We have seen the raging power of the waters, and we shudder at our neglect.
As a species, we humans (homo sapiens sapiens; the label gives me pause) have challenged all that threatens our dominion over Earth. It may appear that we have won. Let’s not be deluded. In the Northeast U.S. we have all but obliterated the greater carnivores. Lacking the bioregional balance maintained by wolf, mountain lion, bear, and winged raptor, and thus cohabiting with overpopulation of white-tailed deer and white-footed mouse, we are now prone to a far more insidious disabler and killer, Lyme disease. Are we safe?
No more have we respected the significance and grandeur of the elements. Misuse of fire ends in nuclear devastation. Air we pollute chokes us. Earth, depleted and poisoned, betrays us; as the farmer-poet Wendell Berry says, it “spurns our seed.”
As to the water, our denuding the shores of mangrove stands whipped the South and Southeast Asian tsunami to full fury. The death of the wetlands of the Gulf of Mexico drew Hurricanes Katrina and Rita inland. These were stirred into frenzy by the heat of the Gulf waters, terrifying legacy of global warming, triggered by our solipsistic love affair with the fossil-fuel-propelled automobile. The ecologian Thomas Berry has called us humans autistic and brain-sick. I shan’t argue.
