rain, rain, go away, Phylor wants to come out and play
{word press ate part of my post; I’ve tried to do forensic reposting. So, hopefully, this will make sense again, and have all the proper links and images where needed!}(disclaimer: carry on Tuesday’s prompt “rain, rain, go away” awakened two sides of me: one nostalgic/fearful of the simple childhood rhyme. And the other, eco-conscious me who looks at pictures and videos of melting ice packs, invasive species, lost natural worlds; the me that feels that my karma* is having to watch the world destroy itself by trying to control the one thing we cannot: nature in all it’s scary/intricate splendor, its furious/ferocious beauty, its gentle/delicate fury.
The dais-pounding, self-righteous conservationist with the horribly ironic situation of sitting in front of a computer inside a house with air conditioning, and a backyard, with carefully trimmed lawn, shaded by trees, and birds calling among it’s branches. The screaming “save a plant, save the planet” me won out. So, the following may be dangerous to your health. To quote an old margarine commercial “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” and it’s very unwise to try to trick her twice.
We’re starting on our 4th heat wave; weather folks are predicting 3+ days with temps over 90 and heat indexes in the 100s. I realize that there are parts of the US (and elsewhere) that this would just be balmy weather. Drought-like conditions have already caused some towns to restrict outdoor water use.
Of course, in general, we’re laughing water-wise compared to the parched and dry-crackled soil elsewhere. Extra heavy rains, and a hurricane, last year filled the reservoirs to almost capacity, giving us a temporary cushion against the forces of Nature. Nature, p****d off at everything we’ve done to pollute, control, destroy, use wastefully, take advantage of. The list of offenses is long and “unnatural.”
And yes, we do reap what we sow. For years, we’ve been warned about the effects of global warming, yet so many of our politicians and corporate ceos deny that we caused any changes to the environment, if they will even admit to the ice melting at both poles, and the shifting of weather patterns like dunes in the desert.
Of course, there is that unwritten rule that empires come crashing down, leaving behind a shell of what once was. History tells us this story plainly, if we so wish to read between the lines that extol greatness and place highly the grand deeds and heroics. Some toppled due to revolts, or the seat of power too far from the “provinces” thus its leaders and policy makers lost touch with the people under its control. Benevolent dictators and benign rulers miss the point that absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely; that power breeds envy, intrigue, mistrust, hatred, and vengeance. A new empire is built on the ashes of the last, only for it, too, to crumble, shatter, and become the dust that another breathes life into.
But we have always lived, it seems, with the folly that we can harness, control, subdue, conqueror nature like victors to whom, in the classic cliche, go the spoils. Only, we are spoiling nature at a great toll to ourselves, and a greater toll to subsequent generations.
As the wild places shrink, as light pollution removes the stars from our skies, as the rivers run dirty to the plastic-wrapped tides of the sea. As each of our carbon-footprints becomes the size of one left by a Sasquatch or yeti. As we ship death to the 3rd world in exchange for new diseases and invasive species, as we sit back and watch Africa shrivel up and wither in the heat and dust.
As we eat our hamburgers and encourage ranchers to cut down the rainforest for a quick profit, farmers use birth-defect causing pesticides to try and feed a population growing exponentially. As we purchase more and more consumer goods so long as the price is cheap, even if the human lives it cost to make thus cheapened. As we in the “developed” world pat ourselves on the back for recycling a bottle or two, Nature cries silently. Acid rain, melting ice packs, evaporating glaciers are its tears.
“[Acid] rains**, [pesticide] rain, go away . . . come again some other day . . . we all want to go out and play . . . oh, [plastic] rains, [polluted] rain, go away.”
- tallest tree species in the world; reaching up to the sky
* Karma, because I think I must have been a logger in a former life, cutting down the majestic redwoods and old growth forests of the west coast without a second thought to the thousand year history I destroyed with a swing of the axe (also why I can’t watch ANY of those lumbering-based reality shows). I cringe at every story about loss of habitat in the rainforests of the world. I am a firm believer in what goes around, comes around; if not in this lifetime, then in another.
Karma, too, due to hubby’s time at university. In the 1960s, he had a Jesuit Brother who constantly warned his students of the effects of logging on the ecosystem of the rainforest and beyond. With Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the forward-thinking instructor must have been one of those loney voices punctuating the silence of clear cut hillsides. He was a “tree-hugger” before the term had been invented.
Major oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham, England
** Acid rain may not be a term used as often now, (we tend to talk in terms of carbon footprints, shrinking ozone, global warming), but my earliest memory of program about pollution was about acid rain killing trees in the Black Forest of Germany. I can still see the images, in black and white, of row upon row of dead or dying conifers – much the way highway pollution has killed many pines on the sides of the road (often the only barrier between clear cutting and our eyes – perhaps we need to see both to be jarred into recognition and action). Or trying to image a Sherwood forest once existing in England (as Hollywood portrayed in the Adventures of Robin Hood which was actually shot in a forest in Bidwell Park in Chico, California circa late 1930s).
Hooker Oak in Bidwell Park, Chico, CA — a stand in for Major Oak (the gallows tree) in the real Sherwood Forest.
I do realize that these kinds of industries create jobs, help first and third world economies, and support towns and utility systems. But as Costa Rica has shown, eco-tourism creates long term jobs, while clear cutting is of the moment. But, as fewer and fewer newspapers exist “on paper,” the need for newsprint has gone down. Paper mills are shutting down, taking with them the economies of one-industry towns, leaving a legacy of devestation of the naturescape and the peoplescape. And, I haven’t even started in on mining, drilling for oil, pipelines and refineries, tar sands, fracking, etc.
As an historian, I’ve always been fascinated by grave yards and how those silent headstones “talk” to us about days gone by. Talk to us, now, in hieroglyphs and half-finished sentences, acid rain having washed away more than ½ of their stories. Stories that we don’t get “do-overs” for.
Well said.