Thinking about Apathy in Nature

Today I awoke to find an article in my inbox that begged me to read it. The topic was one that Tina and I have batted around in a past post, Finding Truth in a False Idyll. The author, Alan Lightman, writes in the article entitled, Our Lonely Home in Nature:

After each disaster, we grieve over the human lives lost, the innocent people drowned or crushed without warning as they slept in their beds, worked in their fields or sat at their office desks. We feel angry at the scientists and policy makers who didn’t foresee the impending calamity or, if forewarned, failed to protect us. Beyond the grieving and anger is a more subtle emotion. We feel betrayed. We feel betrayed by nature.

Aren’t we a part of nature, born in nature, sustained by the food brought forth by nature, warmed by the natural sun? Don’t we have a deep spiritual connection with the wind and the water and the land that Emerson and Wordsworth so lovingly described, that Turner and Constable painted in scenes of serenity and grandeur? How could Mother Nature do this to us, her children?

It seems that prior to nature wrecking havoc on our individual lives we take a default stand that nature is a provider of resources, landscapes, wildlife, and substance. We see the avalanche prone mountains, flood stage rivers, tornado conditions, landslide slopes, fire adapted chaparral, and seismically active regions as the exception to the rule that nature loves and nurtures us. This is an understandable condition given our origin. We, like all life on earth, are a product of this planet. If this rock provided conditions that brought us into being how could it also bring about conditions that destroy homes and wreck lives?

We are left to conclude that the same earth that fostered our existence is apathetic about if that existence continues. Nature itself shows no sign of preference between biotic and abiotic. It is in our perceived sense of apathy that we conclude that we have been betrayed by nature as Alan claims in the paragraphs above. If we even limit our scope to within our own solar system we see that even the slightest fluctuations of temperature on earth often bring about human and animal mortality. Heat waves and winter conditions have long been causes of death to all kinds of living entities despite not gathering the attention of other natural occurrences that bring about a loss of life.

Our very existence dictates our vulnerability to natural disasters. Instead of turning to Muir or Emerson to find a worldview that allows us to move beyond this feeling of betrayal maybe we would be better off looking to Everett Ruess to square our love of nature, of landscape and wildlife, of the very habitat that provides for our existence and that this same source can also wipe us from the landscape.

Say that I starved, that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream! 

The very source of his love, nature, was the same force starving, burning and freezing him. Ruess understood that we suffer from existence the same as any other living thing. Nothing can quite put this into quite a cosmic point of view as Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.