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Good morning. There was more bad news yesterday about the environment. Farmland birds in Europe have fallen by 55% in three decades and this fits in with the wider picture of 10,000 species now being lost every year. Scientists rightly warn of the threat this poses to human survival. Birds and bees are pollinators and they need insects, which are also declining rapidly. But I suspect that the majority of people who care about the natural world also have another reason for doing so. Theologians in the Christian tradition draw a distinction between valuing something because of its usefulness and appreciating it for its own sake, just for itself. Most of us who love the rich variety of the natural world do so I suspect not just because of the need for biodiversity, but for itself; and this is a witness to the grandeur and goodness of creation. A creature does not even need to be particularly cute to be marvelled at. The widely mourned last male Northern Rhino who died this week was not exactly pretty or cosy but its sheer isness, its unique individuality, drew people to it. In Coleridge’s poem “The Ancient Mariner”, a sailor shoots an albatross, thereby cursing the ship and leaving him in despair. Then he looks over the side and sees water-snakes swimming. Some would have found them repellent yet their sheer reality leads him to proclaim O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: In our local church this Palm Sunday the service will be preceded by a procession along the streets led by a donkey with a child on it, symbolising the fact that Christ came into Jerusalem not as a warrior king but as Prince of Peace. The modern liturgy of the Church of England suggests that everything in creation, such as that donkey, offers its own praise to God just by being itself. But G.K.Chesterton in a poem about it tries to get inside its head and speak its mind with the words Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still. Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.