Mother Nature: Benign or a Cruel Stepmother?

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: Man's conflict and coping with natural disasters - Brief Article

Suffering the ravages and rampages of El Nino and La Nina, we pause and wonder whether Mother Nature is our friend or our enemy. The havoc caused by hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, floods, volcanic eruptions, and disease argue strongly that our chief occupation is to fight nature in order to survive.

Hurricane Mitch nearly decimated Honduras as homes and livelihoods were washed away. The president of that nation declared that it would take another 50 years to recover. The economy is in such shambles that a kind of Marshall Plan is being considered to help the country get back on its feet. Almost equally devastating to Nicaragua and Guatemala, Mitch caused more than 9,000 deaths in those three countries. Nature also dealt a severe blow to Texas in the summer of 1998 as first it was racked by drought and then drenched by rains that flooded the state, even washing away some small towns.

Early humans never looked upon nature kindly. They lived in fear and trembling of it and accordingly observed various rituals to placate the pantheon of gods who seemed to control human destiny. In psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's view, this marked the beginning of religion, as humans sought comfort for feelings of helplessness when confronting nature.

In our time, however, we try to work with nature in order to make it serve our purposes. One need only look to Israel, which, with its high-tech farming and irrigation, has become the Biblical land of milk and honey. Yet, this does not always work.

Several decades back, an experiment in cloud-seeding took place in the Black Hills area near Rapid City, S.D. So much rain was produced that sections of Interstate 90 were washed out, as were houses, livestock, farmland, and people. The death toll was in the hundreds, and helicopters were busy for days trying to locate bodies in the muck.

Perhaps it is rationalizing, but a good deal of how we view the work of nature depends on whether we have a short- or long-range mindset. During the 1980s, Yellowstone National Park was struck with lightning, causing fires that couldn't be contained. Thousands of trees were killed and large sections of the park were denuded. People decried the ugliness of the blackened forests and the damage to the land. By and large, though, animals weren't affected. Shortly after, there was the advent of fireweed, one of the first plants to grow after such events, and lodge pole seedlings growing everywhere. The only way they could germinate was in the...