Ob-La-di, Ob-la-da, Nature Wins

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers

August 19, 2010

I am far from a global climate change denier.  The scientific consensus is clear.  I just can’t worry about it much. 

As R.E.M. reassured us, lo, these many years ago, though it may be the end of the world as we know it, we can still feel fine. Because, really, the only thing in jeopardy is the world as we know it – not the world as living, growing, evolving entity.  We can do enough damage to take some other innocent life forms with us.  But the harm we’ll do will be primarily to ourselves. The underlying planet will be just fine over the long term of geological time. 

This is the conclusion I’ve been led to by my so-far brief stint as a farm owner.  My evidence:

·        Exhibit A:  Our first agricultural act on the property, as chronicled in these pages some time ago, was the creation of a transplant bed to house some specimens we wished to save from the coming construction that would destroy all in its path. We tended the bed closely for a couple of weeks, then got distracted by one thing or another for the next couple. 

I assumed the weeds would have gotten somewhat ahead of us in the brief interval since last having at them, so, when I returned to the patch, I brought a particularly apt implement with me to tackle them.  And I put it away, unused.  Because, not only had the little bed become completely overgrown with whopping, great invaders of every variety, but we could scarcely even find the bed at all, so complete was the jungle-like overgrowth in just a couple weeks’ time.

·        Exhibit B:  Craig, the superb landscape designer we’re working with, noted that the English Ivy adorning the north side of the house (as opposed to the Boston Ivy on the south side) is a slow grower.  Typically, perhaps.  But not here, at the House That Nature Ate.

Last fall, when we began visiting and bought the house, a moderate amount of the stuff climbed the structure in a picturesque way.  Come the warm weather, the vines had absolutely consumed the place – to the extent, in fact, that we had a couple of good foot-or-two strands growing inside the house, in Babylonian splendor.  They found their way through the window frames and, deciding they didn’t like being out in the sun all day, chose to grow indoors.  It was probably by a similar mechanism that the first land creature crawled out of the sea.

·        And, finally, Exhibit C – the electrical box.  As you probably know already, the metal box that contains your electrical service is quite solid.  It probably has a front door that closes and a little latch to open it.  They border on being hermetically sealed.  Nonetheless, the one in our barn had a mouse nest in it. How they had gotten in was not entirely clear.  The options were few and unpromising – spaces unimaginably small and tight that they managed to make their way through, nonetheless, in search of home.  And, of course, once they did, they destroyed the modern technology they’d turned into a dormitory.

So, although the making of our tiny works – even just a house like ours -- often feels like it, their destruction needn’t be a centuries-long process, like the jungle swallowing Angkor Wat.  It happens with surprising speed.

            So, we can oil up the oceans, and smoke up the skies. We shouldn’t of course, but we seem incapable of helping – that is, restraining -- ourselves. It might make it terrible for some period of time – long by our measures, short by the planet’s.  And then it’ll be fine again.  Maybe better.  As the chaos theorist played by Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park” put it, “Life finds a way.” 

Farming, you see, is a highly philosophical experience. 

Ob-la-di. Ob-la-da.