Killing God

by David Stalling

For most of my life I've lived and worked in wild country. I've watched dawn break over untouched mountains, followed wolf tracks through fresh snow, spent hundreds of hours watching wild grizzlies bears, listened to rivers that have been singing the same song for thousands of years, and spent enough nights under the stars to know that the natural world is not just scenery. It is alive. It is sacred.

That's why I find one of the great ironies of modern America so difficult to understand.
Millions of people worship a Christian God whose Son, they believe, was born of immaculate conception, died for humanity, and lived in a land nearly 7,000 miles from where I stand. They speak reverently of holy places most of them have never seen.

Yet here, in the places we actually inhabit, we desecrate what is undeniably sacred. We level mountains, poison rivers, fragment forests, exterminate predators, and treat wildlife as obstacles rather than fellow travelers on this planet.

The contradiction is impossible for me to ignore.

The people who lived on this continent for thousands of years understood something we've largely forgotten. Native cultures were not perfect, but many had spiritual traditions rooted in reciprocity with the land. Their ceremonies, stories, and beliefs grew from the forests, rivers, prairies, deserts, and the animals that sustained them. Bears, wolves, buffalo, salmon, eagles . . . they were not merely resources. They were relatives, teachers, ancestors, and fellow beings deserving of respect.

That worldview created restraint.
When you see yourself as part of a living community instead of its ruler, exploitation becomes much harder to justify.

Edward Abbey called himself an "earthiest." Others would call it pantheism. Labels don't matter much to me. What I believe is simple. I believe there is an energy running through everything. Through the mountains and the rivers. Through the wolves and the grizzly bears. Through the trees and the birds. Through you and me.

We emerge from that energy, we borrow it for a brief moment, and eventually we return it to the great cycle of life.

As far as I can tell, nearly every living thing on Earth ultimately draws its energy from the sun. Every leaf, every elk, every trout, every person is living on borrowed sunlight transformed through countless miraculous connections. If I were forced to point to something that most closely resembles God, it would be that life-giving energy pouring down on this planet every day.

The sacred isn't somewhere else. It's here. It's the old-growth forest. It's the alpine meadow.
It's the grizzly digging for roots. It's the wolf teaching her pups to hunt. It's the river carrying snowmelt toward the sea. It is me and you.

Yet our culture has a pathological need to dominate what it cannot control. Few animals illustrate this better than the grizzly bear.

For thousands of years, Native peoples coexisted with grizzlies. They feared them, certainly. But fear was balanced with reverence. In many traditions the bear was regarded as a powerful relative, a teacher, even a spiritual guide. Humility, not conquest, defined the relationship.

Our society chose a different path.

We hunted grizzlies relentlessly, poisoned them, trapped them, and drove them from roughly 98 percent of their historic range in the contiguous United States. We nearly erased them from the landscape.

And even now, after reducing one of North America's greatest wild creatures to a tiny fraction of its former home, many people still insist we should kill more.

I don't claim to know exactly what Jesus believed about l wildlife. But I find it impossible to imagine him gathering his disciples and saying, "Go forth and destroy the wolves. Kill the grizzlies. They are the enemy."

That doesn't sound like compassion. It doesn't sound like humility. It doesn't sound like stewardship.

Yet we often justify our destruction with religious language, convincing ourselves that domination is somehow God's will.

If God truly exists only in heaven, perhaps that logic makes sense.

But if God is the living energy flowing through all creation—through every person, every wolf, every grizzly, every cottonwood, every river—then every act of needless destruction is an act against the sacred itself.

We are killing God,

You are part of that sacred. I am part of that sacred. The grizzly bear is part of that sacred. The wolf is part of that sacred. The forest is part of that sacred. When we destroy them, we diminish ourselves.

We sever the very relationships that make us human. We forget that we belong to the same living system. In the end, we are not killing something separate from us. We are killing pieces of ourselves. 

And eventually, if we continue down this path, we will discover the oldest ecological truth of all: a civilization that destroys the living world is ultimately destroying the only home it has ever had.