It seems as though everywhere I look, I am surrounded with the view that all things natural are moral, virtuous and pure. This high-profile “green” movement has spread across the globe, in the effort to preserve nature and our environment. I often read in books about objects of nature that are meant to symbolize pure and wholesome features. While everywhere I look I seem to come across some message telling me how I should protect nature, I have come to realize that nature is actually a quite dichotomous element. It is deceiving for nature to always be used as an icon for only the good and fruitful aspects of life, when it can also be the source of great destruction and hardship.
I am writing this post in light of the natural disasters that have been devastating communities across the globe, from the wildfires in Texas, to the flooding in the northeast, to the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. So often, I see the media biased toward the belief that man is destroying nature, e.g. the media coverage of the British Petroleum oil spill, but it ignores the fact that nature often destroys man. My hometown was hit hard by two colliding tropical storms last month and saw great amounts of flooding as a result. The area was declared a federal disaster area. Five people died from their basements collapsing in on them from the weight of the water. Countless houses were wrecked; parts of homes were completely collapsed. After enduring three feet of water, my middle school has to be completely rebuilt, because it is now structurally unsound. Businesses were forced to close, unable to afford reconstruction after the flood damages. All this sadness, all from a flood, all from… too much rain?
Nature has this connotation of being wholesome and beneficial. (Indeed, while I was writing this blog, Microsoft Word listed one of the synonyms of “wholesome” to be “natural.”) But is this connotation really deserved? I am learning more and more from this class to challenge the “givens” in everyday life and analyze them to determine if they really are as simple as they appear to be. The floods that devastated my community have made me see that people have a biased view toward nature. While we should recognize nature for all of its virtuous attributes, we also must not forget the danger and power of nature, an important feature that often gets lost in the midst of all its glorification.
You are right. When I think of nature (especially on a beautiful day like today) I think of green grass, rustling leaves, and gently flowing streams, but the word “nature” encompasses so much more than that. In the northeast we experience a few bad blizzards and thunderstorms every year, but rarely much worse than that. North easterners are probably more biased because we do not live in fear of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, and volcanoes. I guess it is easier for us to forget the devastation that nature is capable of. We like to think of our planet as “mother earth” but she has no sympathy for us really. As you say, we need to both appreciate nature and be wary of it.
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