Laud Nature
It is a lonely Easter with no opportunity for grandchildren to share their chocolate Easter bunnies with me. So, I resurrected Easter by listening to the Pope. In all my life, I have never listened to, paid attention to, or given a second thought to the words of a Pope.
In the past week, however, I heard words attributed to Pope Francis akin to the notion that the coronavirus pandemic is one of “nature’s responses” to human negligence toward the environment. Maybe not the revenge of nature, but nature’s response to our lack of response.
Now that got my attention. Nature will find her balance, no matter what humans do, or what humans believe, or what humans think, or how humans act. Mother Nature will have the last word.
My belief comes from an epiphany moment in my late teens on a botanizing trip in northern Maine. We were hiking down a straight path, which only five years earlier had been an active railroad track. Nature had swallowed up the railroad bed to such an extent, that I could not visually discern that it had been a railroad. And this in region above the 45th parallel that is not particularly biologically diverse. Nature had completely erased human activity.
The widely reported interview with the Pope published in various media on April 8 also carried words which piqued my interest. It was time for people to remember their shared roots and traditions, he intimated. “It’ a time for inventing, for creativity,” he said. “We need to connect with our real surroundings. God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives.”
Intriguing words of wisdom and a stern warning I thought, prompting me to google “Pope Francis on nature,” which led me to his Encyclical, On Care for Our Common Home, delivered May 24, 2015.
After skimming the 180+ page document, and highlighting poignant lines, one thought struck me in paragraph 55, page 40, “People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more.”
I confess my guilt in this matter.
Our yearning for consumption, i.e. exotic bats, unleashed coronavirus, which is now changing our habits of consumption, therefore giving Mother Nature a brief opportunity (perhaps) to return to a modicum of balance by keeping us sequestered. Mother Nature’s viral gift is indeed unforgiving.