The Ark of the Habitat: Taking the Rainbow Seriously

by Kelpie Wilson

Wild Earth
Spring 1999

The biodiversity protection movement is guiding the most important social and cultural transformation of our time, only not everyone realizes it yet. Growing up in the sixties I saw the ideals of Peace and Justice mobilize a whole generation. Stopping the war on the earth will require us to enlist the most powerful ideals we have and think big, really big – even beyond concepts like Peace and Justice. Most of us in the environmental movement tend to approach our work as piecemeal issues: we talk of saving forests, cleaning up rivers or stopping mines, when what we need to be talking about is Saving Creation.

Our most powerful ideals are still religious ones. Tom Hayden in his book, The Lost Gospel of the Planet Earth, shows that at the root of all religions is a reverence for the Earth and all Creation. The great modern religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, have wandered far in search of transcendence, yet the root of earth love still anchors these traditions to the ground, if only by a thread. Because new human consciousness sprouts best from the old, we must nurture these roots. Modern Christianity achieved its flowering through a slow process over centuries of incorporation of the older pagan traditions and modification of these traditions to suit a Christian theological framework.

Human culture is a continuous story that has been told and retold for 30,000 years or more. If we look at the images of the late Stone Age, we can recognize stories that are still comprehensible today in the hunting magic of the painted bison, the stone Lady of Laussel with her horn of plenty, and in the images of spirit birds that prefigure angels. Stories build on stories, just as the cave paintings often show animals painted over and merging with other, earlier paintings. Culture is not just the story itself: it is the act of telling and retelling, painting and repainting the picture.

Our job now is to find the pentimento, the traces of earlier stories that shine through in our culture and give us what we most need today. We can build on these traces and paint a new, meaningful layer that resonates with the majority in our culture. One such story that we might retell is the story of Noah’s Ark, known to us from Genesis in the Old Testament.

The Genesis Noah story instructs people to care for Creation. Because God was angry and disgusted with the corruption of the people He had created, He wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. He commanded Noah, the one good man, to build an ark and stock it with two of every kind of creature. God makes it very clear to Noah what he must do. He repeatedly issues the commandment to include every living thing “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” not just the cattle and sheep, and animals that are perceived as useful. Since he is a good man, Noah obeys and loads them all, two by two.

Later, when the land has dried out and all the creatures are sent forth to be fruitful and multiply, God establishes the dominion relationship between man and the rest of Creation. God decrees: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.” Then God sets a rainbow in the sky as the token of the covenant that He makes directly with “every living creature of all flesh”: that never again will He destroy them. Thus God gives Noah’s descendants the right to consume the flesh of creatures but not to destroy them. This is a revelation to those of us who know the Christian concept of dominion from the likes of James Watt. Stewardship is an awesome responsibility, not a “takings permit.”

The call to stewardship expressed in the Ark story is a powerful message, and it is one we must use in our mission of saving creation, if for no other reason than that the vast majority of Americans consider themselves Christians. But pandering to a particular belief system is not the objective. E.O. Wilson surmises that no matter how far science may extend its explanatory powers in “consilient” directions, humans will always require a “sacred narrative” to provide both meaning and hope. It’s in our nature.

As a sacred narrative, the story of the Ark has something for everyone. Cross-culturally, the story of a great deluge is ubiquitous. Joseph Campbell, in his work on the science of myth, includes the flood as one of a few primal themes (e.g., the theft of fire, virgin birth, the land of the dead, and the resurrected hero) that appear over and over in mythology worldwide. The Noah story itself is based on an ancient Sumerian flood myth at least five thousand years old. Good King Ziusudra is the Sumerian Noah, and the Goddess Ishtar plays the role of rainbow covenant maker. In India there is a Noah figure called Manu, and in China he is called the Great King Yu. The Greeks had Deucalion, son of Prometheus, who survived the deluge to repopulate the earth with his wife Pyrrha. The Irish tell myths of founders who were the direct descendants of survivors of a flood.

One survey of flood myths found 500 myths, 62 of which were shown to be entirely independent of the Middle Eastern accounts (Frederick A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered). The myths are found in Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, Australia and the Pacific. For instance, in the mythology of Vietnam, a brother and sister are said to have survived a great flood stowed in a wooden chest that also contained two of every kind of animal.

In the Andean version it is a celestial llama who tells a simple llama herder of the coming flood. The two of them together gather up all the animals and the man’s family to find refuge on a high mountaintop. There are similar Aztec and Mayan stories. Other American Indian myths include a Haida tale in which an old woman causes the seas to rise when the children of the tribe mock her disrespectfully. And from the Papago people: Coyote warns that a flood will come and destroy the world. The hero Montezuma builds a boat for himself while Coyote makes his own dugout canoe by gnawing out a log. Flood myths exist in the traditions of the Inuit, the Huron, the Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Chickasaw and the Sioux.

