Man, Machines and Mother Nature

Man, Machines and Mother Nature

Human beings have made great strides in the last 50,000 years, ever since homo sapiens moved north. We have gone from hunting and gathering to farming then to industry and recently to computers and automation. We have made advances in science discovering new ways to save and prolong life. We can now create babies without need for intercourse. We even can change a person's gender. We have found ways to prevent or terminate pregnancy. We have done many things that go against Mother Nature. Is she mad at us?

As we have always known, Mother Nature seems to have a certain blueprint for life on earth. Have we violated it?

Mother smiled on hunting and gathering as well as farming. We ate what we grew and the animals we raised or hunted. We were able to make things by hand not by machines. We were heated by the sun and stayed cool by opening windows with cross ventillation and fought the cold with fireplaces. We had hundreds of millions of trees and had many lush forests. The vegetation turned our CO2 into oxygen. 

Then came the Industrial Revolution. We were able to produce what we needed using machines, sometimes in mass production. We had coal plants and industrial pollution but some of it was absorbed by our plentiful vegetation and surely the infinite sky could absorb the rest. 

We started mass producing cars which needed gas and oil to run. The growing number of cars set off high levels of carbon monoxide. 

We then started killing trees in order to build structures to house us and to make products that we needed. As the stock of trees decreased, CO2 pollution increased.

Now we have new issues that the Mother would find offensive.

We now have computers upon which we have learned to depend; some even "want" to answer our questions so that humans are not needed to help customers. We have "smart" phones that help us avoid thinking and addict us to use them as we eat, spend time with friends, drive and/or walk down the street. We don't need to go to a store and deal with salespeople, we can order online. Now instead of seeing and hearing our fellow human beings we can email them or text them so we don't ever have to call them, see or hear from them.

We had a sexual revolution that started when a Supreme Court made abortion legal. We realized that this option along with birth control devises enabled us to have as much sex as possible with whomever, wherever and whenever we wanted with no fear of permanent responsibility, as in children. 

We now have 40% of all U.S pregnancies unintended; 50% of these unwanted are aborted. Since 1970, Americans have had 45 million abortions.

Has Mother Nature had enough and is now fighting back?

We are polluting the earth, air and water. We have used our oceans as large dumping grounds. As a result, Nature warmed the earth causing drought, forest fires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; tore holes in our ozone layer that protects us from harmful rays while also causing hurricanes and tornadoes. Maybe water seeks its revenge with massive flooding resulting in mudslides and whole homes being washed away The oceans become so warm and so polluted that sharks are getting closer to the shore and we have more algae and jellyfish in our waterways.

We killed millions of trees for development, now we have climate change. 

Thanks to communication tools like email and twitter we have become more alienated. We are likely to be depressed and anxious. 

As they used to say in a margarine commercial "You can't fool Mother Nature." It seems now to be painfully true.