Growing up, I was blessed to have many encounters with other forms of life. My parents, and their parents, were water people. I knew the ocean and I knew lakes. I also knew the marshes, beaches, and woods along their shores, and the beings who live in and around the water, from jellyfish and horseshoe crabs, to gulls and minnows, to chipmunks and red-breasted robins. I watched tadpoles turn into frogs in the swamp, ducklings paddling behind their parents, and muskrats swimming past with just their noses out of the water. I know I was lucky, because I got to live in places where there was an abundance of wildlife to encounter, but also because I had parents who taught me to pay attention. Even in urban areas, there are encounters to be had if you open to seeing the magic around you.
Biodiversity can mean different things, but when I write about biodiversity I’m referring to the variety of forms of life in an ecosystem. Ecology is generally understood as the study of relationships between beings, and between beings and their environment. An ecosystem, or ecological system, is all the beings, the habitat, and the relationships between them all within a defined area, which might be a single tree or the whole planet. Maybe you’re thinking none of that sounds like magic. Mechanistic science has broken everything in nature down into parts that work together like a machine, and excluded humans from that, but there is one important truth: life on Earth is a whole and you are part of that whole. Recognizing how you are intertwined with the rest of life and the planet itself awakens you to the magic.
Magic arises in the relationships you create between yourself and another being or the land, even if it is momentary. This is particularly true with wildlife. Wildlife are the animals or insects that live outside of human control, obviously excluding humans, but also domestic pets like dogs and cats, even if they are feral, and livestock. The more kinds of wildlife there are in an area, the more biodiverse it is, the more magic you can experience. That’s why I know biodiversity is magic.