Â鶹Éç

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Good morning. Of all the dramatic love stories I’ve watched on TV this year, the most memorable was the bachelor frog star of a nature documentary, Â鶹Éç’s Planet Earth III. Sad Santiago, one of only a handful of remaining Morona-Santiago Harlequin frogs, waits forlornly at a research centre in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Santiago’s indefatigable biologist-turned-wingman heads out night after night to find him a mate, ears expertly tuned to the distinct calls of different species. Finally, his patience is rewarded, and there’s a froggy love-in. Perhaps the species will come back from the brink. This series of Planet Earth was another amazing animal spectacle. But the addition of human stories brought something new. Whether a woman with cancer catching ivory poachers, a tribe protesting the destruction of their forest home, or a biologist looking for a tiny frog, each carried a remarkable common thread. These humans unreservedly loved the animals or places they cared for, and that love was rooted in years of careful learning and attention. In this country many of us can now barely identify the trees in our local park, so it was extraordinary to watch humans speak with such intimate knowledge about creatures they were protecting. So often, that love begins by learning a name. What happens to our ability to love when the world becomes anonymous to us? Writer Robert Macfarlane puts it this way: ‘we do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we cannot name’. In his book Landmarks, Macfarlane describes humans as, at heart, ‘christeners’ of the world around us. This is an ancient idea. In the Genesis creation stories, the first human words are the names of other animals. God brings each creature to Adam so that he can name them; they are not a tangle of unknown lives, but awesome in their complex variety. Of course, the desire to know and name other creatures has not always been loving. In the 17th century, the story of Adam was used as evidence that other creatures just existed for human use, under human control. To this day, the human love of putting things in categories can give us a false sense of power or knowledge. But in the Christian tradition, naming the animals has also reflected a particular human vocation. We are called to pay careful attention to the world, to see creatures as signs of glory, each with their own voice of praise. When we’ve tuned our ears to these distinct voices, we can encounter this diverse, abundant world as an irreplaceable gift, there to be known, there to be nurtured, there to be loved.