No survey of ark stories would be complete without mention of the etymological and iconographical congruities between arks as both ships and containers and as goddess symbols that represent fecundity and abundance—like the holy grail and the great bear.

With the universality and richness of the flood myth revealed, we are ready to begin layering on the new story, starting with the scientific knowledge of historical floods. The end of the most recent ice age began about 12,000 years ago, coinciding with the beginnings of the neolithic revolution, a period of culture formation that led to agriculture, weapons of war, and eventually writing. Over a period of thousands of years, melting ice caused the seas to rise by 200 feet around the world. Many sites of human habitation must have been inundated. Aboriginal Australians have myths of former hunting grounds that form accurate mental maps of 10,000-year-old coastlines that have since been covered by rising waters.

Recently geologists have shown that around 5600 BC, a large freshwater lake that became the Black Sea was inundated by an onslaught of salt water from the Mediterranean when the straits of the Bosporus opened suddenly over a period of days (Doug McInnis, "The Real Genesis Flood," Earth 8:98). The people who lived along the shores of the lake would have fled to high ground and then into Europe and Mesopotamia, carrying a flood story with them.

Perhaps more interesting than the empirical evidence for the deluge are the psychological implications of the myth. The flood story is an indication of the structure of the human mind from the very beginnings of culture formation. I believe it says two things about humans as a species. First, the flood always happens because humans have behaved badly: they are not living in harmony with the universal laws as their Creator intended, so the flood is sent as punishment and as a cleansing. This suggests that we know, or are capable of knowing how to live in right relationship with the Earth, but we need to be vigilant and make sure we keep the laws.

Second, and more important for our mission of saving creation, is the response of the people to the flood: they always take care to save all the seeds of life. They don’t use the opportunity to do away with inconvenient species such as spiders or snakes or tigers; they understand that everything is God’s creation, and they know it’s not for them to decide what’s good and what’s not. They also are not concerned with keeping the ephemeral works of man; they don’t embark with swords or gold jewelry, or even tools like hammers and plows. That stuff isn’t important.

In modern times, the deluge is us?from our overwhelming and expanding numbers to our endless accumulation of stuff. It is after all, the works of man?the housing developments and shanty towns, the farms and factories, the cars and roads, the shopping malls and landfills full of Wal-Mart trash?that are wiping out the seeds of life. We desperately need a story to help us see through this flood of detritus to what is truly important.

I think we can see through to what matters if we are placed in the right circumstances. For instance, I live in the woods and every year, I face the fact that a forest fire could destroy my house. There is no fire protection service here, and it’s a risk that I take in order to have the privilege of living in the forest. When summer starts getting hot and dry, and the needle on the Forest Service fire danger sign points to “EXTREME,” I start thinking about my contingency plan. If I had to leave quickly, I would be sure to take my cat and my album of family photographs. Those things are irreplaceable. My contingency plan is like a mental map. I know where I keep my photo albums and where to find the cat (usually not far from the food bowl).

For secular environmentalists, maps are our myths. Maps show us where our biological treasures are and help us determine the dimensions of the core reserves we need to set aside to protect wilderness and wildlife. But we also need myths to map our meanings, because maps are not yet a universal language. Most people still respond better to colorful stories than to technical diagrams. Accordingly, as we create our map-based rewilding visions, we ought to consider recalibrating our maps in mythical cubits. Since we now know that landscape-sized arks of habitat, not zoo-sized arks are what’s needed to harbor genetically diverse, healthy populations of all animals and plants, we might redefine the new cubit as the watershed. The watershed and sub-watershed are already in use as a basic “conservation unit.” The watershed, as a container of life, has ark-like spatial characteristics, making it a fractional rather than a linear unit.

Myths can help us meet the challenge of helping people to see the circumstances we face. We are in the midst of a deluge—a great washing away of the planet’s biological richness with industrial humanity playing the part of rainmaker—and few people even know it. Perhaps the story of Noah’s Ark has enough meaning to Americans to be able to cut through the siren song of consumer culture and alert us to the fact that we are drowning and pulling down much of the world’s biodiversity as we sink. We need to point to the rainbow and let it remind us that there is still hope for saving Creation. On the authority of both God and the laws of the universe, we know that it is possible to live in harmony with the Earth, but only if we get to work and build that Ark.