Tuesday, December 19, 2006

there is no fury..........

Nature has no fury, and I tire of people suggesting that it does.
I saw a fellow by the name of Perkins in a PBS film on canoing alone in Alaska, and he said, after seeing a peregrine falcon nest out in the middle of the tundra, with two or three small chicks looking up at him, that the idea of a nest, or a home, is such a confident gesture. His point was that nature (or Nature) is indifferent to our lives, and that when some people are confronted with nature, they may focus on a bear or wolf or some limited threat, but that what people really fear is the land, the vastness of our world relative to our own individual size and capacity.

I am so tired of hearing on the news about how Nature's fury wreaked havoc on the Buffalo, New York area recently (the October, 2006 surprise), or when Hurricane Katrina came through the Gulf Coast or with the Tsunami a while back. Nature has no fury.
The systems that impact one another and produce storms of all sorts have no malice for humanity nor other creatures. They just happen.
Sometimes people get caught in circumstances to which they cannot adapt. Sometimes other creatures do, too. That is all.
Humans are getting so spoiled that they don't know how to adapt anymore. They're more than willing to change their environment to suit themselves, to the extent of global weather disruption -- even though that's an unintended consequence of environmental manipulation -- but native ways are getting lost and Americans are increasingly unwilling to adapt themselves to Nature.
An ability to adapt to their surroundings is why our ancestors evolved and survived to this point. An unwillingness to do so may bring our survival to an end, to say nothing of an evolutionary progress.

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About Me

Preacher's (youngest) kid, (late) baby boomer, 2nd marriage, older father, ex-smoker, sensory defensive syndrome, etc.