Even during the historical times (centuries ago), managing or preserving wildlife seems to have been rare. A quite normal way to utilize wildlife was that people hunted around their village what they could get. Wildlife populations survived because much of the areas between villages were seldom visited for hunting and therefore wildlife in those areas was not hunted much. If humans had a possibility to reach most of the wildlife population, the population was typically utilized too heavily and disappeared (extinction).
The first ‘protection areas’ were either areas reserved for the hunting of rulers, or religious sanctuaries.
Bible seems to include rules that reveal an attempt to preserve the productivity of wildlife thousands of years ago. For example, the rule that you should not kill the parents if you take the young from their nest. Even in these cases, the motivation seems to have been getting more food or other resources. Predators that competed from the same food were driven to extinction, if possible.
If there was love, that love seems to have been targeted towards other humans in the same group or society. Maybe pet animals got also some part of the love. Otherwise, the most common rule was probably to kill and utilize what you could, unless the animals had some sort of sacred status.
From an ecological viewpoint, humans have been consumers (predators) with little care for the wellfare of the utilized species. After human population sizes increased and tools developed, humans have been a destructive species. Maybe this reflected a lack of resources - when you have hungry kids to feed, you try to get the food whatever consequences there are. Also attempts to get wealth and status (greed) probably drove utilized species more rapidly towards extinction.
Agreed. Though I include flora in wildlife as well. I’m wondering then if there was a time before our species had weapons or perhaps by the time the first human showed up in this genus they already were utilizing weapons. I know some Archaic/proto-humans such as the Australopithecina group already had weapons. I believe that the Paranthropus boisei had some tools, but then again chimps are known to use branches as tools. I guess we are also not sure if we for sure descended from Australopithecus. I’ve seen that there are some debates. But I think most likely we did.
In the other forums on other sites I’ll post about Australopithecus and any known ecological niches they fulfilled. I wonder if since they had tools and weapons potentially, if they also had complex emotions like love and showed any religious or ritualistic behaviors kind of like burials with a few species. Like how elephants and whales sometimes seem too. They seem to definitely understand offspring loss and mourn.
When I first saw this thread my mind immediately went to the Willamette Valley in Oregon: botanists assess that it had been oak savanna for eight to ten thousand years before European settlers arrived. Since the area got settled it has steadily changed to a different ecology, even in areas where the land was allowed to just grow as it would. This indicated that oak savanna was not the natural state, and led to the discovery that the fires set by the natives had been larger than anyone who’d heard native lore had believed, that the fires covered not just hundreds of meters but rather fire lines as set by the natives could be up to a kilometer or two long, and as those spread the fires could get up to three or four kilometers across and under outlying conditions ten or twelve kilometers across. What was happening was that every autumn tribes set fires on days with mild but steady winds, to drive wildlife into concentrations where even the youngest hunter could kill an animal, with the result that the native oaks survived in groves where thanks to shade the grass remained green through the summer and where the grass stayed green new oaks could take root and grow while where the grass was dry and burned easily oak seedlings tended to be killed.
There’s a large nature preserve on the western side of the valley where botanists wanted to set such annual fires on a smaller scale to investigate an important question: given a native forest of moderate density, will annual burning lead to oak savanna? Some preliminary burns showed that seedling to saplings of all tree species are extremely vulnerable to grass fires (with small amounts of brush, but where there were concentrations of oak trees seedlings survived better. [I haven’t checked back to see if they got that permission and if so what they’ve learned.]
They’ve drifted that way somewhat since their publication branch joined with Disney.
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An exegetics professor I met once got lots of criticism for saying that there is no biblical concept of the soul. His argument was that the meaning of the term changes sufficiently drastically between Genesis and Revelation that no one definition can fit all the uses in scripture.
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Yes. At the very least, the Creation account is a temple dedication story, and in that category the presence and identity of the “priests”, the representatives of the deity, is critical – and that’s what being in the image of the deity meant in temple terms. Also at the very least it’s what I learned to call a “royal chronicle”, and in that category any representatives of the king are critical elements, and royal representatives could be said to be the image(s) of the king. So in both literary genres of the Creation account humans being in the image, or being the image, of God is absolutely essential, a truth being proclaimed regardless of what a reader may make of the rest of it.
It also meant establishing and keeping order in the world/biosphere. A visiting professor when I was at school in Portland commented on this that God’s mandate to care for the Garden meant “gardening” the whole Earth, i.e. keeping it lush and vibrant and orderly – and keeping it orderly included removing invasive species from where they don’t belong.
