Nature’s Crimes?

by Stephen Singular

Certain decades tend to be marked by a series of similar events: the spectacular murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, Ron Goldman, JonBenet Ramsey, and many other well-known victims in the 1990s, followed by the worldwide terrorist acts of the first decade of the 21st Century. If early 2010 is any indication, natural disasters are the new wave -- with earthquakes in Haiti and elsewhere, the exploding volcano in Iceland, and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, apparently caused by the earth belching and sending up a huge bubble the engineers had not quite anticipated. The biggest crime of 2010 may not be a mass murder or financial fraud or the other subjects many of us usually write about. It could turn out to be the Gulf spill, an environmental disaster that seems to have no solution and no one absolute guilty party, although the Obama Administration may file charges against British Petroleum.

We’re all in this tragedy together, unless you don’t use electricity or drive a car or fly in airplanes or want cheaper fuel. We’ve all decided, actively or passively, that something like this could happen somewhere in the deep waters of the globe, but we’ve chosen to take our chances and hope for the best. Real alternative fuels and new energy sources, which now exist in a technological sense but aren’t available in the marketplace, have long been ignored or left undeveloped because nobody wants to rock the oil boat -- not yet anyway.

What everyone today is seeking, especially in the world’s most economically-advanced countries, is a risk-free life. That’s what many companies and many products attempt to offer people, under the theory that if you buy enough of something or invest in a given way, you can outguess the future and be protected. If this once held some truth, that time has long since faded; the planet has become one huge, entangled organism/business and an oil spill in the Gulf threatens the livelihood of multiple industries (fishing, shrimping, and tourism) throughout the southeastern U.S. and far beyond. Greece has financial instability and the New York Stock Exchange drops in a day or so what it’s taken a year to gain. We get reminded every now and then, whether we want to or not, how much a part of the larger world we really are and how fragile we remain in the face of nature’s power. We really can’t be protected from this inter-dependency, any more than we can be shielded from people intent on committing crimes, no matter how many locks or guns we buy.

When I was being raised in a Methodist church in small-town Kansas, I was told over and over again that faith was about having a strict set of beliefs. You had to follow those beliefs and accept what was in the Bible as literal truth in order to have a shot at salvation and a place in heaven after death. For decades, I dismissed this kind of thinking because it didn’t seem to apply to the reality of my own life. It took a long time to realize that faith could be about other things -- like the humbling realization of just how tiny one’s existence is in the overall scope of nature; and that it’s all right to ask for help once in a while because there are obvious forces at work out there that are not only far greater than one can see but more than one can imagine; and that nature may not be merely a punisher but also a teacher, so it’s important to pay attention to her lessons.

And maybe the Gulf oil spill crime is hinting that nature holds treasures that we’ve uncovered but haven’t yet tapped, and it’s time to move in new directions. We’re stuck in the fossil fuel past as surely as are the birds in the Gulf who can’t fly because their wings are weighed down by goo, but we don’t have to remain there. Based on the evidence so far, nature has never failed to startle and reward us with its secrets energy sources. It’s screaming at us right now to have the courage to change.