~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In 1981, long before Internet, even long before computers for us commoners, I wrote a light essay about the unpredictability of nature. I mentioned that someplace in the world it was lightning and thundering, starting fires or floods. Someplace else the earth was quaking, the sky rife with tornado or cyclone. The forces of nature come, they destroy, they leave. They’re kind of like humans, except that we come, we destroy, we keep at it, remaining to the death of the area, we move on, continuing a pattern.
Most earth inhabitants live in urban areas, nowhere near the soil, the land, the very nest that sustains us. Most of us are neither farmer nor herdsman so we don’t rely on the weather, pay it much heed, let it discommode us. In the most part, we do not dread the weather. In the subtropics and below we might get tired of hurricane season, in the way northern parts may get sick of snow and worry about our roofs holding up. But in the ordinary day to day of us we are happy when the sun shines and disgruntled when the wind ruins our hairdo or rain disrupts our picnic plans.
Until natural disaster strikes, we treat nature as if she doesn’t exist. We live safely in our sturdy, warm quarters immune to rain, snow, hot or cold, until nature assumes some terrible wrathful pose – fire, flood, earthquake – and we are once again primeval, forced to flee before something that is powerful, unpredictable and much bigger than we are.
The phenomenon of rampaging nature is frightening. It puts us back in our place of being subject to something mightier than we are. It is at the least uncomfortable, at its worst like the terrible swift lightning, full of death. With impunity nature strikes her erratic blows. We in turn rage and yell and blaspheme but she never heeds. We can’t sue. We can’t wage war. And the next day when the sun shines, we are briefly thankful and humbled and quickly start fixing things up the way they were and return to ignoring the bitch who unnerved us for a brief time and for no reason.
Instances in history in which nature wreaked annihilation remain – Pompei, Atlantis – if Atlantis is fact and not myth – Mynos, Babylon. What stayed the progress of the Incas? Of the lost colony of Roanoke, Virginia? Was it nature?
Forecasts tell us that California will be split from the continent by earthquakes, that the earth is warming, melting the polar ice caps, soon to drown us all. But of course, being human, we have an opposing side that says we’re coming upon an ice age.
What do we do? Besides being outclassed by nature herself, we outwit ourselves, weighing this and that, arguing what is and what isn’t, vaguely “knowing” that we’re fine, it’s not so bad, whatever it is, we shall overcome and in the meantime hope that we’re not in the way when nature throws a fit. Or worse, remains in an ongoing pique and gets hotter and hotter, rains all day for days on end or never rains at all, uses her lightning to torch our beloved oil reserves; in other words, makes a mockery of human endeavor, human hope, human life.
We give nature human sobriquets such as “Mother”; human characteristics such as mean, revengeful, vindictive. Then we lay blame, sometimes on a god, if that’s one’s belief; usually on other humans – the wealthy, the oil companies, corporations in general, the government, the military, the poor. It’s never our fault, but it has to be somebody’s, so we argue, disagree, go to war, do nothing about the climate at all.
If we do nothing, will it just go away? It’s so pretty out there in the pasture, our slim stream such a beauty sparkling there in the sun, our herd so fat and at ease. Nothing’s wrong, merely another storm moving in from the west. Let’s hope it’s not as big as the last one.
If we do something, will it help? And what something is it that we can do? Oh, yes, they say quit using fossil fuels. Well, we can see how that’s working. We’ve built cultures in which to drive a 4,000-pound vehicle to a store a mile away for a one-pound loaf of bread (whose wheat has no nutrients, so the loaves must be fortified). We’d walk, but there are no sidewalks. The traffic’s too fast on that road to walk on the shoulder. It’s raining again anyway. Here, get in the car; we’ll stop for an ice cream cone on the way home.
