One of my favourite children’s books is Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpens’ Wonderful Earth!
It’s a joyous and beautifully illustrated celebration of the wonder and diversity of creation. And sometimes creation is just gloriously weird; who could forget creatures such as the football fish, the weedy seadragon or the pink fairy armadillo? Wonderful Earth! is in part an imaginative reworking of Psalm 104, which celebrates the greatness of the Creator and His creation. There are wild donkeys quenching their thirst from mountain streams, cedars of Lebanon where the birds nest, hyraxes taking refuge in the crags, lions roaring for their prey and Leviathan frolicking in the vast sea, which teems with creatures beyond number.
As Wonderful Earth! goes on to say, you’d think that with such a wonderful world to live in, we’d take good care of it, wouldn’t you? Sadly, that is not the case, and with every month there seems to be further depressing news of how humans have messed up the world. I referred to this in last month’s column, but there’s a more recent update with one statistic that I just can’t get out of my head: since 1970, the world has seen an average 69% drop in populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. To put it another way, in my lifetime, more than two-thirds of most forms of animal life (excluding humans) have disappeared from the planet.
