Several winters ago I spent the night in a tiny koa-wood cabin in the cloud forests of Mauna Loa, as a thunderstorm swept over the 13,600 foot volcano. The windowpanes pulsed electric blue through the night. The next morning I stood outside and gazed past a break in the sunlit canopy to see the volcano's summit shining with new snow.

I had been on the island of Hawai'i to study the 'Alala, a large, black, nimble raven that maneuvers through the island's tangled canopy with the agility of a parrot. Its name, from the Hawaiian, means to wail like a child, which the birds sometimes do. Once numbering in the thousands on the Big Island, by 1996 only fourteen remained in the wild. By 2000 it was believed that a single aged pair of wild birds survived, with another two dozen mostly old or non-breeding birds in captivity. So the situation remains to this day, and most everyone agrees that the 'Alala will soon join the hundreds of Hawaiian species to go extinct before it.

Earth is in the midst of a spasm of extinction that the planet has not experienced in more than twenty-five million years. But unlike the mass extinctions of the geological past, this one is all ours -- we are causing it, and only we can stop it. Yet this quiet progress of death is invariably lost behind the daily chatter, the growing drumbeats of war, the latest political crisis or economic trend. Have we merely lost our perspective? Have we lost our way?

In the misty quiet of the highland forests -- a place the early Hawaiians referred to as place of the gods -- I often found myself becoming prayerful for the 'Alala. But having been raised a Christian, I could hardly find the words. I searched my religious upbringing for appropriate prayers and came up empty. Are animals invisible to my tradition, I wondered? Instead, I gathered inspiration from the place where I stood and uttered an ancient Hawaiian prayer.

Over the years of study, my quest for the 'Alala has been accompanied by a growing hunger for a language of spirit to enlarge the predominantly scientific context in which I have come to know the raven. Along the way I have made the pleasant discovery that prayers and thoughts for animals do exist in the Christian tradition; unfortunately, such expressions have been systematically excluded from liturgies -- the very foundation of many people's language of faith, including my own. When a man dies, we come together, we weep, we bow our heads and pray. When a creature passes to extinction, we silently remove their name from the Federal list of endangered species.

There is a profound paradox here. As Holmes Rolston III argued, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, the major federal law for protecting species, rested upon the implicit recognition that animals often transcend material human interests. The law, as originally conceived, did not say to protect species because they were economically valuable or useful; it instructed us to protect them even though this may cause economic harm useful or not. For reasons greater than economics or biology, humans are to protect even the tiniest bugs, fish and salamanders, snakes and frogs.

In 1987, when Congress passed amendments to weaken the ESA, a "God Committee," nicknamed for its power to determine the fate of species, was established to factor in the economic costs of preserving a particular species. When a later Congress threatened to kill the ESA, Evangelical Christians became an instrumental voice in saving it. To kill off a species, they argued, was to diminish the presence of God. Why have so many biologists for years kept vigil over the fading 'Alala and thousands of other waning species around the earth? Surely they are compelled by a voice above reason.

Several months ago, there I was again, climbing through the rocky Mauna Loa forests, wondering about the raven. Drawn by a conversation beyond human utterance, one older than words, which speaks to our belonging to Earth and to each other in a more-than-human world. And I worried that unless that voice speaks more often within the spiritual and religious realms of our lives, countless more species will be lost, and it is not enough merely to grieve.

Pausing beneath an ohia tree garlanded with red blossoms, I pulled from my backpack the book Animal Rites by Andrew Linzey, a theologian at Oxford University. As the morning mist ascended, I read aloud part of a prayer from St. Basil the Great:

Enlarge within us the sense of Fellowship with all living things,
Our brothers the animals to whom you
Gave the earth as their home in
Common with us.

May we realize that they live not for
Us alone but for themselves and for
You, and that they love the
Sweetness of life.

- - Mark Jerome Walters is a veterinarian, a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School, a clinical assistant professor at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and the author of two books. He is currently writing a book about the 'Alala.