Man and Nature

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Thursday March 03, 2005 11:00 by Nils

What should we do?

I find myself thinking of Kenya’s tsunami victim. That’s right: victim, singular, no “s” on the end. He was Samuel Njoroge, a car mechanic from Nairobi, who was making his first ever visit to the East African coast. “He was very excited about the prospects of going to the beach and learning how to swim,” said his father. He picked the wrong day.

When tens of thousands are dead, it’s easy to mock the networks flying in Diane Sawyer and the other sob sisters to nod sympathetically and maintain that anguished angle of the eyebrows as someone retails the details of one specific tale of woe. But “human interest” at its crassest has a lot more going for it than its opposite: inhuman lack of interest. Consider 43-year old Greg Ferrando of Maui, on vacation in Thailand and enjoying the charms of newly deserted Patong Beach. As the Associated Press reported, “he went for a barefoot jog up the immaculate white sand beach, where the tsunami has wiped away almost all signs of humanity.”

“This whole area was littered with commercialism,” said Mr Ferrando. “There were hundreds of beach chairs out here. I prefer the sand… It looks much better now.” If you don’t mind stumbling over the occasional washed-up corpse on your barefoot jog.

There are a lot of takers for Mr Ferrando’s view: Man is the problem. He should be humbled by the awesome power of Mother Nature and learn the error of his ways. Eschew the beach chairs and parasols and margaritas and all the other litter of commercialism.

But, if I had to name the single distinguishing feature of North American life, it’s the refusal to be cowed by the elements. In the northern two-thirds of the continent, Mother Nature spends six months of the year trying to kill you, and do we care? Hell, no! Bring it on! In the weeks leading up to the fall of the Taliban, you may recall, the media were prostrate before the awesome powers of the “brutal Afghan winter”: “Realistically, US forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options,” reported New York’s Daily News. Actually, to be really realistic, US forces had a window of two or three years: a third of a decade later, the “brutal Afghan winter” still hasn’t shown up to foreclose options. As I write, it’s 62 and partly cloudy in Kandahar, 61 in Bost and Laskar, and in my corner of the Atlantic seaboard I won’t be seeing temperatures like that for another four months.

But the whole point of all the earth-is-your-mother environmentalism is to inculcate an enfeebling passivity in the face of nature. There wouldn’t be an America at all if the first settlers had heeded the warnings of Ye Olde Weather Channel about the brutal New England winter. In that sense, for all his other failings, I’ll miss Hurricane Dan Rather’s dispatches from turbulent coastal municipalities – not the parts of the show where he’s reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bits where he does the other headlines of the day as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be reading “The Dow closed 13 points down today” while wrapped in his sou’wester round a lamppost as the wind’s howling and a rusting doublewide flies over your shoulder.

At such moments, Dan captures something important about the essence of America. Insofar as the “brutal Afghan winter” has any objective reality at all, all it means is that the key highway to Pakistan runs through some pretty high elevations, and has a tendency to get snowbound and impassable. Whether it needs to get quite so impassable is another matter. I like the Afghans, God bless ‘em, but honestly it doesn’t speak well for a culture to have lived in the same place for thousands of years and never got around to inventing the snowplow.

During the Afghan campaign, an Internet wag, Glenn Crawford, deftly summed up the different cultural approaches to unpromising climate - in this instance between the bleak Afghan plain and Nevada. Third World solution: eke a living out of the desert. American solution: “Viva Las Vegas!” One wouldn’t commend a den of gambling and fornication to every spot on earth, but, driving through the Sunni Triangle, I couldn’t help feeling the history of the Middle East would have been a little different if smack in the middle of the Arabian desert you could have seen Wayne Newton with full supporting orchestra. It would be to Afghanistan’s benefit if someone opened a ski resort, and made the brutal Afghan winter pay its way.

That’s what the Thais did: they made Phuket and Phi Phi Island the preferred vacation resorts for millions of westerners. Economic reality dictates that poor people wind up providing services for richer people: in Mississippi, they work in Wal-Mart; in China, they manufacture stuff for Wal-Mart; in Sri Lanka, they make the brassieres for virtually every breast in the United Kingdom; in Thailand, they pour your banana daquiris; in Afghanistan, they grow poppies. There are worse things than luxury tourism. To demand, as Mr Ferrando does, that Thai beaches remain free of “commercialism” is to demand that the Thai people stay poor and dependent.

“The Earth Is Your Mother” is eco-babble. The Eighth Psalm gets a lot closer to the truth: “What is man that thou art mindful of him…? Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands…”

Just so. We’re not here to be cowed by the environment. Rebuild the resorts in Phuket. And open one in the Hindu Kush.