Man plans, nature disposes

BIMBO CABIDOG

The thinking and use of stratagem may date back to the hunting-gathering societies that existed around 12,000 years ago.  In that stage, the activity of humans was still solely the procurement of food. They foraged in the wild savannas and woodlands. Their ways already exhibited planning and a rudimentary form of organization to overpower the stronger forces of nature.

The thinking beast in man became defined during the succeeding epoch of the herdsman. This time, humans no longer hunted but pastured animals for food. Pasturing and husbandry ushered a big leap in advancement for mankind.

Horticulture and the domestication of animals changed the mode of man’s existence. He would no longer lead a nomadic life. He began to settle in places. With the subsequent clustering of domiciles, communities emerged.

As human life progressed, method became more and more the determinant of survival rather than sheer force. Soon enough, it would chart mankind’s transition to unprecedented prosperity, then historical social development.

Among species in the animal kingdom, only the Homo sapiens can plan. With the ability to think and plan, man would be described as rational animal. Rational intelligence evolved cognitive language, then philosophy, then science.

Let’s go back to the topic of stratagem. In various fields of contemporary endeavor, there is talk of the best laid plans of men. Planning may be credited to have brought mankind to where it is today. Society throughout the globe is now marked by prodigious advancements in material life. The dizzying speed and scale with which these advancements are made boggles the mind. It may be owed largely to planning.

But did planning really bear out every development, every progress, or every advance that man enjoys today? Or were many of it anyway the outcome of things that happened beyond the best laid plans of men? Where a lot of the revolutionary ones intuitive, rather than deliberated?

Discoveries and inventions seem to be the latter. A lot of them seems to have occurred in a flash of the moment, not as the ultimate result of following a charted course.

For narrow purposes, human intelligence has competed with nature in shaping the future. Societies have charted their development, often diverging from sound natural course, in many cases even at loggerheads with it.

It is now being proven by the continued befouling of the environment and global warming that man’s narrow plans themselves have laid the course of his own self-destruct. Nature, on the other hand, through eons of time has always planned earthly life’s sustainability.

Five-year economic development strategies may be credited with having brought prosperity. But they also have wantonly destroyed ecosystems, and brought about the deleterious phenomenon called climate change. In fact, as things stand today, they may already have placed Homo sapiens in line with other species for extinction.

Science now tells that the biosphere, apart from the human brain, contains the best laid plan for a world with no hunger, no devastation from calamities exacerbated by climate change, and no depletion of natural resources beyond recovery. This plan is cast in the genetic code of species.

There is dynamic interaction of organic and inorganic elements in their vast diversity. Ecosystems in their perfect balance are preserved. Resources cycle with remarkable synergy. Mass and energy flow in harmony, moved about by living organisms.

Such is how nature designs.

The way a lion, a python or an eagle – to name a few, ensnares its prey is a study in ingenuity that human stratagems may look phony in comparison. But even as they kill, they close a gap in the cycle of life, connect the food chain, and ramp up balance of the whole environment.

Every organism from the microscopic protozoa to the mammoth whale, and every inanimate element from the tiny pebble to the biggest mountain range, take each one’s place and fulfill each one’s role in the entirety of things. Their DNAs written into their beings make everything dynamic, one and interconnected.

What fruit a man will eat, from what tree he will get shade, and what herb he will thresh to cure an ailment, are all imprinted in the chromosomes of each species. The biological genes draw the plan for him to have food over the next ten to fifty years, breathe ever fresh air, prevent landslides in the uplands, break the lash of winds, and regulate climate.

A mysterious intelligence charts with perfect synchronization of time and motion how the myriads of life forms in a richly diverse ecosystem interact with each and everyone, manage specie population, nourish through the predator-prey relationship yet live from generation to generation, reproduce themselves, and turn around the cycles of energy and matter.

No one or group with PhDs in their CV can ever engineer one journey of life, like a seed projectile coasting along the seashore, finding the exact right spot on the shallow waters, descending, planting itself on the sandy bed, taking roots, and becoming a new mangrove tree. The shape, buoyancy, reproductive characteristics and even the destined travel of the seed have been encoded in the species’ genetic blueprint.

There is a lot of brain in the supposedly thoughtless wilds. Intelligence and logic unmistakably are also their basis of change. Quite amazingly, the natural world is even better at it than human society. Scientific observation itself has shown that brilliant stratagem is present in the being and becoming of organisms, supposedly with far less intelligence than man.

Finally, man plans, nature disposes. He built the grandeur that was the city of Pompeii. In a fury, nature personified by Mt. Vesuvius demolished it with red hot lava and ash. Kingdoms that have once stood proud and basked in the glory of a golden age would become a heap of ruins invaded by layers of dirt, and choked by jungle growth.

Through the attrition of time great edifices of men succumb to the elements. Water dripping on stone, and roots creeping under masonry finally tear the whole structure asunder. With forest covers razed to almost zero by greed, towns that have stood for hundreds of years would at last vanish under landslips and liquefied mud cascading from the mountains.

Truly when nature is abused, it reacts violently. But people never learn. The only way to save themselves from disasters getting worse and more tragic is to let nature take its course. Men plan narrowly, nature designs comprehensively. They would spend colossal amount of money and resources on engineering structures to address a problem, like flooding, that can only be solved ecologically.

Humans alas plan ultimately against themselves. They plan to get rich in five years. In the next 50 years, there would be nothing else to live off, no natural biophysical systems to support life, and probably no more dry solid ground to stand on. They concoct short-sighted schemes that in the long run blow in their faces. The artificial human designs destroy the natural scheme of things. Then they destroy man himself.

Enough with the culture of destruction, enough with the proud stratagems of a limited mind, time to let nature under the bidding of an infinite intelligence again have its way.