Man and the Natural Order

I just came back from a walk around the ranch, disappointed at the condition of the 12 acres of pasture that had been so difficult and expensive to prepare when we expanded my wife’s horse breeding business a few years ago. We had used tractors to harrow the soil, removed (by my calculation) over 300,000 rocks, planted grass, and tried to keep it irrigated, mowed, and fertilized. But a few short years later, with the help of horses grazing and cavorting all over it, there are bald spots and erosions — not to mention gopher holes and weeds.  In short, entropy – the tendency of the universe towards disorder — is trying to take it back where it was before we started.

To me, it was a reminder of a couple of things.  1) When man makes an adjustment to a naturally balanced system for his own pleasure, that system is very likely to react in ways he couldn’t have foreseen.  2) As suggested above, the system ultimately rejects the order and structure that was imposed and returns to its former more chaotic state.

Think of how recently it was in terms of earth’s history that man’s greed led to systemic human behavior that aggressively exploited nature. And then realize that, in that exact period of time, we have skyrocketing rates of cancer, never-ending wars, AIDS, and a billion people who can’t get a drink of clean water.  We have genocides, widespread drug abuse, Ponzi schemes of unprecedented proportion, campus shootings and suicides, financial collapse, deepening droughts and famines, and increasingly severe hurricanes.

It’s almost as if this earth is trying to expel us — rather like a landlord evicts bad tenants.

As far as I’m concerned, there is only one way through this: to become good tenants once again. And the rent isn’t cheap: it means restraining growth; it means making sacrifices; it means taking care of one another; it means understanding that future generations have the same rights to a rich and verdant planet that we do. But I think we’ve all seen that the landlord here is most unhappy with us, and isn’t likely to put up with our behavior too much longer. I wish I could reach out to the world and make a deal: I’ll pay my share of the rent if you pay yours.