Part I

Where Are We?

Chapter 5

Mother Nature's Dubious Parenting Skills

We do it with the whole of nature itself.

We often have an uncritical propensity towards thinking of nature as good and harmonious - a fact that in recent years has been exploited to the hilt by advertising, where just about every produce under the Sun from shampoo to sausages makes a claim to contain "natural goodness" or "nature's health-giving ingredients".

It's true that some bits of nature, such as "the countryside", can look very nice from a car window or when you're on holiday in a carefully selected part of it, but take away the painstakingly constructed comfort buffer that we create with our modern technological know-how and you find that nature's altogether a different kettle of fish.

Nature is in many ways a harsh and unforgiving thing, best avoided. After all, on a cold winter's evening the freezing draught that's creeping under the door is simply nature trying to get in to remind you of just how unpleasant things can be in the outside world. For a lot of the time you're probably better off indoors with the door firmly closed, and with a draught excluder in place.

If you're feeling generous it can be argued that there is a degree of harmony in nature and in the cosmos that contains it, but only in that they operate by laws rather than by acts of chaotic and anarchic randomness.

The laws that govern the underlying workings of the universe are very scientific. A typical example would be Newton's third law of motion, which states: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

These are the laws that work away quietly behind nature, keeping things functioning without us noticing them. There are other laws however that govern the workings of nature specifically at the level of living things, of plants and animals. This is the level that we normally think of when we think of the "natural world".

Here are just a few of these laws: 1) If you're weak, you die.

2) If there's a chance that you'll make a nice meal, you die.

3) If you're ill, you die.

4) If you're alive, you die.

Such are the laws of harmonious nature.

Imagine these laws being passed by any government. Civil rights campaigners would be down on them like a ton of bricks, quite rightly.

How come there isn't an organisation dedicated to having these laws of nature changed? All we've got are organisations that are dedicated to keeping nature exactly the way it is.

And these brutal laws were all created by nature, which we misguidedly personify as a beneficent female: Mother Nature.

If I were a woman I'd push to get the "Mother" part dropped from that name. (And for the same reason, if I was a mystically inclined woman I think I'd quietly drop the Goddess part from the popular "Earth Goddess" concept.) Mother Nature seems to be such a bad parent that she should be on trial for the abuse of her children. Have you noticed that she eventually kills every last one of them? Nature is given a female persona because nature is thought of as being nurturing.

There is of course a large amount of nurturing in nature, but it's very tightly targeted by its practitioners, as it generally only occurs between members of the same species, and even then predominantly between blood relatives, so there's actually no way in which nature can be described as nurturing in any form of universal or indiscriminate way.

Whenever there's any nurturing or cooperation evident between members of different species it's almost definitely because there's some form of symbiotic relationship involved. Each party gets something useful out of it, otherwise they wouldn't bother (A typical example of symbiosis is the way that ants actively protect the caterpillars of the common blue butterfly from predators - and are rewarded by nectar secreted by the caterpillars).

In a world full of creatures that only look out for themselves and their blood relatives, it's a strange fact that it can be argued that there's only one species of creature that actually seems to care at all about any other forms of life on the planet whatsoever.

Humans.

You may find this hard to believe, bearing in mind that the received wisdom is that we are some sort of malevolent mutant plague-species that is on the verge of wiping out most of the other life on the planet at any moment.

The tendency that's making us wipe other life out (which we are definitely doing, unfortunately) is a different tendency to the one that makes us care for it. We have the two tendencies, while most creatures only have one of them - the tendency to wipe other life out. We tend to think that we possess more of this particular destructive trait than other creatures simply because of the fact that we put it into action more efficiently.

To get a bit of perspective let's look at the caring capacity of another species of animal: one that we're well positioned to study at close quarters: the domestic cat. You'd never see a cat caring for a bird with a broken wing the way that you'd see a human doing, would you? We all know what a cat would do with a bird with a broken wing. And when it's done it we (or at least the cat apologists amongst us) excuse the cat because such acts are "in its nature".

Imagine what would happen if we used that sort of excuse for all of our own actions. It would mean that murderers could get away with murder, and rapists with rape, simply on the defence that it was "in their nature" (while ironically there'd be a danger that anyone who professed to being an upstanding citizen couldn't get away with such crimes should they ever commit them, because such acts of violence weren't in their nature).

Most creatures have a total lack of concern not only for creatures of different species but even for most members of their own species. You can see this if you watch almost any natural history documentary on television, unless it's been censored to eliminate any unpleasantness.

Take for example a documentary that's set on the African savannah, in which a cheetah is hunting zebra. The cheetah rushes towards a herd of zebra and all of the zebra start galloping around in a state of panic trying to get away from the fleet-footed predator. But once the cheetah's caught an unfortunate zebra what do the other zebra do? They stop running around, and start grazing. They return to the task of eating their meal, the one that was interrupted by the arrival of the cheetah in the first place. They start grazing right there, next to where one of their fellow zebra has been dragged down and is now being torn to pieces by the claws and jaws of a large carnivore. Do they all gang up on the cheetah and drive it away, saving the stricken zebra's life? No. Because if they did so, the cheetah would still be hungry and would soon be back - and this time it could be them. The only thing on the zebra's minds, if anything, is "It wasn't me." Similarly, you may watch enraptured by a nature documentary featuring the progress of a family of baby owls in a nest. The opening shots of the programme may show a group of four very cute, down-covered nestlings. Mysteriously though, part way through the programme a strange thing may have happened. For some reason there are only three nestlings to be seen, rather than the previous four. Where has the fourth one gone? The fourth one, the runt of the litter, has been eaten by its siblings. Eaten! By its brothers and sisters! Can you imagine the outrage if that happened in a human family? It sounds as though I may have something against nature, judging by the tone of this section, but I haven't.

I actually think that nature's rather wonderful.

It's just that I don't think that nature's very nice. Except, as I said, through a car window.

I think that we have a misguided tendency to view nature as good and us as (unnaturally) bad. This, I believe, is a gross misinterpretation and distortion of things, and is probably the result of guilt that we've acquired due to the fact that we now bestride the earth as an all-consuming and all-conquering colossus.

Our success is our burden.

But it's not our fault that we're so successful. It's just "in our nature". It's in our brains. Like the cat with the injured bird, we simply can't help ourselves.

(However, the time has now come where we indeed have to go against our nature and change our ways, before we cause any more damage.) We're successful because we have a problem. This problem is that we just can't stop doing things, no matter how hard we try. For instance, part of me wants to just sit around watching the grass grow, but I can't. I'm compelled to write this book instead! Part of you probably wants to just sit around watching the grass grow too. Then why don't you just do it instead of reading this book? Why is it in our nature to be this way - to be incapable of stopping doing things? The possible reason is explored later, notably in Chapter 17, and Chapter 18: however before we look into that particular issue, let's look a little more closely at our attitudes concerning the small matter of our relationship with the rest of the universe.