Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 26, 2026
A few summers ago I put my deposit down to do something I’d always said I’d never do – get on a cruise ship. Some beloved relatives were going and had two persuasive arguments: we were going to Southeast Alaska (primarily Glacier Bay) and there would only be about 100 people aboard. The crew included half a dozen naturalists with a program sponsored by National Geographic. Having collected Nat Geo maps throughout my childhood, how could I say no?
A few days into the cruise the captain slowed to idle in a wide cove. The water was pretty still, not much wind that day. A naturalist called out, “Watch for bubbles.” A bunch of us trained our binoculars a hundred yards off and spotted bubbles – a lot of bubbles. “Don’t take your eyes off that,” she said. The bubbles grew denser, more furious; and suddenly surging up from the dark waters came a circle of nine humpback whales with jaws wide open. Water was streaming from their baleens and with a huge splash they fell back underwater.
This was my introduction to “bubble-netting,” possibly the most astonishing feat of natural creatures I’ve ever seen. I soon learned the complexity of this feeding technique, the cooperation among the whales to form a circle, their way of communicating who will do what (blow bubbles, emit an underwater shriek, all to corral fish into their circle). The intelligence of creatures other than human beings had only been a theory to me before. Now I saw it in action for myself. I was enthralled.
Having been steeped in the creation stories of Hebrew scripture all my life, I found myself probing again the meaning of one of the Bible’s most dangerous sentences. Right after the phrase quoted above, the Lord is said to have declared, “let Adam [humanity] have dominion over . . . all the earth.” “Dominion” is the most common English language translation of the Hebrew word yeredu which can mean “rule” or “authority” or even “subjugation.” But the word is more complex than that. It also has a tone of “stewardship” or “serving” the well-being of the earth.
The latter meaning has itself been subjugated in the torrent of human development, much of it blessed by Christian churches. Especially with the term “dominion” the scriptures seem to turn humanity loose to use, adapt, and exploit the riches of nature. Human beings were now distinct from other creatures, and just within the last three centuries the sciences adopted the term “nature” to describe the world outside of “us,” as if “we” are not part of it all. Human consciousness was clearly superior to any other; human ingenuity and capacity for endless innovation in technologies seemed to have no bounds. No way other creatures could possibly keep up with us. They were here to serve us.
As European settlers brought the Bible to America, they were convinced that the riches of the new land were theirs for the taking. America was the Promised Land, provided by God for human benefit. The wealth of resources seemed inexhaustible. Birds and bison were killed by the millions; the entire dense forest cover of Michigan was logged off in little more than a decade; tanneries dumped toxic heavy metals into the streams; as cities grew and began to construct sewer lines, they ran them straight into the rivers; most had no sewage treatment at all – my hometown St. Louis built its first major plant the year I was born.
The role of religion was to offer thanks to God for all these wondrous gifts. Dominion as “stewardship” or some kind of service to a common good was trampled in the rush to develop. Only in the second half of my own lifetime has there been serious questioning and major new action to conserve resources and protect the life of creatures other than us.
Nothing pushes me to hopelessness more than humanity’s rapacious appetite and the resulting carelessness of consequences. But nothing gives me more hope than seeing the astonishing resilience of other creatures. They seem to far exceed humanity in their ability to adapt to new circumstances, to change how they do things, in order to survive and thrive. To notice the source of that hope, I have to look, to listen, to the earth we have been given. Stewardship and service of the common good begins with knowing who and what surrounds us with such a plenitude of beauty and resourcefulness.
That is what I took away most from the Alaska cruise. You just don’t know what you might yet see. Wouldn’t it be something if a reading of Genesis 1 was always accompanied by this simple imperative:
“Watch for bubbles!”
Thomas Frank
The Rev. Dr. Thomas E. (Tom) Frank (Facebook Photo)
Tom Frank, of Asheville, N.C., is University Professor Emeritus at Wake Forest University. This post is republished with the author's permission from his Facebook page.