Penguins, Etc. July 1, 2015June 30, 2015 WHEW! Same-sex marriage is okay, says this Orthodox rabbi. Whew! Now I just have to find the right goy. OUR SELF-DESTROYING SPECIES Or the right penguin. The Supreme Court found Monday — whether rightly or wrongly from a legal perspectve — that the EPA went too far in a recent attempt to protect the environment. Here’s an entirely different perspective — not a legal one — just by way of context. From Peter Matthiessen’s End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica: The blithe wandering of penguins in the ocean wastes is made possible by the salt gland adaptation shared with the gale birds and also by the uncanny powers of navigation found in migratory birds, sea turtles, and other endowed creatures, from dogs to spiny lobsters. Perhaps it was also an attribute of early man, but man does not recognize such gifts as true intelligence, being insufficiently intelligent himself to imagine intelligences of a nature different than his own. Watching for hours from bow and bridge, I am awed by these creatures and their adaptations and migrations … — by icebergs, whales, the sea and ships, circumpolar currents, geologic time, the origins and evolutionary histories of life-forms, the quirks of birds, birders, and explorers, antifreeze in fish blood, the blue in ice, human folly, the ozone hole, and the earthly balances upset by global warming — in short, the mysteries of the natural world in their endless variations, the myriad petals of creation that open up and fall away in every moment. Therefore I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of bio-diversity in the Earth process, the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which present themselves endlessly to all our senses, to be tasted, experienced, and fiercely defended for our innocent inheritors against the rape and dreadful wasting of this beautiful and fragile biosphere and its resources. In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and industrial erosion and poisoning of our earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped alive from its shell.