Nature, doing what nature does—Get even

My original intention was to write something commemorating Earth Day. I seem to have wound up killing several birds with one stone, namely Evangelicals’ role in politics, the fact that we keep putting God in the center of issues in a way that takes us off the hook, and our lack of respect for the environment, which may be coming back to haunt us.

Mother Nature doesn't always need a hammer

Evangelicals, who often appear to be very at home living in a Biblical world, are convinced God spends all His time punishing us for our transgressions—legalized abortion and homosexuality, and possibly being anti-Trumpers.

On the other hand, they believe that being pro-life and taking a stand against homosexuality will incur the favor of a more benevolent God.  Also, supporting Trump can’t hurt.

Ministers like Joel Osteen have a very simple message. “Do right and God will do right by you. In Joel’s message, the reward he’s talking about isn’t heaven so much as monetary success.

This all goes back to Biblical days, when God was flooding the earth, creating famines and releasing swarms of locusts or armies of frogs.

All this reward and punishment talk, I suppose, is a means of preparing us for the apocalyptical war that will be waged between good and evil. Evangelicals tell us—and I must say sometimes they seem a little, what’s the word, anxious, maybe too excited at the prospect—but they say this war is right around the corner, and promises to be, at long last, the war to finally end all wars. Armies for this war are being built and plans are being drawn in churches.

Despite what the Bible says, I find it hard to picture God leading an army. I also can’t picture Him putting up with the devil for more than a few hours, before shouting, “Hit the road, Satan.”

God had to have foreseen man behaving badly when He gave us free will. It’s hard to picture him being caught off-guard. I think the concept of sin is more man’s creation.

I don’t see God paying attention to every minute deed of man, when He pretty much lets the rest of the universe operate on automatic.

Is He really choosing sides in sporting events—not big events like the Super Bowl, which I can see Him being interested in, but rather every single contest, at every single level, on every single playground, every single minute of every single day? Like all those crap games going on in all those back alleys. The people participating in those events certainly think He’s engaged.

Is He really involved in choosing the exact time of death for not just you and me, but every single man, woman and child on Earth? If so, was there something that only God was aware of, for not letting Bing Crosby make it back to the clubhouse? Did God have to take him out on the putting green? Seems very un-Godlike.

I kind of like the idea of free will, where not only are we free to make our own choices, but no one, and in this case, no one means Someone, is looking over our shoulders, jotting down notes and second-guessing us. That said, I believe there is a price to pay for our actions. It’s just not coming from Heaven Headquarters. Maybe we’ll pay that price down the road to Someone, but what happens in this world, I think, gets punished in this world.

So who does the punishing?

We are all familiar with the story of the dinosaur. They were coasting along, nibbling at leafs atop fifty-foot trees, butting heads for fun, getting the shit scared out of them every time a thunderclap applauded, and leaving really big footprints everywhere they went for about 260 million years.

God didn’t seem to be interfering much in their lives. Maybe, that was because they lacked thumbs and brains, and were incapable of sinning. Like I said, they were usually just doing what dinosaurs did, which was nothing, only on a big scale. Maybe, 

God just had better things to do.

Then that asteroid hit. When I say hit, I don’t mean it broke into millions of pieces and conked each individual dinosaur on the head, killing it.

Apparently, the asteroid hit and kicked up a dust-storm or dust-cloud or whatever you want to call it; and any dinosaur that had a brain bigger than a walnut, and it appears that none did, but had they, they would have known right then and there that the jig was up.

At this point, nature took over, but to be perfectly honest, that asteroid was already part of nature on a much larger scale. It wasn’t long before less sunlight was reaching the earth, temperatures started dropping, and icecaps began forming and moving south for the summer, freezing dinosaurs in their tracks. Had this not happened, mankind wouldn’t have suspected in a million years that dinosaurs even ever existed. In fact, for about three millions years—as long as we’ve been around, we didn’t suspect dinosaurs did exist until the last few hundred when those frozen bones started popping up.

As climate began getting colder, vegetation died off. Not only could dinosaurs not find leaves atop fifty-foot trees, they couldn’t even see the trees, for the forest no longer existed. Without thumbs or brains, dinosaurs couldn’t build shelters, which they also couldn’t do before the asteroid hit, but which they didn’t need then.

It seems that nature plays a bigger role controlling the lives of earth’s inhabitant than any spiritual CEO. Maybe the Indians had it right. Earth, wind and fire.

The inventions of the Industrial Age—automobiles and airplanes, plus a whole lot of gas-guzzling machines have allowed mankind to throw his weight around and more or less thumb his nose at nature. Man wasn’t going to allow Mother Nature to call the shots like she did with the dinosaurs or pre-wheel generations of humans.

We’d drive through, fly over and sail around any roadblocks she put up. For the last century or so, man did whatever the hell he wanted to do, and there didn’t appear to be much nature could do about it. Our rivers began burning and our air was becoming unbreathable. Water that wasn’t burning was becoming undrinkable, but man kept shuffling along, living what had come to be known as the good life.

By April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, the tide was beginning to turn. Nature was starting to get even. Just as previous generations were introduced to petroleum, the current generation learned about something called the ozone layer. Apparently, it was disappearing before most of us even knew it existed.

The next fifty years saw climate change become a major issue—a major debatable issue. Even as glaciers melted and oceans rose, people who weren’t scientists debated whether climate change was real. To their credit, dinosaurs never wasted a minute debating whether an asteroid was what hit earth. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it was something.

Fifty years of useless debate has left us with no ice cap. If future generations are told the story of the Titanic, someone will have to explain to them what an iceberg is. 

Coastal communities will go the way of Atlantis, which is unfortunate because while Atlantis was a folk legend, cities like Norfolk, Virginia are real and are really sinking.

Yes, Mother Nature is getting her mojo back. She didn’t send a swarm of locust to get our attention, and she certainly isn’t consciously punishing us like Evangelicals believe God is always doing. Nature is simply adapting to the changes man has made by making her own changes. It certainly does look like punishment, though. When nature adapts, the message for mankind is, “Hold onto your hats. It’s gonna get rough.”

Her adaptations are changing weather patterns, producing bigger and more dangerous hurricanes and tornadoes, snow where there was never snow before, and droughts where there used to be rain-forests.

In spite of what was happening right before their eyes, climate change deniers were doing what habitual deniers do, continuing to deny. Like any frustrated mother dealing with children who won’t listen, Mother Nature just got tired of arguing.  

This brings us to the corona-virus, which seems to have done what fifty years of Earth Day marches could never do—shut down businesses in a way that’s gotten our attention. It’s not just corona-virus. Viruses, in general, seem to be getting tougher, more persistent. Viruses are shouting at us the way even loud tornadoes weren’t able to do.

What’s the take-away as businessmen like to say? The demand for electricity and other utilities have hit rock bottom. Transportation has come to a virtual standstill. OPEC can’t give oil away. Air and water are getting cleaner. Not because man got smarter, but because nature has enlisted the aid of something else besides weather in its fight against industrialization. Tiny but headstrong viruses.