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Lyall Watson is a South African naturalist
who earned his doctorate in biology from a German university. His first
writing, Supernature, sold one million copies.
The book demonstrates how nature is worthy of awe for its breathtaking
accomplishments. More recently Watson
wrote another best seller entitled Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil.
This also earned rave reviews around the world.
Dark Nature presents a no less awesome account of nature’s
capacity to do thoroughly bad things.
Starting with the “selfish” gene that for
millions of years has been bred to fight for its own survival at any cost, Dr.Watson shows how this is manifested in the predatory,
territorial, xenophobic, and for ten percent of all life, the parasitic
behaviour of the animal kingdom. Nature throws up examples of sexual
aggression, pack rape and incest. He lifts the veil upon a vast killing field
where nearly every species exists to be some other species’ dinner. He cites
the words of the great naturalist, T.H.Huxley,
“Mother nature is a wicked old witch!”
Any farmer who has to fight for survival against wind, hail, floods,
diseases, tick, fluke, anthracnose and other pests would be inclined to agree.
Rene Dubos was a
pioneer of modern environmental thinking. An advocate of wetlands conservation,
he originated the famous slogan, “Think globally, act
locally.”
Dubos was not only critical of human
ecological abuses, but he was also critical of how natural systems can be
wasteful and plagued by shortcomings. He felt that the growing veneration of
nature was a foolhardy distraction. He angered many nature worshippers by
declaring, “Nature does not know best.”
Another person who fell out of favour with
the environmentalists was toxicologist Bruce Ames. He became some kind of hero
to them when he proved that a popular fire retardant was carcinogenic, but then
he became a villain to the same people after 20 years of research convinced him
that naturally occurring plant chemicals are more dangerous than chemical
additives and pesticides. Nature produces toxins, poisons, and venoms
aplenty. Some scientists now estimate
that plants regularly pour 10,000 times more carcinogens into the atmosphere
than man-made chemicals.
As much as we loathe disease carrying ticks,
mosquitoes, and lice (all products of mother nature),
microbiology demonstrates that the most dangerous animals on earth are the ones
we can’t see. Many of these naturally
occurring bacteria and fungi are beneficial, and each of us harbour
more micro-biological life on our persons than the human population of the
world. Some micro-organisms (all very natural), however, are real killers,
causing malaria, rabies, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers, mengoccocal
disease, legionnaires disease, SARS and lots more. Before the
discovery of antibiotics people died like flies from infectious diseases caused
by deadly micro-organisms.
Medical technology is now able to remediate
some of mother natures foul-ups such as
life-threatening birth defects, naturally occurring cancers and breakdowns due
to genetic weaknesses as common as poorly constructed feet. It was not long ago
that a simple case of an inflamed appendix (an organ mother
nature gave us that serves no useful purpose) was a certain death
sentence. So too, women frequently died giving birth, and most children died before
the age of five as a result of a naturally occurring organism that caused
dysentery. The Bubonic Plague wiped out one third of
The simple fact is that ever since humans
began putting on clothes to protect themselves from the natural elements,
making fire to render natural food more nourishing, or managing the natural
vegetation to produce more food, humans have been learning how to modify,
improve, and control the work of mother nature.
Potentially and ultimately, the human mind,
with its powers of intelligence, cognitive decision-making and planning, is
superior to nature. Troglodytes who find this philosophy abhorrent, would, if
they were consistent, go live in a cave and prefer the spell of witches to
modern medicine. In answer to those who point to human blunders such as
thalidomide,
As
Greg Easterbrook puts it in his Moment on the Earth, “Nature has
structural flaws and physical limitations. Genus Homo may be able to change
that. People may be here because nature needs us – perhaps, needs us
desperately.” Mother nature had already wiped out 99%
of all the species she had formed before humans walked this earth. Has this creature that has been invested with
intelligence and consciousness arrived to hasten the age-old process of the
extinction of species, or can human science and technology now be used to prevent
it? It has already started to happen. Humans have the potential to manage
nature in such a way as to make a better world.