by Dennis Green
Nature has often been romanticized, often worshipped, even personified, but I don’t think we really comprehend it at all. It wasn’t glorified in New England by Emerson and Thoreau until it had been largely “tamed,” when the average citizen of that part of the country could live indoors and not worry that the next storm would tear the roof off.
In more savage times, Nature was feared and worshipped, even placated by various kinds of sacrifice, including human beings. In ancient Egypt, the gods were so feared that the incense used by the priests in worship rituals was a valuable trade commodity.
During the modern age, nature has been regarded, by the French Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, for example, as “the benign indifference of the universe,” which takes no particular interest in the fate or future of mankind. By others, such as 20th Century Evangelical Christian preachers Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts, America is God’s Chosen Land, unless it must be smited mightily by such disasters as Katrina or 9/11, for its sins.
Likewise, the Very Right Reverend Roberts commented recently that Haiti was struck by an earthquake because of its “pact with the Devil” in the 19th Century to get out from under French colonial rule. By that I assume he meant its embrace of Voodoo, (“Voudou”), a combination of French Catholicism and West African beliefs. I suspect he’s never heard of plate tectonics.
In 1989, I flew in a private helicopter over the collapsed Cypress Freeway, brought down by the Las Prietas earthquake, and saw these lumps between the sandwiched concrete slabs, with smoke coming from some of the big lumps. They were cars! With people trapped inside them. And I don’t believe for a moment that all the 50 or so people who died on the Cypress that day had been singled out by God for their sins.
No, we inhabit a planet that is still in the very unstable stages of geologic development, one besieged by seismic and volcanic activity, by uplift and erosion, by storms and climate change. And as much as we may disturb its ecology — with strip mining, clear-cut logging, damning its rivers, wasting its prairies and polluting its atmosphere — it is ultimately beyond our control.
People who have sailed its seas in small boats know this all too well, that nature is utterly implacable, that during a storm at sea, there is no escape, nowhere to go. “You can go below, and many have died that way,” sailors say. Scientists who study its magnetic poles, and who know that they may shift, and what the consequences will be if they do, also know how vulnerable we are, no matter how much we think we are masters of our fate!
So if we don’t temper our hubris somewhat, Nature will do it for us. If not with an earthquake, or a tsunami or a hurricane, with our own mortality. For many of us, long before the Boneyard, come the aches and pains, the failures of certain vital organs, the bypass and the transplants and the procedures. Or just the feeling of running down.
No amount of incense, so far as I can tell, and I’ve burned my share, can fend off our “fate.” Nevertheless, we persist in doing what we can, what we think will make a difference. Stem cell research? Cloning? The miracles of modern medical technology? The glory of God’s grace? Whatever.
For whatever we do, Nature will have her way with us, and even the weatherman doesn’t have a clue what’s coming next. So hang on.
©2010 Dennis Green
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