"In the early 1990s
the cod fishery along Canada’s Atlantic coast disappeared almost overnight due
to overfishing. The ecosystem was pushed beyond what it could bear, and the
fishery simply and suddenly collapsed. There were no fish left. In 1992 the fishery
was closed for good, and the cod population has never recovered. Neither the
cod nor their prey nor the ocean itself cared a whit about the collapse. But
tens of thousands of people in hundreds of coastal communities suddenly found
themselves unemployed, and a way of life centuries in the making came to an
end.
God said to Noah
and his sons, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast
of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on
the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the
green plants, I give you everything.” (Gen. 9:1-3)
With great power
comes great responsibility. Our reason enables us to approach the boundaries of
its own capacity and gesture beyond it, toward eternity. Here lies the mystery
of our status as priests and kings of creation. Reason, the thing that
separates us from brute beasts, does not liberate us from animality, but it liberates
animality itself, for the actualization of a potential that cannot be
actualized without reason. Cod do not fall into a depression when they run up
against the limits of their codness; they accept it without wonder. And people
who see our own species as the chief obstacle to conservation are only half
right. Man is at once the chief obstacle and the only possible solution."
Will Brown, “A Catechismof Nature: Reason and the Destiny of Animal Life” Covenant 3 Mar 2016
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