Man Plans, Nature Disposes

BIMBO CABIDOG

The Homo sapiens is the only species that thinks. It uses the thought process to plan. Planning remade the original world of creation after its thought.

Wherever he went, thinking man left a distinct mark. In fact, in the latter part of his existence, he has so changed the Earth, that almost everything in it now bears the imprint of human hands.

The unique capacity to chart outcomes started to determine what the future will be, still in the hunting-gathering stage of human-social development.

The period was around 12,000 years ago, when Man’s activity was solely the procurement of food, foraging in the wild savannahs and woodlands. At this time, the specie already exhibited a characteristic that separated it from the rest of the animal kingdom: it planned and organized to dominate the overpowering forces of nature.

Planning is thinking and deciding. Thinking would become more prominent during the succeeding epoch of the herdsman when humans no longer hunted but pastured animals for food. Animal husbandry ushered a big leap in their advancement.

The domestication of animals and the advent of horticulture (planting) radically changed the mode of human existence. Humans no longer lead a nomadic life. They settled. With settlement, geographically permanent human communities rose.

As they progressed, method more and more determined living instead of brute force. It later spurred off rapid social development.

Of all species in the animal kingdom, only the Homo sapiens show planning. Thinking turned man into a rational animal. Rationality further advanced human intelligence. It evolved language, philosophy, and then science.

The phrase, “the best laid plans of men,” became popular some time ago. They may certainly be credited with where mankind is now, a stage characterized by phenomenal progress in the way it lives. What the world is today can trace to man’s ability to plan.

But did planning really bear out every development, every progress, or every advance? Or did they actually happen beyond the best laid plans of men? Where they intuited, not deliberated?

The discoveries and inventions that brought phenomenal change in the lives of human beings seemed to be intuitive. Many of the stories about them tell that they occurred in a flash of the moment, the lighting of an idea different from what men have used to think.

They did not result from following a charted course. They resulted from veering off course, blazing a new trail, breaking with the past. They resulted from debunking old knowledge and embracing the unthinkable.

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

It is now being shown by the unchecked befouling of the environment and the disastrous impact of global warming that narrow plans themselves would lay the course of mankind’s self-destruct. Just allowed to take its course, nature on the other hand sustains earthly life.

Development strategies may be credited with fostering unprecedented material advancement. But they also have brought in the decimation of ecosystems and the catastrophic phenomenon called climate change.

As things stand today, the aftereffects of the pursuit of misconceived progress by societies may already have placed Homo sapiens among the species in line for extinction.

Science tells that the biosphere, without the interference of man, draws the perfect design for a world with no hunger, no devastation from calamities made worse by climate change, and no depletion of natural resources beyond recovery. This is cast in the genetic code of species.

The natural world exhibits diversity integrated in one holistic web of interrelationship and dynamic interaction, not only between living organisms, but also between them and inorganic elements, like water, soil, rocks and minerals.

Ecosystems preserve and sustain perfect balance among various elements, such as soil and water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, food and its consumption, and prey-predator populations. Resources cycle and recycle. Mass and energy flow in perfect harmony. Such is the natural design.

The way a lion, a python or an eagle ensnares a prey may be horrifying to witness.  But even as they kill, they preserve life as a whole. They plug a gap in the cycle of life, turn the food chain, obviate the degradation of the environment by limiting other species from wantonly multiplying.

Every organism from the microscopic protozoa to the mammoth whale, and every inanimate object from a tiny pebble to the biggest mountain range, take each one’s place and fulfill each one’s role in the ecological arrangement that supports and sustains life. The DNAs written into their beings set the characteristics that make everything dynamic, one and interconnected.

The fruit man eats, the tree he gets shade from, and the herb he extracts to cure ailment are all blueprinted by the chromosomes of each species. Biological genes have already drawn up how he will secure nourishment for the next ten to fifty years, breathe fresh air, prevent disasters from landslides, break the lash of winds, and regulate climate.

An incomparable intelligence has engineered with perfect synchronization of time and motion how myriads of life forms as well as non-living things shall interact with each and everyone to maintain and reproduce life down to every minute in a holistic planetary ecosystem that manages population of species, provide and distribute food through the predator-prey link, and spin the cycles of energy and matter from generation to generation.

No human ingenuity can ever set life on a journey, like a projectile of a seed coasting along the seashore, finding a right spot on the shallow waters, descending vertically, planting itself on the sandy bed, taking roots, and becoming a new mangrove tree.

Amazingly, the shape, buoyancy, growth characteristics, and even how the seed may end to give birth to a new life have already been encoded by an intelligence that of humans is nothing in comparison. The code is written in the genome of the specie.

Thus, it should not be a surprise if there is indeed a lot of brainy stuff in the supposedly thoughtless wilds. Intelligence and logic unmistakably course through the natural world. There is better order in the jungle, serving the purpose of existing forever, than in human society.

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 end up a heap of ruins, like the Angkor Vat, overrun by dirt and choked by jungle growth.

Over time, nature outlives what men have lived with. Marvels of edifices succumb to the elements. Water constantly dripping on stone and roots creeping under masonry finally tear and reduce to ruble what once were grandiose structures .

With forest covers razed to almost zero by greed, towns that have stood for hundreds of years at last vanish under landslips and liquefied mud cascading from mountains and burying them under meters of earth.

Abuse nature and it will react violently. When there were no more forests to hold water, an abnormally large volume of it roared downstream and drowned 8,000 in Ormoc City, during the lash of a mild tropical cyclone named Typhoon Uring.

But people never learn, or just refuse to, obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. The only way to get out of the path of disasters that are getting worse and more tragic is to let nature take its course. But driven by greed for pointless material prosperity, they couldn’t help it.

Men plan narrowly, nature designs comprehensively. In the name of development, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money and natural resources to build settlements that calamities easily demolish, because they have swept away the barriers that could naturally protect them.

Confronted by seasonal floods and lahar flows that hit communities with tragic effects, the government resorts to building dikes costing billions of pesos that later crack and soon give way to the elements. Officials insist doing so even with the knowledge that what could better deal with the hazards are not engineering but ecological solutions.

Because of the narrow purpose of piling up treasures on earth, humans alas unwittingly make plans that in the long run work against themselves. They devise schemes to get exceedingly rich. But when they have done so, there is nothing left to live off. The natural biophysical environment has been so depleted to further support life and habitation.

With the onslaught of climate change, there may even be no more dry and solid ground to stand on. Man’s proud progress has blown in his face. What support life and really matter – air, water, solar radiation, soil to grow food, and vegetation, are cut off. When the artificial destroy the natural, it has destroyed mankind itself.