Its not nice to fool Mother Nature | Shon O’Connor | November 2010
Mother Nature is normally not very forgiving when we cross her. She may seem to let some of our transgressions slide for a while, but always comes back to punish us with a vengeance. The last century saw some of the worst imaginable pollution to our environment and also some of the worst consequences. For starters, Mother Nature taught us that our failure to deal with sewage will result in cholera. Our polluting rivers and streams will interfere with recreation and drinking water. Dumping toxins and other bio-hazardous material into the ground will result in cancer. And if we continue to develop our land by removing natural estuaries and easements we will flood, to historic proportions, and destroy the natural beauty of our landscape. Through some of these environmental life lessons we have learned to correct our environmentally disruptive ways. Too often, however, we only mitigate the damage we have done to ourselves without fully stepping back to examine the way in which we’ve reshaped our natural environment. Caring for and protecting the earth is too often a secondary or lesser priority.
Like many of our own mothers, Mother Nature can also be very forgiving of our past transgressions when we correct our ways. We have made enormous and remarkable strides in the last 30 years in the United States both by cleaning up and correcting a great deal of the damage we have done. Forests are slowly growing back, rivers and lakes that were too polluted for recreation are now usable again, and the majority of the toxic byproducts of industry are now contained and stored. Unfortunately, we cannot pat ourselves too heavily on the back for cleaning up our act. Metaphorically speaking, we’ve “cleaned house” merely to dump our trash on down the street where we don’t have to look at it. This is because we moved from a self-productive society in the last 50 years to one that relies on cheap imports from third world countries that don’t have environmental regulations or controls. Many of these countries are so desperate to attract any economic growth that they will do anything to manufacture goods even if the cost is incredible damage to their environment.
In the end, Mother Nature may in fact be coming to the end of her tether. Cheating the process comes with consequences and the damage we’ve created are manifesting in the irredeemable revelations from our environment. Hopefully we continue to correct our ways and minimize some of the more alarming environmental doomsday forecasts. The saying live simply so others may simply live resonates with both man and the ecosystem. But Mother Nature, in the end, will not be fooled.
