National Parks and Tsunami

This week the new Ken Burns series on the National Parks is airing. It is very good, and as I have been watching it I am both reminded of the experiences I have had viewing the handiwork of God in Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, the Smokies and also find myself anticipating the time when I will get to visit Yosemite for the first time. The National Parks are indeed a national treasure and I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone/Tetons are so unique in the world and so breathtaking that all Americans should endeavor to visit them.

Yet I am also struck with the tone of the series that presents nature and wilderness as an unqualified good with no dark side. Though they mention at times how the frontier was in the 1800's viewed as something to be conquered rather than preserved, that point of view is presented as something to be looked down upon. This strikes me as a very recent point of view, and one that would fit into what C. S. Lewis calls 'chronological snobbery'. We take our own modern opinion to be so vastly superior to what came before that we don't even try to understand why our viewpoint is different.

Today the news provided a good opportunity to recognize the dark side of nature and reflect on our chronological snobbery as tsunami hit the Samoan islands and an earthquake hit Indonesia on the same day. Meanwhile the typhoon that hit the Phillippines a couple of days ago has now passed over southeast Asia and the death toll is starting to emerge. Among all of these some 1000 or so folks are now dead with the count likely to rise further in the days to come. The economic damage is huge as well.

While these kinds of storms and quakes are not the same as simply undeveloped land in parks, they do illustrate that nature is both enemy and friend. To the Pilgrims and all those after them who lived on the frontier, cutting down the woods for shelter and fuel and to allow farming was necessary to avoid death due to winter cold and lack of food. Killing grizzly bears and mountain lions and rattle snakes was to necessary to keep your children and milk cow alive. While nature provided wood and meat, it was also menacing in its ability to kill you and your family. It was to be conquered to stay alive. While many took this very much too far, slaughtering animals for feathers or hides, the threat of wilderness was clear to everyone.

In our sanitized, urbanized world we romanticize the wilderness and overlook the real threat the natural world posed to frontier families. Many early pioneers went to the opposite extreme, demonizing it. The truth lies in between. We are stewards of the earth, to both utilize its bounty and also keep it sustainable for the future. Nature is both beautiful and threatening, as people also can be. And so the apostle Paul concluded that both man and nature are fallen, and both are created by God and reflect His handiwork. Those two sides remain in tension as long as this earth remains.