Rain Forest

Forests are the lungs of planet earth.

They consume our CO2 and exhale oxygen.

They filter our pollution and purify the air; they re-cycle back to the atmosphere vast amounts of water through transpiration and thus help to regulate the climate patterns for the world.


Deforestation is like planetary lung cancer; it takes our breath away. We simply can’t survive without the forests; they breathe for us. We didn’t plant them but they sustain us. Reckless logging and large-scale burning for agriculture destroys a crucial balance of soil, water and air. And we all pay the price of that wanton short-sightedness.


Israel’s Earth-maker hymn Psalm 104 celebrates the forest as God’s garden –
The trees of the LORD are well-watered,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests;
the stork has its home in the pine trees.
Psalm 104:13-17

A rain-forest eco-system is a complex marvel of mutually-supporting organisms. In fact, tropical rain-forests support the greatest bio-diversity on the planet. (See http://www.tropical-rainforest-animals.com/Tropical-Rain-Forests.html)

Forests provide huge economic resources and medicinal treasures far beyond what we know today. Harvesting these riches without de-forestation, without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, is an almost impossible project. Recreation and tourism leaders remind us to leave only our foot-prints behind, but that seems to be a tough challenge for most people.
Sustainable development is the gold standard of responsible stewardship, but as a human race, our greed and impatience gets the better of us every time. Beneath the forest floor lie huge deposits of minerals, oil and gas, the extraction of which almost always fouls the environment.

And that brings us to the delicate balance that wisdom demands of good stewardship: respect and restraint.

As Israel’s song says,
How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all; The earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104:24

Photo Credit Tiffany Svensson

In his 2009 Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders, anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis tells a fascinating story of the people of the Anaconda who live in the northwest Amazon rainforest in the eastern foothills of the Andes in Colombia. For them the forest is not a material resource to seize and exploit, but a living homeland to treasure and enjoy, to cultivate and preserve. Whether they sing Israel’s song or not, they have a similar conviction that their canopied world is not of their own making, and that it is full of wonderful mystery and has been entrusted to them to cherish and honor.

Pause in wonder . . . at what a marvelous and intricate gift a forest is. Thank God for its glory, color and vibrancy. Ponder what a generous classroom a forest can be for wisdom and humility . . . and pray that we will value and conserve the forests of the earth for generations to come.