Born To Laugh at Tornadoes

"Hah!," you say.  "Gotcha!"   

Last week, I said that man is not separate from nature and that man-made environments were no less "natural" than termite mounds or bee hives or beaver dams.   But last weekend, while discussing the book Braiding Sweetgrass, I said that it gave me pause to reflect on how out of touch I've become with nature, "living as I do in an cybernetic world of music and movies and television and video games and sports."  

Wasn't I contradicting myself, claiming that my cybernetic world was somehow separate from the natural world?

First of all, good catch and thanks for bringing this to my attention, and second of all, fuck you. Mind your own business, and you try blogging something every day for years on end.

But seriously, Saturday night, sitting alone by candlelight in my powerless house and wondering what tree had fallen this time to cut off my electricity, it dawned on me that the problem in our cybernetic world is not that it's separate from nature, but it's out of balance with the rest of nature.  

In the Matrix movie, Mr. Smith famously compared the human race to a virus.  "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment," Mr. Smith notes, "but you humans do not" (Mr. Smith is an AI computer program). 

"You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.  There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

Whatever else we may say about a virus, few say they're not a part of nature.  Human beings are also part of nature even if, like viruses, we aren't always good caretakers of the environment on which we rely for survival.    

Commenting on the catastrophic wildfires still plaguing Australia, Aussie rocker Courtney Barnett recently told Rolling Stone, "our country, white Australia — we stole the land from indigenous people, and then we’ve ruined it over the last 200 years. And the government, our leadership, shows no empathy or care."

Similarly, before Americans feel too superior to Australians, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his book We Were Eight Years in Power called the United States "a plundered land built with plundered lives." And we're also plundering this great continent just like they're doing down under.

Short version: human beings and their built environment are not separate from nature but can, left to their own devices, become out of balance with the rest of nature, and therein lies the problem.