Eco Catholic

The Gospel account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes clearly shows Jesus’s awareness of the central place of food in our lives. Listening to him preach created an appetite in his followers, which he satisfied almost as an afterthought. Jesus knew that food is one of our central concerns.

In this country over the last several generations we have seen an amazing transformation in the way food is produced and consumed. I can remember as a kid all the mothers on my block in the summertime would buy lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and cabbage not at a supermarket but from an elderly Italian who parked his pickup truck at the top of the street on Monday afternoons. There were no supermarkets. My mom’s best friend lived with her husband on a small family farm outside of town. We would often spend weekends with these farmers and get up early on Saturday mornings to help feed their chickens and hogs or to ride on the tractor when it was cutting hay in the spring.

February’s full moon which comes tonight is known as the Hunger Moon. The native peoples called it so. That’s because back in the day when most of us were rural dwellers, by February, autumn’s well-stocked larder had been largely depleted. People had only turnips and shrivelled, anemic potatoes in their root cellars, and maybe a squirrel or rabbit for supper and little else. Spring’s promise of new life and a bountiful garden and good hunting had not yet arrived.

As it mounts the icy sky, though, it sets stark patterns of beauty. Nature writer Hal Borland describes it: “Footsteps in the snow become laced traceries of purple shadows. Starless ponds of night sky lay in a meadow’s hollow. Roads become black velvet ribbons with winking frost sequins. Pines become whispering flocks of huge, dark birds. On hilltops and in pastures cedars are black candle flames. Warm-windowed houses and frost-roofed barns are all twins, each with its counterpart beside it on the snow.”

Evidence of climate change isn’t always as stark or far away as melting polar ice caps or rising sea temperatures. In fact, says conservation biologist Richard Primack, unmistakable signs of climate change can be seen every day, in every backyard, in towns across America. Primack, a Boston University professor of biology, is working on an award-winning research project to demonstrate the local effects of global climate change. He’s using Concord, Mass., as a living laboratory, and he has teamed with Henry David Thoreau, America’s great 19th-century nature poet and philosopher, who lived in Concord.

We’ve all seen this – even if you live in a city. A flock of starlings consisting of maybe a few hundred or more individual birds turns on a dime all at once. It’s startling. It’s wonderful. How do they do that?

A murmuration – that’s the term for a large flock of starlings – rolls “like a drunken fingerprint across the sky,” as the poet Richard Wilbur wrote, “smudging the dusk horizon with the quickness of a pulsating jellyfish.”

The ancient Romans believed that the gods hinted at their intentions in the way birds flew. Scientists of the last century groped for such mysterious concepts as “natural telepathy” or a “group soul.”

I had taken a bucket of mulch from my compost pile and was putting it around plants when I found a small newborn creature in it. I held it in my hand for a long time and studied it with awe. About the size of a pecan, it lay in the fetal position, eyes still unopened, its smooth skin translucent. The long tail was the only clue to what it was. It was so absolutely vulnerable and precious, I almost wanted to cry. I felt a deep sense of love, protection, and oneness with this sacred innocent being.