Posted on October 1, 2009 - by Rasham

MAN vs. NATURE

I love the frozen air on an early morning when the sun stretches its eastern arms and tugs at the surface water on the lake, leaving moisture to linger like a cloud of ghostly gray that levitates between the valley and the infinity of space. The tame potentials of nature during the first hours of a new day are remarkable, inspiring, and quite beautiful to any serendipitous observer. I think of how harmless nature appears from my seat on the bus, though I know nature is anything but fair and kind: such attributes are absent in the business of survival. All at once the world can demolish and destroy your misconceptions of control and superiority, beneath which lies fear, delusion, and ignorance: we tend to see the environment for what it affords us, as though the earth is a surplus store which caters to our material needs.

What a rude awakening to awake to the news of nature’s ‘fury’ as we scramble to make sense of senseless acts of slaughter. In the media aftermath nature is portrayed as a problem because of repeat global episodes of unpredictability occurring in patterns of infrequency. Nature becomes our enemy, our oppressor, an obstacle to overcome, a detriment to our efforts of survival. Man vs. Nature, a concept that implies a duality, a distinct separation stressed between all things ‘man’, and all things ‘nature’.

We challenge nature, use our methods of containment, manipulation, modification, and domination. Every interaction we have with nature is one colored by this impression of it: that we see it as some devilish force pushing opposite our motives that go unquestioned and assured.

And when any such thing happens as a violent rain, a swarm of hungry microbes, an earthquake, a drought, oceanic shock waves, flooding, species endangerment, beached whales, dead dolphins, heat spells, rising water levels, melting ice, or an increase in the intensity of storms and surges we think of it as a natural dilemma, and we hang our heads and clean our messes and continue on as we have in the past. We spray the crops with contaminants, we poison the water with the byproducts of modern invention, we deplete the world of resources for our own stubborn use, we dispose of our garbage in the habitats of world’s creatures, we build fences and bridges and causeways and entire city structures across the landscapes of living nature, we suck and feed and leech the life from our planet like a virus from its host, believing that we must survive in this manner or perish, and shall anything attempt to demonstrate otherwise, should some earthly event consume our achievements and swallow our neighbors we only unite in remorse and fight the force of nature armed with the strength of 2400 years of misguided science and fueled by the false presumption that she threw the first punch.

Man vs. Nature: what a silly idea to think of man as separate from nature, as operating under a different set of principles from the very thing which spawned him! But it has been done, and now it must be undone: we are in desperate need of a revolution of thought, and our perspective of our relationship to our environment must be deconstructed and reconstructed so as to conform to the design of planet earth.

The green revolution is a disgraceful attempt to remedy this fallacy of human consciousness, targeting the sympathetic tendencies of the average person by overwhelming him with images of dying polar pups and apocalyptic repercussions of stringent denial. It has become the marketable face of corporations and policy, the hot new item on the shelf, the ‘must have’ and the ‘can’t do without’. The mission of this so called period of ‘going green’ has not the best interest of nature at heart. Rather the greedy lechery of business CEO’s and their monetary objectives are all that stand to profit. Nature is the exploited means to their end, where emotion is employed to produce empathy and regret; we are told to feel sorry for nature, to wrap our arms around her, to love her and protect her, to cuddle her creations and feel remorse for all we have done by complying with economically devious plans: heal the world by buying this product and that car, engage a quick fix to appease our justified feelings of guilt and daunting selfishness.

But this isn’t a probable solution at all, indeed there is no solution to the problem of nature because the problem isn’t nature, its mankind. And our destructive habits are but a symbol of our lack of reciprocity between man and his home planet. What must change is our way of thought. Man vs. Nature must become Man for Nature, we must revisit our history to understand the origins of our perpetual mistakes, we must identify as creatures of this planet no different than the ones perishing on our behalf, we must remember that nature is exactly that, something bigger, more powerful, and more universally profound than we. It is not to be subjected to our will and superiority but to be respected and trusted to restore its own inherent balance and beauty. We must understand that we can only truly be a positive contributor to earth by refusing to harmfully interfere, and instead vow to perform those acts which are in accordance to the laws of nature apart from our own self righteousness and egoist beliefs. Where before we have treated the symptoms of nature as though it is diseased and thus in need of a prescription remedy we need to understand the entirety of it, and in doing so we begin to see just how damaging our modern existence has become, and just how exactly to rectify our behavior.

Use the energy efficient light bubs, recycle your plastics, till your soil, treat yourself to organics: but know that these efforts are of but minimal impact in the grand scheme of it all. Nature will be fine, she may be changing, but it is mankind who needs to adapt to this change, and not nature which needs to be fixed. You cannot put a Band-Aid on the wounds of the world, though you can refuse to accept the idea that you can. All we have are our tools of submission to the truth of our parasitical collectiveness. Where most see a disaster in the current trends of nature’s explosive occurrences I see a wild animal bucking the pests from her back.

And then of course there is also the idea born from the mistrust of the supremely wealthy and the politically powerful players in the monopolistic structure of our society, where the forces of nature are in fact the forces of man; they have been harnessed, learned in laboratories in the world’s finest universities and government basements, where the most disturbing scientific research is conducted and released upon the most politically insignificant, monetarily poor, essentially helpless and morally dispensable civilizations of the world.

That we have the knowledgeable capacity to mimic and instigate natural disasters is unquestionable. Also unquestionable is the motivating consequence of such an action: to promote mass fear of our environment in an overwhelming consciousness, and subsequently urge the reliance upon those in power for answers and support who then guide the common majority in the engagement of investments in the marketable products of big business in return for security and protection from such events.

What is questionable is the audaciousness of men on earth: could they really be accountable for the deaths of thousands of innocent people and the consequent destruction of entire hometowns?

That question is not for me to answer, only to ask. My angle is not to sell or bargain information but to encourage the individual to conduct his own inquiry into the realities of his reality. In either case, whether nature be truly in and of herself reacting to years of human neglect and abuse, then she shall have her way and win her wars, and all we need do is sit back and watch our creations crumble in awe of the virtues of universal balance, and perhaps in our societies there will be born that personal humility that has been lacking for centuries on the western front. If on the contrary, the dramatic materialization of nature’s vivid episodes are purely a systemic effect of the active weapons of mankind intended to illustrate a false state of dire global circumstances, then so be it as well: in either case, again and again, from here and onward through time, let there be a light-bulb moment in the mind of every man, where he realizes either the poisonous essence of his own insignificance at the mercy of nature’s reprise, or accepts the unsettling potentials of man’s poisonous essence when the rulers of the world wield their wands and create from it the last day of life on earth.