Nature. We Love It — But Does It Give a Darn About Us?

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

In her new book, Writing Wild, Tina Welling quotes the popular mythologist Joseph Campbell: “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

I like Joseph Campbell. But I’m not so sure about nature.

It was nature – Nature – after all, that brought down a mass of mud and rock on the village of Abi Barak in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province earlier this month, More than 2,000 human beings perished in that one act of – Nature.

In 2011, 1,600 people died when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami were unleased in Japan by –  Nature.

I get where Welling is coming from. She’s is a big fan of nature and its ability to inspire creativity and ignite the psyche. She writes of spider webs glittering in a tree and snowflakes landing on a moose’s eyelashes. She reports experiencing helpful writing epiphanies while out on the trail.

I have my own fond memories of nature – of lying on the sandy beaches of Lake Michigan as a child, soothed by the sound of nature’s gentle waves lapping at the shore and the touch of nature’s gentle breeze on my sun-kissed – OK, scorched – skin.

For me as a kid, Lake Michigan – and all of nature – was a benevolent, nurturing presence. Many of the folks I interviewed for my book, Wrestling with God, felt the same way. They talked about a deep kinship with the natural world.

Tori Isner, an Army veteran who traces her roots back to the Cherokee people of southern Appalachia, had this to say:

“It’s a family thing, the spiritual world. It’s a connectedness to everything around you, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun.”

And this from Cerridwen Fallingstar, a Witch and shamanic priestess:

“Outdoors . . . that’s where I feel the connection with whatever you want to call it –  God or Goddess or ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’”

Pediatric pathologist Geoff Machin, on the other hand, was not so sanguine about the nature of nature:

“Many of us cling to a pre-Darwinian, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept of the natural world that says, ‘Isn’t nature beautiful?’ . . .

“I call this concept the romantic model. What the romantic model doesn’t tell you is that . . . that every tree, every animal, every bacterium and every virus on earth is locked in a deadly struggle with every other individual – within the species and across the species . . . Anything that doesn’t compete goes to the wall and dies.”

Geoff’s right. The truth is, Lake Michigan – and all of nature – is not nice. It is fierce. It does what it’s going to do. The Great Lakes can roar up a storm in minutes. Over the years their waves – taller and steeper and more frequent than those out on the ocean – have sent thousands of  shipwrecked vessels and their passengers to watery graves.

And the soft waves lapping on Lake Michigan’s shores? They turn frigid in winter. Ice balls, ice rings and ice pancakes crash about in the surf. And on the shore, spray from the lake builds ice caves twenty and thirty feet high.

“Nature doesn’t care one whit about us,” writes Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe, in the New York Times. “Nature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent. Nature is purposeless.”

Not only that, Lightman asserts, life in general and human life in particular is inconsequential in the cosmic scheme of things. The results of the Kepler spacecraft’s search for signs of potential life in the universe suggest that a mere one millionth of one billionth of one percent of the visible universe exists in living form. We and our plant and animal kin just don’t count for much.

“We may find nature beautiful or terrible,” writes Lightman. “But those feelings are human constructions.”

So – which is it? Is nature a friend as Welling suggests? Cruel as Machin asserts? Or has Lightman got it right – nature is indifferent?

I’m going to go with indifferent.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to wade into Lake Michigan the next time I see it, lie on my back, close my eyes, float in the sun, and let the lake’s soft waves soothe my soul.

My soul — or whatever it is that makes me love that lake.

If this story resonates for you, check out “The Downside of Things Beautiful.”   For other posts about Lake Michigan, go to “Walk Around Lake Michigan? She Did It, Now I Don’t Have To” and “Build a Wind Farm, Wreck Lake Michigan.”

A storm comes ashore at Grand Haven, Michigan, 2009. Waves of 15 to 20 feet were predicted for that day. Video by Kevin Walters