One of the joys of the house in Florida where Tom and I live for a few weeks in the winter is that it is less than a mile from the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). We were there one afternoon in February and I again admired the boardwalk that had been constructed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the NWR movement. The boardwalk’s planks are engraved with the names, locations, and founding dates of many of the NWR properties in the United States and its territories. The walkway has several lovely places to stop and take in the scenery across the water from Pelican Island itself and to contemplate the amazing vision that started it all in 1903.
Pelican Island was the very first refuge founded in what would become a network of 600-plus refuges. In March of 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919, president 1901-1909) founded Pelican Island by executive order to protect egrets and other birds who were being hunted nearly to extinction because their plumage had become very popular in women’s fashion. It also protected a large pelican rookery already on the island, hence the name Pelican Island.
From this beginning as a single waterfowl sanctuary, the refuge system has grown into a network of over 600 public lands and wetland management districts encompassing over 150,000,000 acres set aside for wildlife conservation. These properties, now managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, are home to at least 700 species of birds, 220 species of mammals, 250 species of reptiles and amphibians and 1000 species of fish. Endangered species are often given priority in deciding what areas to set aside as refuges. Most refuges are open to the public for a variety of recreational uses although some are closed to better protect the wildlife or fragile habitat. Those refuges open to the public host roughly 50 million visitors annually.
The wisdom Teddy Roosevelt showed in starting the refuge system is not his alone. He is part of a vast river of tradition that holds up the wisdom of the natural world, both for its own sake and for ours. For example, from John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club:
- When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
- God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
- During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.
And from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac:
- Acts of creation are ordinarily saved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.
From Rachel Carson’s well-known Silent Spring:
- Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
- We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
To bring these citations up to date, this from 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg:
- I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel everyday. I want you to act. I want you to act like you would in a crisis. I want you to act like your house is on fire, because it is. It is still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision, it will take courage, it will take fierce, fierce determination to act now, to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words, it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible.
Pelican Island wisdom is the wisdom of our UU Seven Principles. It is especially the wisdom of the 7th Principle, respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part. It is respect for all beings, without exception. It is the foresight to preserve and protect for future generations. It is the affirmation that the natural world exists for more than simply human use and gratification. It is the wisdom that says justice and compassion encompass all beings, not just all peoples.
Rev. Julia