In recent days, numerous tornadoes have decimated entire cities, destroying everything in their path. When I say everything, I include people, homes, trees and cars, all that was on the way.
When we ask ourselves why Nature is so mean to us, we don't find any answers, and yet this Nature has made men similar and it is life that makes them different. This word is from Confucius.
Blaise Pascal had a word that may be appropriate to our situation. He said:
Nature has perfections to show that it is the image of God, and defects to show that it is only the image. Are tornadoes its defects?
However, these days, talking to different people the same answer has been offered to me and I wonder if it is not the right one.
« We have been bad to her and she is punishing us. We destroy, we pollute, we do not respect our environment. »
When we see how we treat our seas and oceans, not to mention our forests, then we realize how wrong we are.
Jean Jacques Rousseau warned us well: Nature never deceives us; it is always us who deceive ourselves. We must believe that the work of nature is difficult to understand. And yet, Nature has many benefits. Among other things, it reduces the risk of suffering from depression, a walk in nature reduces headaches. It even seems that a natural environment has benefits on intellectual performance. A doctor once told me that nature accelerates healing, stimulates creativity and makes us happy.
There is so much good to say about Nature and I would think that our misfortune is probably that we have not taken Nature as our guide and that is why we are going astray. And yet Nature should make us able to bear what happens to us.
It seems that Nature has decided to take her revenge. Leonardo da Vinci said that in Nature, everything always has a reason. She tells us in her own way: You destroy me day and night, so I do the same. She knows that she is more powerful than we are and so she calls us to order.
What I am saying is farfetched, rather blame Nature than God because this one is not present in all the men while the nature is permanent. Crazy how I will associate a famous word of Einstein. He was asked: Do you believe in God? To which he answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza. And if not everyone knows Spinoza, I would simply tell them that for him , God is Nature.
So I propose to respect it. The sun and the rain are there to make our landscapes even greener, and I believe that this is the color of Nature. The fauna and the flora, are they not her children? Isn't it part of this new word Biodiversity? Today we talk about climate change and human factors that contribute to make Nature less diverse by altering its functioning.
It is a fact that we spend less and less time outdoors and, for most of us, in an impoverished natural environment. I fear that living like this may lead us to potential extinction. I am going to go outside because my innate tendency is to look for other life forms in Nature. It will be my biological evolution that will allow me to better adapt to the environment.
To conclude I would say that if our well-being depends in part on the quality of our link to Nature with its human and environmental consequences, then I will do my part and participate in setting up the actions that are necessary. The first one will be the respect of Nature