Ironically the site those images come from insists that it’s meant to be literal on the basis that a human measured it. Assuming that the 1500 mile figure is the correct one, here’s the deal: Measurements back then could be made using a rope with knots marking each cubit, and such a rope could measure sixty cubits. There’s something like 3,960 cubits to a mile, so we get a side measure on the city of something like six million cubits. Assuming a sixty-cubit measuring rope and an assistant for getting the rope stretched and tallying the count, that’s a hundred thousand measurements for each side, three hundred thousand to measure the whole New Jerusalem. Being generous, one use of the measuring rope could be done in ten seconds (assuming excellent dexterity and superb endurance), so the time to measure the city comes to three million seconds, which turns out as roughly twenty-three years to do the measuring, or allowing for sleep and food and such call it fifty years.
My bet is that any human being spending that long of time on a single task requiring precision and endurance and focus would go mad.
But hey, it’s pretty, no?
[They goofed – it ought to be centered on Jerusalem.]
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My senior year in high school as staff at the district’s Outdoor School I got the job of keeping a fire going constantly (due to my winning a bet once that I could start a fire with one match during a moderate rainstorm at the beach) and was thus officially the “fire keeper”. The opening of the camp week began with the main campfire being lit ‘from the heavens’ via a flaming arrow sent down a fine guy wire to strike the pyramid of wood in the fire pit, and at the end of the campfire festivities it was my job to give a flaming brand to a representative from each cabin and lodge for them to light their own fires. The camp director told a story about how humans got fire from the sky, and enjoyed its use, then eventually learned to carry fire along with them and never let it go out (so of course the kids ended up calling me the “fire god” all week) – and, long after, learned to start their own.
So I wonder how long that was the case, that a tribe had a fire-keeper whose job was to keep the flame going always.
One example of how pre-historic humans may have stewarded the planet is fire management in fire-prone regions. In pre-historic Australia and California, for example, the indigenous people conducted regular burning during the wet season to control the amount of fire so that fires would not get out of hand during the fire season. Fire of course plays an important role in many ecosystems. For example, fire maintains grasslands by preventing woody vegetation from taking over. Grasslands, in turn, provide a habitat for certain types of megafauna. In light of this, humans controlling paleo-fire was probably one way that prehistoric hunter-gatherers practiced ecological management. Ecological management, if you think about it was essentially what God charged Adam with in the Garden of Eden.
Just one big deflection. You reject what hundreds of passages plainly narrate from cover to cover, including Jesus and the Nicene Creed and then try a bait and switch and say you are just rejecting “my interpretation of scripture”. You live in a fantasy land.
Small populations can have huge impacts. A good example is how in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, from foothills in the Coast Range to foothills in the Cascade Range, when European settlers arrived the entire area was oak savanna. It turns out that this was the result of native tribes doing autumn wildlife drives/hunts by means of lighting the dry grass on fire along lines that could be more than a kilometer long. The fire drove the wildlife so even novice hunters could get a kill, and the meat was dried for a supply through the winter. So for possibly up to ten thousand years the ecosystem of an area some twelve thousand square miles was shaped and maintained by human action.
Another example is in Illinois where some tribes dug channels and built berms that served to make the flooding of rivers spread over a wider area than would happen naturally (at least not as often). They recognized that floods increased fertility of the ground as so worked to make that cover more area on average.
And as researchers recognized this, others were finding the same thing in various places all over the globe, humans inadvertently molding ecosystems for their own benefit.
You sure got me there a Vinny. You must have been captain of your debate club. You might have even went to college to hone in those counter argument skills.
I don’t want you think I’m being sarcastic. You blew my mind with the way you just mastered theology and was able to present arguments. They really need to bring you into some podcasts.
When I asked “ in what ways did God create the world and cosmos “ and you reposted with… the Bible says so I almost choked on my veggie dog. So simple but so razor sharp.
Made me almost worry I would look stupid if I questioned you about how god stitched you in your mothers womb and you popped back with “ well the Bible says so “. Done crushed two seeds with one stone.
Then when you brought up not only does the Bible says so, but so does the creeds…. I almost fainted. You just single handily with a few repeated phrases changed my entire worldview and theology. I thought I met some Einsteinian brains in the past but never one with a poet’s silver tongue.
I hope you do mind if I just copy and paste and quote you to every single atheistic and agnostic argument ever!!
There are Hebrew words that can be used for both, but the word in Genesis 1 is not one of those.
