{"id":36303,"date":"2022-08-20T00:01:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-20T07:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=36303"},"modified":"2026-06-06T06:45:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:45:48","slug":"nature-does-it-even-know-were-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/nature-does-it-even-know-were-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Nature Even Know We’re Here?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Does nature even know we’re here? The Great Lakes covered with ice and clouds. NASA satellite imag<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n


\n<\/em>Dear Readers: I’ll be taking some time off to enjoy the last bits of summer. To keep you entertained, I’ll repost some of my earlier essays. This one got its start in 2014. — BFN<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

That’s the popular mythologist Joseph Campbell talking. I like Joseph Campbell. But I\u2019m not so sure about nature.<\/p>\n

It was nature \u2013 Nature \u2013 after all, that brought down a mass of mud and rock on the village of Abi Barak in Afghanistan\u2019s<\/a> Badakhshan Province in May, 2014. More than 2,000 human beings perished in that one act of \u2013 Nature.<\/p>\n

In 2011, 1,600 people died when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami were unleased in Japan by \u2013 \u00a0Nature.<\/p>\n

Tina Welling is a fan of Joseph Campbell. She’s also a big fan of nature and its ability to inspire creativity and ignite the psyche. In her book, “Writing Wild,” she writes of spider webs glittering in a tree and snowflakes landing on a moose\u2019s eyelashes. She reports experiencing helpful writing epiphanies while out on the trail.<\/p>\n

I have my own fond memories of nature \u2013 of lying on the sandy beaches of Lake Michigan as a child, soothed by the sound of nature\u2019s gentle waves lapping at the shore and the touch of nature\u2019s gentle breeze on my sun-kissed \u2013 OK, sunburnt \u2013 skin.<\/p>\n

For me as a kid, Lake Michigan \u2013 and all of nature \u2013 was a benevolent, nurturing presence. Many of the folks I interviewed for my book,\u00a0Wrestling with God<\/em>, felt the same way. They talked about a deep kinship with the natural world.<\/p>\n

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Son Peter Newhall at 20 months on the — benign — shores of Lake Michigan. But does nature even know we’re here? Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cerridwen Fallingstar, a Witch and shamanic priestess, had this to say:<\/p>\n

\u201cOutdoors . . . that\u2019s where I feel the connection with whatever you want to call it \u2013 \u00a0God or Goddess or \u2018the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Pediatric pathologist Geoff Machin, on the other hand, was not so sanguine about the nature of nature:<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of us cling to a pre-Darwinian, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept of the natural world that says, \u2018Isn\u2019t nature beautiful?\u2019 . . .<\/p>\n

\u201cI call this concept the romantic model. What the romantic model doesn\u2019t tell you is that . . . that every tree, every animal, every bacterium and every virus on earth is locked in a deadly struggle with every other individual \u2013 within the species and across the species . . . Anything that doesn\u2019t compete goes to the wall and dies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geoff\u2019s right. The truth is, Lake Michigan \u2013 and all of nature \u2013 is not nice. It is fierce. It does what it\u2019s going to do. The Great Lakes can roar up a storm in minutes. Over the years their waves \u2013 taller and steeper and more frequent than those out on the ocean \u2013 have sent thousands of\u00a0\u00a0shipwrecked vessels<\/a>\u00a0and their passengers to watery graves.<\/p>\n

And the soft waves lapping on\u00a0Lake Michigan\u2019s shores? They turn frigid in winter. Ice balls, ice rings and ice pancakes crash about in the surf. And on the shore, spray from the lake builds ice caves twenty and thirty feet high<\/p>\n

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Front page of the Detroit News, 1913, a year of record shipwreck weather on the Great Lakes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cNature doesn\u2019t care one whit about us,\u201d writes\u00a0Alan Lightman, author of\u00a0The Accidental Universe<\/em>, in the New York Times. \u201cNature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent. Nature is purposeless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only that, Lightman asserts, life in general and human life in particular is inconsequential in the cosmic scheme of things. The results of the Kepler spacecraft\u2019s search for signs of potential life in the universe suggest that a mere one millionth of one billionth of one percent of the visible universe exists in living form. We and our plant and animal kin just don\u2019t count for much.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may find nature beautiful or terrible,\u201d writes Lightman. \u201cBut those feelings are human constructions.\u201d<\/p>\n

So \u2013 which is it? Is nature a friend as Welling suggests? Cruel as Machin asserts? Or has Lightman got it right \u2013 nature is indifferent? Does nature even know we’re here?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to go with indifferent.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean I won’t wade into Lake Michigan the next time I see it, lie on my back, close my eyes, float in the sun, and let the lake\u2019s soft waves soothe my soul.<\/p>\n

My soul \u2014 or whatever it is that makes me love that lake.<\/p>\n

If this story resonates for you, check out\u00a0\u201cThe Downside of Things Beautiful.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0 For more about Lake Michigan, go to “Eagle Top — A Wild Place Tamed.<\/a>”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n