Chapel

Seeking Hope

by ERIC BAACK, Professor of Biology OCTOBER 7, 2020

“It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth, as burglars will sometimes wantonly wreck a house. It is a strange and terrible moment in history. We who ourselves depend on it utterly are laying waste to the biosphere . . . rushing to degrade the atmosphere above and the ocean below and the soil at the center and everything it supports . . . Already more than half the rainforests are gone, pesticide use has decimated wild flowers and the insect populations of farmland and rivers, the beds of the seas are deeply degraded and most of the fish stocks are at danger levels, the acidity of the ocean is steadily rising, coral reefs are under multiple assault, 40 billion tons of climate-changing carbon are loading the atmosphere every year and currently one-fifth , and rising, of all vertebrates . . . are threatened with extinction. Loss is everywhere, and the defining characteristic of the natural world in the twenty-first century is no longer beauty, nor riches, nor abundance, nor, if you like, life force, but has become vulnerability.” Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy

Wednesday chapel featured a series of talks by current and former students of Biology 151, Principles of Biology: Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity. The talks focused on “questions of ultimate concern” at the intersection of science, spirituality, and ethics. The entire series is reprinted here.

It is a dark vision, one that I know well as a scientist. Earlier this year, I spoke with Pastor Annie (Edison-Albright), suggesting that Luther College needed to find a way to explain how its religious roots could be of value to those who might not identify with any religious tradition. So when she offered an opportunity to explore the intersections of humanism, ethics, spirituality, and biology in a series of chapel talks, I agreed. Over the years, I’ve had amazing conversations with students at these boundaries. This openness to explore religious questions—questions of ultimate concern— deepens our life of learning here. Today, I’ll talk about one set of fears and hopes—ones that are connected to my teaching. But we face others of equal importance. We faculty who teach biology often wonder how to be both truthful and hopeful. As a child, I often wasn’t able to. My head was filled with images from TV public service announcements: cities that appeared to be polluted concrete wastelands and forests desolate after fire. Sometimes, my teachers did not help. I remember watching a film in third grade, showing the animals around the world going

Editor’s Note: In Quarter 1 this fall, extinct due to human action. I was filled with sadness and anger over what we were doing. I entered high school in the first year of Reagan’s presidency, amidst talk of winning a nuclear war. His administration removed solar hot water panels from the White House roof and pushed the National Forests of the Northwest to “get out the cut.” I remember dreaming in despair of a world freed from humans, healing itself. As I grew older, I began to learn of human actions that were helping the non-human world. Oregon’s republican governor during my childhood, Tom McCall, cleaned up the Willamette River flowing through Portland, threatening to shut down the paper mills upstream unless they cut their waste. My father built solar hot water panels for our house. In college, we collected seeds from a prairie that had never been plowed and helped with prairie burns. After graduation, I taught high school biology. One of my students asked me why biology mattered when she wouldn’t live to be 24. Her brother had been shot and died, and she thought she too would die within a few years. I lacked an adequate answer: all that I was teaching was of no value if she had no hope. I had to teach reasons to hope. As educators, we owe our students and our society the truth. But we must make sure that we don’t lose sight of what is good and the possibilities of what might Eric Baack

be as we lay out the challenges: we, and our students, need hope if we are to serve the common good. So, what do we do in introductory biology? We tell our students that we humans have choices to make, that some of those choices could lead to a world with less climate change and fewer extinctions. That even if the pollution of rivers from Iowa’s farms has gotten worse over the last 15 years, other states have found ways to do better. We tell them that even as global CO2 levels rise, Luther College has cut its carbon footprint by more than half over the past 17 years. We tell students of the animals extinct in Iowa by 1900: otters, beavers, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes—and how many have returned. But some sources of hope I’ve kept to myself. I doubt that most would find my vision comforting. Should I ask my students to imagine a world where

wild places have dwindled, where the species that are left are those that can co-exist with humans: the grasses that sprout in sidewalk cracks; rats, starlings, and carp? Even in this impoverished future, so long as plants still capture the sun and the earth’s waters have oxygen, I imagine life restoring wonders to the world. As terrible and heartless as evolution is, with time it will once more fill the world with “endless forms most beautiful.” Even now we see new species arising in the strange environments we have made: there are mosquitoes that live their entire lives in London’s underground, isolated from their relatives above. Imagine the exuberant novelty that will emerge in the next million years if we allow it. I choose to hope our young species will grow wise, that we will allow life to restore the world, for ourselves and all else that lives. The Sending: Go forth with the courage to look upon the work to be done, with the resolution to begin, with the knowledge that you will not work alone, and with the perspective to see where life thrives as well as where it suffers.