Changing the Environment

“Human nature can be changed,” asserts Professor Hocking of Harvard, confirming the gospel. Changed lives can also change the environment. “Ye are the salt of the earth. Ye are the light of the world,” said Christ.

A striking example of a changed environment through the life a single individual is portrayed by Edward Bok in his autobiography as he describes the Island of the Nightingales. In the stormy North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands lay a ledge of rocks where many a vessel had been wrecked. Pirates who looted vessels inhabited the island and murdered crews. Finally the Netherlands government determined to rid the island of pirates and assigned Edward Bok’s father, a young Dutch lawyer, to do the job.

It was a grim place, barren of trees, of any living green thing, but the young lawyer cleaned up the island and not only decided to make it his home but determined to make the island beautiful. He led seafaring men to inhabit the island and said to them, “We must have trees.” They were too busy with their fishing and so he was compelled to say, “I’ll have the trees if I must plant them myself.” “Your trees will never live,” said the islanders.

“The north winds and storms will kill them all.” But plant trees he did, a hundred the first year.

The second year he planted more and each year for the fifty years he lived on the island, he planted trees. The birds which were so often storm-swept by the turbulent North Sea rested on this island in the course of their flight and found protection here against the tempest. As the trees grew tall through the years, the island became a bird sanctuary. Then one night a singular thing happened.

A pair of storm-driven nightingales found refuge in the island. In gratitude for their refuge they remained on the island and raised their young nightingales. Within a few years the island became a colony for nightingales. At eventide the women and children would walk out among the trees to listen to the evening notes of the birds of golden song.

Throughout Holland and Europe, the fame of the Island of Nightingales spread. This Bok married and had a family of thirteen children whom he sent out into the world with a message that they must make every barren place beautiful. His grandchildren went to the four corners of the earth and one of them, Edward Bok, built the famous bird sanctuary in Florida. But it all began when one young Dutchman determined to make a barren reef of rocks a refuge of beauty and a cathedral of golden song.