A Prayer for Our Fellow Creatures

At present, I am reading a book called Dominion, by a former speech writer for President George W. Bush, in which the author, Matthew Scully, makes the case that our society needs to reform its treatment of animals. In it, I found this amazing prayer: 

"Holy God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail."  

-- Saint Basil, bishop of Caesarea (375 CE)

A Quote from "The Greening of Faith"

"We have lost our sense of being rooted in a deeper and more encompassing natural order of reality...  Religious consciousness and perspective... may be indispensable in ameliorating our present situation by helping us to integrate ourselves in a wider (and surely wiser) natural reality... a love of the earth that human beings once felt strongly, but that has been thinned and demeaned."