The Way the Earth Treats Us

Many years ago, I ran into a video called If the Earth Treated Us the Way We Treat the Earth. One can look at it and merely see it as a sketch mocking climate change skeptics, but this video makes a far more profound point than it realizes.

First, look at the very title, implying that the Earth’s raucous behavior is somehow unusual. The truth is that it is not hypothetical or abnormal at all; this is the way the Earth normally behaves toward humans. Humanity from its very earliest days had to contend with the myriad challenges the Earth threw at it, and even today in the developed world, natural disasters often exact a bloody toll. The point is, however, that the everyday challenges of survival have been made trivial by First World technological infrastructure and nature management techniques.

Which brings up the second point: in a state of nature, modern people would not last long. The Earth’s behavior in the video is a pretty good approximation of humanity’s environment well into the 19th century. Only people who lived most of their lives in 21st-century developed-world comfort would assume the Earth was like a giant national park. Struggles for survival did not begin with industrialization, and putting a modern person into the living conditions of a medieval European peasant would likely kill that person — and this is before we get to hostile wildlife in an era without firearms. The idea of the natural world as some leafy paradise is a false one. An untamed Planet Earth is a perilous place.

Sometimes, when a person tries to make one point, they accidentally make another. I don’t think the video is wrong as long as one remembers that Mother Nature is a very, very disagreeable lady.