Nature and Such...

The following is a post I had to do for my program but I thought I would through it out there for thoughts and other discussion =) apologies for the length, but since I don't post often, perhaps you will forgive me.

In 1982, I was twelve years old. I had been admitted to hospital in
order to have my tonsils taken out. I had chronic tonsillitis most of my
adolescent life and they finally decided to remove the offending body
part. I was checked into hospital on February 12th, and would be
released on February 16th. I didn’t know just how much of a life
changing experience this would prove to be. It was, as it turned out, to
be incredibly life changing on many levels. The first level was not
immediately apparent, as I was in too much pain post-surgery to realize
what kind of benefit modern science and medicine had given me, it would
take time for my throat to heal and then time again for me to catch my
next winter cold, in which I was far less miserable than usual to
realize the benefit. However, my life changed in another way when I was
in that hospital. I was sharing a semi-private room with a small girl
who was extremely sick, with what I do not recall, but it was very
serious. Her parents were there almost all the time. Her father worked
on one of the oilrigs off the coast of Newfoundland and was supposed to
have traveled out to the rig on the same day I was admitted, but his
daughter had been so ill that he stayed in town in order to be with her.
That weekend, through to Monday the 15th, there were terrible storms,
both on land and offshore. And in that terrible storm, the oilrig,
called the Ocean Ranger, sank, killing all 84 crew members. It was one
of the worst oil related disasters in Canada’s history. It touched the
lives of just about everyone in Newfoundland in some way or another. It
also really provided me a certain amount of clarity on humanity’s
relationship with nature. It was my first real experience with tragedy,
and I watched it unfold on the face of a man who was supposed to be out
on the rig when it sank, who was alive only because his little girl was
sick. For the first time, I began to think about how nature reacts
against man-made creations. I also began to think about why the
exploratory drilling platform was out in the middle of the North
Atlantic Ocean in the first place.
The first two sections of Donald Worster’s book speak directly to those
thoughts I had so many years ago. The way he presents the formation and
history of ecology, and the view of nature often found in western
science and culture helps explain a lot. The view of nature as something
to be exploited for the benefit of humankind, and the view of nature as
something to be bent and controlled by human beings stand out in
particular. Why was this rig out in the middle of the ocean? To explore
for possible oil fields, so that the resource could be tapped, refined,
and then marketed to the consumer. So that the non-renewable resource
could be exploited in order to maintain the modern lifestyle we have all
become so accustomed to. The Ocean Ranger was one of those technical
marvels, and those involved believed it to be indestructible, just the
same way the Titanic was believed to be. Engineers had weighed out every
contingency plan that they could think of, and had designed a structure
that was supposed to withstand whatever nature could through at it.
Nature, however, upped the ante. Hurricane force winds attacked the rig
and waves as high as a five story building crashed against it. The winds
were too high to allow for helicopter rescue, and those who made it to
the lifeboats did not stand a chance against the brutal conditions.
As human beings, we have placed ourselves in a privileged position over
the rest of the planet. We see the resources as being there to support
and provide for us, and do not necessarily recognize our role in the
ecological system. We have developed technologies to protect us from the
natural elements, even as we were developing technologies to further
exploit the resources to be found within those elements. We fall to
science to answer our questions and solve our problems. Yet when science
believes it has all the angles covered, nature can still strike with
something unexpected. One does not have to look very far to find other
examples. Hurricane Katrina and the city of New Orleans, the tsunami
that hit south-east Asia so ferociously, and the earthquake in Kashmir
in 2005 all are examples of nature trumping technology. And yet, we as
people still persist in the notion that we can overcome the natural
world with the technological one. We believe that the planet is there
for us to exploit, rather than seeing ourselves as an integral part of a
larger system. Even the early theories of ecology that recognized nature
as a complex system that was indeed greater than the sum of its parts,
still placed an emphasis on what utility could be gained from the
resources. Gilbert White recognized the inherent systems but believed
that humans held a privileged position above the systems of nature.
Little thought was given to the ethics of such a position of privilege
as it was deemed, whether through a scientific lens, a naturalist lens,
or a theological lens, that the planet was there to support mankind.
Worster contends that the rise of Christian pastoralism, which
idealized relationships between people rather than relationships between
people and their environment, may have played a large role in the
development of an adversarial attitude towards nature. (p. 26) Instead
of harmonious existence, humanity in the Western Christian context, saw
nature as a hostile force. The continued idea that human beings were the
only living creatures on the planet with an internal soul, as pronounced
by Pope Pius IX, meant that there was no need to feel guilty for the
death or destruction of anything not human. People were not a part of
nature, but instead above it. This anthropocentric view created, in
Worster’s view, at best a calculated indifference, and at worst an
outright antagonism towards nature. (p. 29) By not allowing any but
humans to have the divine spark of a soul, Christianity helped “reduce
man’s perspective of nature to a mechanical contrivance.” (p. 29) This
helped the realm of scientific thought believe that the world, and
nature was founded on a rational set of laws and order, and that
somehow, humankind’s innovations were all a part of the accepted divine
order. It helped create an imperial view of nature that, even when
science removed the supernatural from the picture, persisted in the
rational minds of Western reason. (p. 29)
We seek to dominate the elements, to control them and use them to our
own ends. Yet nature has a way of reminding us that we are not actually
the dominating force we believe ourselves to be. We are still entirely
reliant on the resources of the planet, which we are consuming at
alarming rates, in order to survive, and more so, in order to live the
life we feel we have the right to be accustomed to. I am a child of
modern convenience. I like my toys and gadgets just as much as the next
person, but I am often given pause for thought as I see how far removed
from the natural elements of the planet we have become. We are
proceeding to make ourselves alien to the very planet that sustains us,
and are constantly looking for ways to undo the damage we have done, and
at the same time, looking for more resources to exploit. There is a
strange disconnect between ourselves and the systems of nature that
sustain us and there is some danger in that disconnect. My first real
awakening to that disconnect lies now at the bottom of the North
Atlantic Ocean, in the form a giant concrete platform that serves as
both testament and tombstone.

***information on the Ocean Ranger can be fund at
http://www.releases.gov.nl.ca/releases/2002/mines&en/0215n02.htm
and
http://atlantic-web1.ns.ec.gc.ca/climatecentre/default.asp?lang=En&n=83846147-1#metmoment

The book cited is Nature's Economy, A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd Ediditon.
Donald Worster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1994].

We return to the scene one month later, where our subject is once again sitting in his apartment in Kingston, and once again burying his face in his books. After three wonderful weeks in Ottawa, the return to the city of his schooling is somewhat stressful, and exhausting. Classes are good, but busy, (as a testament to this, the Xmas tree still stands in the corner, stripped of its ornaments but not yet of its lights) and the apartment is in a state of chaotic organization. It is clear that the hero of this tale is conflicted about some of the aspects of his life. A friend is hurting and there is nothing he can do to help her. He himself is longing to be back in Ottawa, where his heart lies, and where he has friends and a social life that he is missing. Kingston offers casual acquaintances and school-mates, but there has been no strong connection. That connection is something he is used to in his life, he has been very blessed by a close circle of friends, and they are too far away right now.