Good point there. Images of Ishtar could be a pregnant woman, a young beautiful woman, a warrior, or even all three. It’s also worth noting that both she and other ancient near east goddesses with multiple attributes would have those attributes communicated by what companions were pictured, for example bulls, cats, hawks, lions, snakes, so a god or goddess could be depicted with the same human figure in different carvings but with different animals pointing to the attribute being emphasized (lions and hawks are pretty obvious; not so much bulls since at least modern folks would associate a bull with male fertility, but they appear with Ishtar as tokens of her fertility, presumably because strong males are attracted to fertile females).
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Wildlife for my conservation work are more of a measure of success rather than a goal. Thinking of the environment out on those dunes for me tends to focus on soil bacteria and how to get them thriving in sand (I’ve puzzled some people when I tell them it isn’t necessary to pick up their dogs’ poop out in the forward dunes – mostly the natural bacteria in dog poop that might not be wanted spread around in the wild don’t survive a dune ecology that doesn’t support much except dune grass, but they do die and contribute to the ability of the dunes to hold water [the same is true of human poop; we did an experiment with two dunes along the border where dunes were expanding westward and were pretty amazed – one of these pioneer dunes we left alone, but we used the other as our “outhouse”. Over the period of three years, the first dune grew noticeably, but the “outhouse” dune in comparison exploded in size], and when dunes can hold water longer natural bacteria, fungi, and more get a longer “growing season” each year].
There were tribes in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. who carried fire with them in an interesting tool:
That’s a piece of very hard wood that results from branches growing out from a tree trunk; as the tree grows, the wood of the tree covers the wood of the branch slowly and steadily, and the branch wood surrounded by the tree trunk wood gets very hard and durable. These can be found on river gravel bars fairly easily, and if you hold one with the large end up you’ll see that the large end is hollow. The wood inside will burn, but generally very slowly, so if you have a good-sized one such that a burning coal scooped from a fire can be placed inside to carry it. It will need fed, and the best way I’ve found to keep it going is to add not pieces of wood but charcoal naturally produced by fires. I think the farther I’ve carried an ember this way was maybe two kilometers; I put the “horn” in a bucket with river sand to keep it upright, and carried about two liters worth of old coals from a fire pit – which turned out to be a lot more than was needed to keep my flame, but carrying that extra turned out to be beneficial because once we stopped and decided it was where we would have a fire, half the ‘excess’ coals went into the bottom of a fire pit with a little hollow in the middle to tip the burning coals into from the horn.
At any rate, that method was one that could be used to hike for days, each evening using the ember to start a new fire and each morning a new coal could be put in the “horn”, cold coals from the fire could be scooped up and carried to feed the ember in the “horn”.
Just for interest, with a branch composed mostly of pitch wood, a friend and I once made torches using such “horns”: that hollow part suitable for carrying a burning ember all day serves to nicely contain the bright fire that burning bits of pitch wood makes. Our torches were about as effective as what movies generally have.
My gut feeling about the Garden as related in Genesis is that it was supposed to be a home for a situation where “walled city aspects” weren’t even needed.
I was going to dispute that but then I stopped to think: if it wasn’t for three foolish human decisions with regard to the sandspit that forms our bay, the area where I do conservation work would still be bay and the spit would be a hundred meters farther west as well as fifty meters wider, and instead of large stretches of dunes covered primarily with two imported (and invasive) plant species, it would all be a native forest with varying plant density. So there would be no need for my work if others hadn’t screwed it up.
Though now there’s an added invasive species we have to fight that I can’t discover how it even got here; no one seems to know, which is a bad thing because it keeps popping up in rivers where the only sensible explanation is that people brought it there.
The point he made is one that can’t be avoided no matter how one takes the Creation accounts; whether literal, as ‘royal chronicle’, as ‘temple dedication’, as polemic against the creation mythology of the fertile crescent, as poetic prose full of symbolism, or whatever: all of those tell that humans are in God’s image and this is not extended to any other creatures (indeed given the priestly or the royal meaning of being in someone’s image, it can’t apply to any other creature, just to humans), so Vinnie is right that this is a point – actually a pair of points – that can’t be tossed.
And there is even less possibility of avoiding the message that YHWH-Elohim commanded everything into existence.
And more. That post is worthy of being bookmarked.
For years I struggled with thinking that the last line is redundant! Then I tried to make “heaven” match “invisible” while “earth” was everything “visible”.
