I always knew we were blowing it when it came to the dominion thing.
No, not Dominion Voting Systems machines and the slander and libel perpetrated against them by Fox News and various Trump shills, acolytes, mouthpieces, and the like. I mean, yeah, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that, when it came to claims of Venezuelan-based voting system malfeasance, that there was, to be exact about it, nothing to ‘em. I only wish the settlement payment Fox News had to make to Dominion had exceeded the billion-dollar mark. Seven hundred eighty-seven million dollars is a lot, but there are lottery winners taking home more. A check for a little shy of eight hundred million dollars just isn’t as impressive as it used to be. Give one to Jeff Bezos, and he’ll probably put it up on the refrigerator under the magnet with the contact information for Country and Continent Real Estate (“Selling Major Land Masses, Entire Ecosystems, and Carefully Curated Collections of Countries Large and Small since 1993) and forget about it.
The dominion problem to which I refer above is the notion, common in Christian denominations, that man was given, by God, dominion “over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”. This was right after the “be fruitful and multiply” part, and right before we read that “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good,” after which, he took a day off.
Then mankind took over, on the basis of God’s mandate. But before Adam and Eve even got around to being fruitful and multiplying, they bungled things in the Garden of Eden and got kicked out, with God then cursing the woman with pain in child-bearing and cursing Adam to have to work the ground to grow food, and telling him “you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. The short version: Adam, Eve, meet Pain and Death. Note the black robe, hood, and scythe on the latter. You’ll be seeing him again later. That kicked off a trend in the performance of the duties of dominion that never really improved much, and in many cases has been demonstrably horrible. Which makes me wonder, if aliens ever do show up with plans to colonize the planet, will it be because God has hired new management for the place? And if so, can we really blame him?
One of my favorite (?) examples of human mismanagement of earthly affairs is the Colorado River. The Colorado is nearly 1500 miles long, the fifth-longest river in North America, stretching from La Poudre Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park to Baja, Mexico, where it used to empty into the Sea of Cortez. Note the “used to”—for the last sixty years or so, the river has more or less ended in a trickle where there once was a magnificent river delta. Through conservation efforts, there’s been an effort to “restore” the delta, but there’s no reasonable hope it will ever again approximate what it once was.
What happened to it? A horde of thirsty settlers, ranchers, farmers, industrialists, developers, and more. As the West was settled, more and more water was diverted from the Colorado to irrigation and for other human use. The cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and (most obviously) Phoenix rely heavily upon water from the Colorado River for their sustenance. To a lesser extent but still critical extent, so do the Colorado Front Range metropolitan areas of Denver, Fort Collins, and Colorado Springs. Salt Lake City, too, gets water from the Colorado River Basin. At the same time, Colorado River water is used to irrigate crops across the region, especially in California, where about 90% of winter-produced vegetables in the US are grown using water that largely fell as precipitation hundreds of miles away in the Upper Basin of the Colorado River. The reality is now that in most years, more water is used than actually flows in the river system. This leads not only to a river that never makes it to the sea, but has also dangerously drained the two large reservoirs formed by damming the Colorado so as to manage water use. These two reservoirs, Lake Powell (formed by the Glen Canyon Dam) and Lake Mead (product of the famous Hoover Dam) are now well below half capacity, and in danger of reaching levels so low that the dams, which were also built so as to provide hydroelectric power generation, may soon not be able to produce power at all. The stretch of the Colorado flowing through what many consider the nation’s premier national park, the Grand Canyon, is considered the most endangered river in the United States. Which, given our sorry record of river management, is saying something.1
The example given above is of course one of we Americans making a mess of things in our own country. A reader might be wondering: are things any better abroad? The short answer is “No.” The long answer can be a very lengthy discourse on the myriad examples of poor land and resource management, environmental degradation, the effects of biological magnification of toxins, and of course climate change, followed by prolonged sobbing, or we could go with a huge burst of maniacal laughter, also ending in tears and a sad, quiet, “No. No, they’re not.”
The Amazonian rain forest is rapidly dwindling, being burned, plowed, dug up, and poisoned. The first news flash about the apparent ongoing insect apocalypse came out of Germany. Plastics pollute every ocean, which might not matter as much as we thought, because we’re soon going to be turning large chunks of the ocean floor into a sort of vacuum-mining operation. Amphibians are on the retreat on every continent they call home. Every under-developed nation with high-value metals or similar resources is experiencing a flood of essentially unregulated mining destroying land and people. During the twentieth century, at least 50 different species of North American freshwater fish became extinct2. In the oceans, not only are fish populations struggling in the face of prolonged and massive over-fishing, but we’re losing the great mammals of the sea as well. We’re in a fight with ourselves about the continued survival of elephants, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. We very nearly wiped out the American Bison, and it only hangs on now in small populations here and there. There are three species of right whale, genus Eubalaena. Two of the three, the North Atlantic Right Whale, with a population of about 400 individuals, and the North Pacific Right Whale, with, possibly, a bit more than half that, have population trends suggesting a high likelihood of extinction within a few hundred years—this for whales that evolved somewhere on the order of 35 million years ago, and have life spans of 75-100 years, perhaps longer. More than one-third of all the Sumatran tigers in the world live in zoos; only about 5-600 are surviving in the wild3 . The recent birth of three Sumatran tiger cubs at a Nashville Zoo represents a significant increase in the world population.4 The numbers of migratory birds in North America have dropped by about 40% in the last fifty years. Less than 2% of the once 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie in North America remain intact. Coral reefs (the development of which was first described by a scientist named Darwin—yeah, that Darwin) have decreased in extent by about 50% since the mid-twentieth century5.
