Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sally Dyck is bishop of the Minnesota Conference of The United Methodist Church. She received theological training from Boston University School of Theology (M. Div., 1978), University of Geneva/World Council of Churches (graduate certificate, 1978), and United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio (D. Min., Black Church Studies, 1989). Her upbringing in a Mennonite home instilled in her the understanding that personal piety is inextricably woven to peace and justice advocacy. She has been married to the Rev. Kenneth Ehrman, a United Methodist elder, since 1976. The two have traveled the globe together by plane, bicycle, and on foot.

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A Hopeful Earth

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

In 1968, when I was a boy, Apollo 8 sent back the first pictures of our planet, that blue-white marble floating in space. Well, those pictures are as out of date as my high school yearbook photo. The planet doesn't look like that or behave like that anymore—there's more blue and less white, more cyclones swirling in the tropics.... It's the image of the beautiful planet in space that we usually carry with us in our mind's eye. And yet that planet is rapidly browning through desertification. — Bill McKibben

The Laws of Life: Tropical Rainforests

The exact amount of life, even the number of types of living things (species) on this planet is unknown. Estimates range from tens of millions to more than one hundred million species. The tropical rainforests of South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa cover only 2 percent of the earth's surface but are estimated to contain more than half of the world's species. The rainforest supports a vast quantity and diversity of life because the conditions and the forest itself maximize the principle requirements necessary for life. For this reason, the rainforest is a prime example of the natural rules that govern the systems of life in overdrive.

All of life requires energy—energy that ultimately comes from the sun. Rainforests are located on or near the equator, and so they receive a constant twelve-hour supply of sunlight year-round. Trees and other photosynthetic life use the sun's energy to make the chemical food energy for all living things farther up the food chain. When we eat a cow we are indirectly eating the sunlight energy that the grasses the cow ate converted from sunlight energy into chemical food energy.

Life also requires water. Rainforests receive between 80 and 430 inches of rainfall per year. At least half of this rainfall is produced by the rainforest trees. A canopy tree in a tropical rainforest will produce 200 gallons of water annually, and an acre of rainforest transpires 20,000 gallons of water into the atmosphere each year. Rainforests make rain!

The sun and warm temperatures combine with the nearly daily heavy rainfall creating constantly high humidity in rainforests. Insects, decomposer fungi, and bacteria thrive in the warm, dark, and moist forest floor and quickly break down any fallen leaves or dead plants and animals back into their nutrient building blocks. These recycled nutrients are taken up quickly and stored in rainforest plant life, as opposed to being stored in soil; thus rainforest soil is nutrient poor.

The diversity of life is the final ingredient or natural law for sustaining a large quantity of life. Species in an ecosystem, and in the world, depend on one another for food, nutrient recycling, shelter, pollination, seed dispersal, protection, and more. They are interdependent, and therefore their lives are woven together into a fabric of sorts. Rainforests are masters of variety and specialized, interdependent relationships.

The enormous canopy trees in rainforests have wide bases (called buttresses) to support their weight, and their tops practically interlock to form a canopy or living roof meters above the forest floor. The plants that manage to survive along the forest floor have huge leaves to soak up the dappled sunlight peeking through holes in the canopy. Vines climb the trees to reach the sun, and once they are at the top they form a walkway-like system for creatures in the canopy. Plants working to access sunlight create multiple layers within the forest. These layers create a variety of places to live and a variety of plant species to eat; thus they support a variety of animal life. With dense vegetation and little wind, plants must rely on insects, bats, and birds to pollinate their flowers and move their seeds.

The combination of the layered forest, the need for pollination, and requirements for decomposition creates a variety of roles for organisms to play. These roles are called "niches." This is not too different from how the word niche is used outside of science (for example, "I hope as he travels the world and works in a few jobs that he'll find his niche"). A niche includes where an organism lives, what it eats, what eats it, and how it contributes to the ecosystem. The more niches there are to fill, the more variety in species an ecosystem can sustain.

For example, Brazil nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa), large canopy trees found in the Amazon rainforest, depend on the agouti, a small rodent that is the only animal with teeth strong enough to open the grapefruit-sized seedpods. The agouti scatters the seeds across the forest by burying caches far away from the parent tree. For pollination, Brazil nut trees depend on Euglossine orchid bees, the only insects to pollinate the Brazilian nut tree. For this reason, there has been little success growing Brazil nut trees in plantations; they appear to grow only in primary rainforests.

Breaking the Laws of Life

The rainforest's abundance of niches, sunlight, and water, combined with conditions for fast nutrient recycling, explains why rain forests contain half or more of the life on this planet. Unfortunately, when we break these laws by changing these conditions, the abundance of life is destroyed, and in the case of tropical rainforests, humans are unable to restore or rebuild them.

The equivalent of two football fields of rainforest is destroyed every second. That is 120 football fields slashed and burned per minute! At least 40 percent of the tropical rainforests originally on earth have been destroyed, and without significant measures to halt clear-cutting, all forests could be gone by 2050. As we destroy rainforests, we lose access to lifesaving medicines (120 prescription drugs used today are derived from rainforest plants, two-thirds of all plant cancer-fighting compounds come from the rainforest, and the periwinkle of Madagascar increased child leukemia survival rates from 20 to 80 percent), we destroy species that have not even been discovered, we change the formation of clouds and thus the weather system, and we cause countless other unintended consequences. But the main point is that when we destroy rainforests, we break the fundamental laws of life.

Clearing rainforests to plant soybeans, graze cattle, or log trees destroys the strongest, richest fabric of life on this planet and in its place leaves a hot (remember twelve hours of sun 365 days a year), nutrient-poor (remember that rainforest soil is nutrient poor since the nutrients are taken back into trees so quickly), and dry (remember that the rainforest created half or more of the rain that fell) plot of land. To clear a rainforest is to create a desert.

The desert is the opposite of the rainforest. It is still an ecosystem that has a variety of life, but unlike the rainforest that maximizes the requirements of life, the desert has the challenge of making the best of the minimally available principal requirements of life.

The First Temptation: Salvation Not by Science and Technology Alone

The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert, a place with the challenge of life. As Sarah says, if you were going to be stranded somewhere, you'd prefer the rainforest to the desert...