Much of Nature

When I drive down the freeway I often watch the hills as they roll on either side of me. Rather than focusing on their present, barren, condition my imagination soars with ideas of how they must have been.

Instead of forty foot billboards I see hundred foot Chestnuts. I see oaks as big as houses and cane as tall as pine. In my imagination there are no fences, hogs, or cattle. There is only wolves, mountain lions, and buffalo. My heart and mind throw back to a time when the Georgian hills were home to both predator and prey. When the coyote only knew the west and the west had no knowledge of the pioneer.

If God exists we have cut the fruit he has sown and planted our own version of a forest. We turned oak and hickory communities into crops of invasive pine and grass. We chose which species to protect and forsake those we deem insignificant.

We plundered what cannot be replaced.

Somewhere on this road there is a soul with a different imagination. One amazed at the amount of open space left in the Piedmont. One who sees opportunity and industry. The modern pioneer sees eighty foot pine and imagines hundred foot buildings. He sees fences, hogs, and cattle and imagines a parking lot. He does not know this land once belonged to buffalo. He does not seem to care. He seeks progress as defined by his father and his father’s fathers. He is the American spirit. Pure and unaltered. He is enterprise and prosperity. He is old and dated and his peak has naturally passed.

As our oil runs out and our world rattles on we will see what we have done and act appropriately.

We will run back to nature like times before. Like a withered old maiden, with her humble, wise, broken, and aged body, she will accept us once again. And weariness, restored by Gaia’s grace, will cease.

We crawled out of the wilderness, walked head-high within the light of “civilization,” and ran back to the forests when we had nothing left. Like a child straight from the womb, we are both scared and comforted by darkness.

If God exists he is as much of nature as he is of us.