Was anyone really surprised when the “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray barb? The guy based his entire career on taunting wild animals. Or when the magician Sigfried was mauled on stage by one of his tigers? Or when that guy who lived with wild grizzlies was killed by wild grizzlies? The recipient of the first-ever face transplant needed the operation because she overdosed on sleeping pills and her pet labrador chewed half her face off. Some people love nature, but nature doesn’t love people. Humans almost went extinct 70,000 years ago. Filmmaker Werner Herzog put it best when describing the obscenity of the jungle:
Of course we are challenging nature itself and it hits back…We have to accept that it’s must stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity…Nature here is violent, base...I see fornication, asphyxiation, choking, and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery…The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain…It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger…Taking a closer look around us there is some sort of harmony—the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder…Even the stars in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted with the idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this I say this full of admiration for the jungle. It’s not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.
Nature-lovers who lack Herzog’s judgment can pay with their lives. Christopher McCandless starved to death while stupidly trying to survive in the Alaskan wilderness with hardly any supplies or preparation. While it’s tempting to romanticize his death, his written words leave no question that he wanted to be rescued: “In the name of God, please remain to save me.” As Sherry Simpson wrote in the Anchorage Press, he died from an “unwillingness to see Alaska for what it really is.”
Timothy Treadwell lived with wild grizzly bears for 13 summers before he and his girlfriend were eaten alive in 2003. Treadwell despised civilization and believed he had found purity in bonding with nature. “Animals rule!” he screamed during one expletive-laced tirade against humanity. He wanted to become a bear and honestly believed that these vicious predators were his friends. In the documentary Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog comments on footage of the bear that likely killed Treadwell:
And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.
Daniel Suelo is a modern-day caveman in Utah. He sleeps near a nest of scorpions with mice scurrying over his body and kissing bugs sucking the blood from under his fingernails. He once nearly died after eating a misidentified cactus and falling into a delirium. Bear Grylls has to survive on Man vs. Wild by doing things like drinking his own urine. Tom Marshall disappeared in the 1970s while living in the woods of Oregon. Before his disappearance, a friend asked him about the beauty of outdoor living. “It’s not that great,” he said.
Human beings cannot live in harmony with nature because there is no harmony in nature. Born naked into a harsh world, people must transform nature in ways that make their lives better. Toward that end, the only thing humans have going for them is their brains. A human is not faster than a tiger or stronger than a bear. People survive only by using the power of reason to manipulate the world around them: building tools and weapons, growing and storing food, domesticating animals, and teaching kids not to eat yellow snow. The litmus test for any nature-lover is a rat infestation. Do they live in harmony with their new housemates or call the exterminator? Exactly.
Environmentalists often worry about human activity upsetting the “balance” of nature. But there is no balance in nature. Things are always in flux. The planet’s climate, geology, and ecology undergo violent transformations from earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor collisions, solar flares, changes in ocean currents and cloud formations, and other cataclysmic events whose impact vastly exceed anything that could be done by humans short of nuclear war. It's somewhat arrogant to think that puny humans can greatly impact something as powerful, complex, and dynamic as global climate patterns. Nature kicks its own ass on a regular basis. Even before the appearance of Man, 99 percent of all species that lived on Earth went extinct. There have been several mass extinctions where more than 50 percent of species disappeared in a short time. The “Permo-Triassic” extinction nearly wiped out all life on Earth. The wider universe is even more violent, filled with supernovas, asteroids, gas clouds, vast stretches of empty space, desolate planets, large galaxies strangulating smaller galaxies, and roaming black holes that devour everything in their paths. Intelligent life seems to have evolved as a cosmic accident in a relatively quiet corner of the galaxy. It is mathematically possible that Earth contains the only complex life in the universe, and even it will be destroyed when the Sun begins expanding in 4 billion years. Any extraterrestrial life will end when the universe collapses into a featureless, infinite void trillions of years from now.
Furthermore, people have the right to transform nature because we are better than nature. Only humans can consciously substitute cooperation for conflict. Only humans are capable of love, friendship, joy, humor, morality, charity, art, science, religion, and philosophy. Only humans can appreciate beauty or contemplate their own existence. We naturally feel sorry for a boy whose dog is his best friend or a woman who treats her cats like her children. Pets are incapable of experiencing the sublime depths of human relationships. You don’t see cows in the pasture writing philosophical treatises or making hilarious YouTube videos. They just stand there like idiots waiting to die. They don’t even know they are cows. We eat them because we know instinctively that they have nothing to live for. “Animal rights” activists who seek to give all creatures equal moral standing are suffering from absurd delusions about the reality of nature. The human race is much too hard on itself. We’re actually pretty awesome. Human awesomeness may be the only thing making this violent, doomed universe worthwhile.
So the next time you hear some neo-pagan, Earth-worshipping, eco-fascist tree hugger say that human beings are the “worst” animal for upsetting the “balance” of nature, throw them in a lion pit to see how they like it. Fuck nature. Humans rule. Animals drool. Read more
