glimpse the true beauty and diversity of our Lowcountry home. These days it’s blooming jasmine scenting the air and mating pairs of oystercatchers taking flight. King tides and partial eclipses add moments of grandeur, but the smallest things are just as lovely. Green anoles and garter snakes. The press of lettuce through the garden soil. This place we live has, as Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” and all it takes to find them is opening a window, going outside, setting down our distracting devices to look at the real world instead. If we do, I am certain we will fall in love with it.

It is in this context, however, that we must now share a grave concern. The world we so love and are enraptured by is increasingly threatened by us. Normally, I walk my morning circuit in silence, listening to the birds and the breeze, but lately I’ve been listening instead to an audiobook I read years ago, but felt the need to spend time with again, as if in morning prayer. The book is Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which details the remarkable evolution and adaptation of life on Earth, the great extinction events of the past, and the current, accelerating rate of species loss due to human-caused climate change, destruction of habitat, and overconsumption.

Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and, as such, she is a wonderful storyteller. To listen to the book each morning is to accompany her to the far ends of the Earth, scuba diving near gaseous vents in one chapter and hacking through rain forest in the next, all the while bearing witness to what is happening in our natural world. The short version is that we’re destroying it much more quickly than we realize, and what is lost can never be recovered. The flora and fauna of our world have adapted and evolved over geologic time; they are able to change, but not at the rate we have now introduced. We are burning so much carbon in such a short amount of time that many species simply cannot keep up. Trees cannot move forests. Corals cannot change seas. And so on.

I consider The Sixth Extinction to be a kind of required reading, as it really does help us to understand our place and the harm we’re doing to it. Yet it also puts us in touch with scientists, researchers, and storytellers who love the natural world and want to protect and preserve as much of it as we can. It’s not a particularly religious book, but I listen to its stories in a devotional way. Midway through my walk, I usually stop at the harbor’s edge to catch my breath. Sometimes a pod of dolphins is there. More often than not, an assortment of herons. All of it is sacred.

I’m not the first one to feel this way. I know from speaking with most of you that you revere the natural world just as I do. Our church has a long-running commitment to caring for the Earth, and today, on Earth Sunday, we find just one example of that. At our Earth Fair after the service, we’ll share ideas about how to live more lightly and in balance with our natural home. And our morning scripture gets at an even older affirmation in our tradition. The psalmist, writing to and among ancient Hebrew people, sings of God, the Mystery he experiences in the natural world. It is in the heavens. In the skies. Day after day they tell a story. Night after night they reveal things. Without speech, without words, their message reaches to the ends of the Earth.

The psalmist continues by moving from reverence to action. He hopes to practice good religion, live in harmony with the Mystery, and not cause harm. He prays forgiveness for his failings and presumptions and asks for wisdom going forward. He means to honor the Mystery. And so do we, in our own living.

The best way to do this is to connect with our natural home every day. Open a window. Go for a walk. Sink our hands into the garden soil. Watch the sun go down. And as we learn to love and respect this place more deeply, and all the beings with whom we share it, let us do everything we can to care for it. If the peregrine falcon is any example, and it is a rare example, then one day we may be surprised what comes of our work.

May it be so.