[Ahem.] So, let’s just check the program again, regarding how well we’re doing in our dominion over things. Fish: Ugh. Birds: Hmmm…. Livestock (a term that as used in Genesis chapter 1 is thought to refer to animals in general, not just domesticated animals): Not great. Creeping things (all the smaller animals, from snakes and lizards to insects, arachnids, and the like): Well, there’s that insect apocalypse thing, and…let’s move on.
If we were given a report of “unsatisfactory” regarding our dominion over the planet’s other creatures and ecological systems, it would be hard to argue that we deserve anything better. We are damaging and destroying ecosystems large and small in any number of ways: burning, dredging, draining, damming, polluting, logging, mowing, paving, mining, and more. We kill millions of migratory birds every year by erecting reflective-glass-covered skyscrapers for them to crash into during their nocturnal migrational flights. Indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum insecticides in residential yards kills not just mosquitos, ticks, and fleas, but also bees, flies, butterflies, beetles, spiders, worms, lacewings, lady bugs and lightning bugs, and more.
I’m tempted to say it’s kinda like turning a horde of second-graders loose in a Walmart, telling them that they’re in charge of everything, and then closing the doors and walking away. Forever. But that’s not really fair: the second-graders might well, on a relative scale, do a better job. Though I suppose they’ll grow up and continue the human reign of terror in dominion over the rest of this planet’s denizens.
When I was young, and we lived down the street from the Flintstones and Rubbles, my mother taught me that when you’re a guest somewhere, be gracious. Don’t be greedy, don’t interfere, don’t unnecessarily impinge or burden. Put things back where you found them. Treat even the most cloying kitsch on display as if it’s the host’s dearest treasure. Clean up after yourself, don’t leave messes behind, and be grateful that the host has willingly shared their space, their things, their lives, with you. Such is a great gift.
This leads me to think maybe ‘dominion’ is not the best theme by which to manage our own existence in God’s great creation. Maybe we should remind ourselves that we’re guests. To steal and slightly paraphrase a former president, we didn’t make this. We’ve just made a mess of it.
If we followed Mom’s rules for guest behavior, we’d be cleaning up our messes and not wantonly wasting resources. We would seek to limit our burden upon the Earth—and upon its other residents, and our own future generations.
When I camp and hike, I adhere pretty strenuously to the Leave No Trace ethos. I enjoy, admire, even sometimes touch and feel. But I strive to leave things as I found them to the extent possible, and, also to the extent I can, to limit contact, and wear and tear, on the most precious and sensitive of other creatures and creation.
We’re guests. Here but for a moment, and then to dust and ever-fainter memories. We often speak admiringly of how someone’s ‘leaving their mark’, too often failing to consider that leaving a mark is sometimes the beginning of erosion, or maybe an act of vandalism. If we must leave a mark, let it be a mark of kindness on the heart or soul of another. Let’s not be greedy, or unnecessarily burdensome. Let’s respect the lives of other creatures, and the treasure that is the only world we know.
For an excellent rundown on the Colorado River and how its water is managed/utilized, see this report in the Colorado Sun: Mullane, Shannon. 4o million people share the shrinking Colorado River. Here’s how that water gets divvied up. Everything you wanted to know about the Colorado River but were afraid to ask. Accessed October 31, 2023. https://coloradosun.com/2023/08/14/colorado-river-explained/
Burkhead, NM. Extinction Rates in North American Freshwater Fishes, 1900–2010, BioScience, 2012; 62(9):798-808. [https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.9.5]
Luskin, M. S.; Albert, W. R. & Tobler, M. W. (2017). Sumatran tiger survival threatened by deforestation despite increasing densities in parks, Nature Communications; 8(1): 1783.
Trio of endangered Sumatran tiger cubs born at Nashville Zoo. Associated Press video, October 27, 2023. [https://apnews.com/video/animals-nashville-tigers-national-national-5b992b757bbb4b52bbcce02b5f6445a4] Accessed November 1, 2023.
Eddy, TD, et al. Global decline in capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services, OneEarth, 2021; (4(9):1278-1285. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.08.016]
Yes! I agree with Dr. Hall's comments. The truth is often painful. This is an essay that needs to be in large font, bold letters on the front page of every newspaper, periodical, online forum and social media platform! (I'm repeatedly chagrined by finding ecological news, climate change conferences, and all types of dire warnings to humankind about the consequences of our distorted dominion relegated to the back page, if printed/posted at all. Shame on us for our "head in the sand" approach to this travesty!) Thank you, Perry, for joining in with the voices that care about our planet, its creatures and its future!
Perry,
Your profound essay brought me to tears
I learned a great deal I did not know
It was painful but I need to know
I know you are writing
not only from knowledge but from love
Thank you for how deeply you love
all the creatures and the rivers
all the endangered beings and beauties
we have neglected harmed and failed
I don't want dominion
yet I aspire to be more than a guest
I want to be a protector
I want to feed and tend
God's lambs
and all His creation
I am so glad I found your writing
You inspire me
to do my best to do that