Then I started learning ancient Greek and that notion went into the trash heap.
“Heavens and earth” back in the day was a way of saying “everything that is”. “Visible and invisible” is the same. The difference, and the reason for both being in the Creed, is that the one is a Hebrew phrase while the other is a Greek one, not just as language but as concepts – it’s a kind of way of saying “All that exists” but then, just in case someone might not get the point, saying it again.
The difference for this term between Father and Son is the preposition that goes with the label.
So much theology in prepositions!
I’ve occasionally thought of it as initiating an interface: the humans of Genesis 1 had minds that were what so many scientists today think the mind is, just the result of what happens in the brain and nothing more; then God changed things, and the mind was transformed into a combined physical/brain and spiritual/soul (or spirit) endeavor.
Taking the word πρωτότοκος (pro-TOH-toh-kos) in Colossians seriously, that’s almost a necessary conclusion: since Jesus is the “opener of the way” with respect to created existence, then everything that comes into being takes its shape from Him.
The difference would be that prototokosian (to coin a word) image is limited in scope to one small aspect of the “form” of Christ, whereas the “image” as in “image and likeness” is full: the first re-presents Christ in some limited way and to some limited ‘audience’, whereas the latter re-presents Christ to every little bit of Creation.
[random thought: if there is indeed other life out there, maybe our destiny includes reaching the stars so that we can re-present God to that life as well].
You seem to have meant it as young-earth creationist, in which case it was not at all accurate. The essence of the YEC view of scripture is to read it as though it was someone’s great-great-grandfather’s diary written in English describing events he witnessed – and that he was a perfect observer that never got anything ‘wrong’.
Considering it from the perspective that the order of events is lifted out of Egyptian and other fertile crescent mythology and then all the details are changed in a way that says, “Are your gods are belong to YHWH” and the reason for that is that they are all created – and not merely created but created as tools or servants – it takes some real rejection of its literary nature in favor of reading one’s own meaning into it. Both its literary genres and its polemical purpose make a few things very clear: God created all things; He did so by sheer command; and He made humans as His representatives to all the creatures and as their representatives to Him – both of those being integral to what being “in the image of” means.
The first Garden story reinforces that by portraying humans as being formed by close personal attention from God, something no other creature had, and by noting that none of the animals was suitable as a partner for the first Man. Both those, in ancient mythological terms, draw a stark delineation between Man and animals, a line as between viceroy and subjects.
Even the second Garden story draws that line, in the curses, where it is shown that Creation itself has to be adjusted due to actions by those Imagers.
He’s stating what the scriptures clearly teach not just in one place but repeatedly as major themes on through Israel’s history. You can’t dodge God as Creator by some personal statements that make things vague, especially when the main passage in scripture that supports your contention that everything is to one degree formed in God’s (Christ’s) image makes it blatant that all things have been made through Him and that assurance isn’t in the past tense but in the present: all things that exist are being sustained in their existence by Christ, right now as much as when Paul wrote. As one of my theology professors put it, “Creation is always present tense”: He is not just Creator of a machine He set running without needing Him any longer, He is Creator every moment as He sustains all things in existence.
BTW, that has something to tell us about the topic here: since we are God’s representatives to Creation, and since God didn’t just set things running and then step away leaving things to run on their own, it is our task to be busy caring for and ordering all things for their benefit at all times. That doesn’t tell us what our ecological functions have been, but it does give us a starting point by saying what they are supposed to have been and to be!
Actually for much of human history people have engaged in managing and preserving wildlife – they just didn’t view it that way. Royal game preserves go back about as far as people having kings, and those game preserves functioned to keep many species from being wiped out due to indiscriminate hunting by everyone.
Interestingly, that’s a function of the ‘kingship’ involved in being in the image of God!
Game preserves are not very old, although there may have been older religious sanctuaries in Asia.
Tribes may have excluded competing tribes from their hunting areas for a very long time, much before written history. After the wealthy got power and sole ownership to pieces of land, there has been restrictions to hunting (only the owner or his household was allowed to hunt in that area). I would not name these game management or preservation, rather they were monopolization of resources.
Removal of competing predators can be called game management and that has a long history. Introduction of new game species is also an old habit, that was done for example in the Roman empire. Wider game management in the current sense started to become common about 300 years ago, in Britain. That was the time when people established game preserves and large numbers of gamekeepers were hired.
How long the history of game management is depends on the definition. If removal of predators is game management, then the history is very long. If we include only the modern idea of game management, then only a few centuries.
