Don’t call nature “Mother”

 

We’ve been seeing many extreme weather disasters lately in all corners of the Earth. Some of us may even be experiencing them ourselves. The death tolls are high, and climbing.

Floods of biblical proportion, unending droughts that seem to create unending fires, infestations by rats and locusts, and other creepy crawlies…all signs of an angry Mother Nature.

But please, don’t call nature Mother. And don’t call her angry either.

It didn’t give birth to us. It doesn’t think we are more special than any other of her wards. And it thinks nothing of snuffing us homo sapiens (Latin for “wise men”…seriously?) out of existence in the blink of an eye.

We are nothing to nature. Certainly nothing enough for nature to be angry with us.

Well, maybe a teeny-weeny itsy bit of something. Like lint at the bottom of our pockets. Or dandruff on our shoulders.

But yo, nature ain’t your Mama.

It’s rather the state of balance between all the environmental factors – heat, moisture, cosmic radiation and expulsions from the bowels of the earth. It’s that particular point of balance at which animals and plants live, evolve and die.

We’re in this small window where these factors allow us to survive. We’re in the Goldilocks zone – neither too hot nor too cold. Disturb any of the zone’s components and it’ll wreak havoc on our continued survival.

We’re just one of the countless bits of nature, along with viruses, rainforests and cockroaches cohabiting with us now, and those that have gone before – dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and dodo birds.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, we homos have the biggest brain in proportion to our body among all the animals on Earth. With that brain we’ve built a very human-centric existence, often to the detriment of our fellow species, and increasingly, to ourselves too.

The reality is, even if they’re jellyfish, or just a banana, our fellow species share a considerable amount of DNA with us. They’re our cousins and they make the world go round, too. Their existence matters in the balance of nature.

But we haven’t been taking good care of that state of balance. We’ve overburdened, polluted and altered the components of the very land, sea and air we live in, and have pushed that balance to a dangerous new position.

The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the air, the earth wasn’t a very pleasant place to live in. Yet, we continue to add more carbon to the atmosphere. Even if we stop today, it’ll remain up there for decades, soaking up the sun’s radiation and cloaking the earth like a thick blanket.

We’re earth’s apex predators because we eat everything that moves; we’re also its apex destroyers that harm and destroy everything that moves, and many that don’t too.

We’re really not leaving a very hospitable place for those that come after us.

Hospitable for humans, that is!

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will say: “Life on earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot.”

Earth isn’t going away. It’ll keep revolving around the Sun. Snow and rain will fall, plants will grow and die, volcanoes will erupt and the occasional asteroid will hit us. Pandemics, whether on animals or plants, will be commonplace.

There will still be cooler times and hotter times and storms and floods and droughts. However, these will happen with greater frequency and ferocity. Survival for all species, especially us “wise men”, will become more precarious.

Is that a sign of Mother Nature suffering? Or angry at us?

No. They’re just signs of a new state of balance in a nonstop procession of states of balance. Signs of the fact nature doesn’t care about us.

The average temperature going up or down by a few degrees, or even a smidgen of a degree, means a huge amount of energy locked into or released by every single molecule of the ocean, wind, soil and snow.

This energy, when it moves as waves or storms, blizzards or floods, will snuff out many lives. We’re seeing those very things happening out there right now.

It will also dry out many parts of the earth even while it inundates others. These parts will burn with increasing regularity, and only stop when there’s nothing left to burn.

At some point we may have altered the balance of nature so much our own existence becomes untenable. We’d better move to space, the Moon or Mars and away from the uninhabitable earth by then. Cockroaches or viruses or six-headed hominids will dominate life on this planet.

And nature will not care.

So, the reason why we should care about nature is we need to keep the state of balance as close as possible to where it is now for our own good. There’s no future for humanity if we push that balance to a new, unfamiliar point beyond the Goldilocks zone.

Perhaps the Bransons, Bezoses and Musks would’ve hitched a ride to space by then, guaranteeing the continuing human existence in the universe. But here on Earth, the rest of us, or rather our progeny, have no future.

All the predictions of climate science seem to become more dire and desperate. It’s easy to pooh-pooh them, except the data is quite clear and our own daily experiences confirm this.

Of the options we have to deal with the climate crisis – retreat, advance, avoid, accommodate, resist – the smart money seems to be on managed retreat. Some of the environmental damage is so severe the best we can do is to admit defeat and withdraw.

If we live by the coast, prepare for bigger storms and rising sea levels. The desert? Even less rain and hotter temperatures. The mountains? More forest fires and retreating glaciers. Even if the calamities themselves don’t do us in, the cost of just surviving will.

Because we evolved to survive at this point in the balance of nature, shifting that point of balance too far too quickly will bring misery and ultimately destruction to us.

We’ll find out soon enough whether we are homo sapiens or homo idiots. Whether we are head and shoulders above everything else on earth, or just dandruff on the clothing of nature. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.