NATURE PUNISHES US FOR OVERCONSUMPTION

Many of us have started relating the outbreak of coronavirus as nature's punishment to mankind for destroying her wild beauty and spirituality. The reason behind such thought has been that over the centuries, we have witnessed the wrath of nature in forms of epidemics like plague, tuberculosis, smallpox and polio, severe natural disasters like fires, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes that impacted entire countries as well as individuals, and resulted in enormous material and emotional damage. It is often debated if such natural catastrophes could be avoided.

Another way of looking at such turbulences on earth are natural ecological catastrophes for earth’s natural course of development. 

English novelist Thomas Hardy loved all his life the tract of South England which he called Wessex for hills, dales, heaths, rivers, meadows and woodlands and these appear and reappear in one novel after another. But in his love of Nature there is nothing mystic or transcendental like that of Wordsworth. He never believed in romantic nonsense that nature has a separate life, a soul, of her own. As a poet or a novelist, he loves the beauty of nature, but as a scientist he does not ignore her faults. He enjoys the sweet music of birds, but also knows that it is short lived. The rose may be beautiful but it has a thorn which pricks the chin of his beautiful Tess of his famous novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles . He knows that the serpent also hisses where the sweet birds sing. He gives us both the sides of the picture — the ugly as well as the beautiful, the bright as well as the dark. He portrays nature completely.

Similarly we all have a mind and a heart. Heart is culture that beats for beauty and imagination. Mind is a civilization that allows us to think scientifically to keep us ensconced in reality. Hardy also believed that contemporary science has also made him aware of the brutal struggle for existence that goes on everywhere within the apparent calm of nature. He finds nature rich with rapine, red in tooth and claw. Life lives upon life, the strong prey upon the weak, and he comes to the sorry conclusion that mutual butchery is the law of nature. There is no harmony in nature, but everywhere there is an internecine warfare. In disgust he turns from nature to his own kind, for there at least he finds “Life loyalties”.

To go a bit forward Nature has always pushed us toward development by creating difficult conditions for us, such as heat, cold, earthquakes, epidemics and pandemic. After all, a person only begins to move when he feels bad.

Therefore, nature is forced to send us suffering in order to encourage us to develop. Then we begin to develop science and economics, and begin to study ourselves and the environment around us in search of a way to organize safer and more comfortable lives for ourselves.

While cures for plague or TB or smallpox or polio, landmarks in weather forecasting have been established, quests for curing cancer, forecasting earthquakes or such natural calamities are continuing -- now on also for COVID- 19.

Development is necessary only because of the problems we experience.