I agree.
I personify Mother Nature that way, too. I suppose you could look at it other ways, but the end result looks the same to me.
I believe we, today, only see the tip of the iceberg regarding the complex, intertwined systems that regulate the planet's health and ours. But we've thrown it out of whack with our numbers and our technology, which keeps our great numbers alive longer to consume every damn thing even more voraciously. Whether our numbers make us more unhealthy and we suffer more from the environmental health hazards ever-present on our planet or our numbers cause Mother Nature to throw us more curve balls to thin the herd or it's some combination of the two hardly seems important to me, until we fully understand how these systems work. Until then, it is quite possible to act responsibly, based on circumstantial evidence, like we do all the time. We still don't know what causes a healthy cell to turn cancerous, but we can still observe inhaling smoke sure doesn't help.
I also share your lack of concern for the works of man. If some rich assholes lose their beach houses or some boardwalk with its overpriced cotton candy and rental bikes and overpriced condos and everything else for rich assholes gets washed out, I won't cry much about it. Maybe we could make a public park out of it. Perhaps that's a good thing in the big picture. The atmosphere recovered remarkably well during the short span of pandemic lockdowns. Mother Nature, that fickle badass, will shrug us off like last summer's beach shawl.
Maybe, that's the way it should be, like a wildfire, one of the natural ones, caused by lightning, which burns down the healthy green to start anew, as was intended. Maybe it's like one of those controlled burns of prairie grass intentionally started by man with the same purpose, a healthy purpose, not the plague of random fires that follow man in his clumsy carelessness like a wake of flame cutting through a forest.
But I don't even like people that much. I cry for the trees and hills, not the rich asshole's house, no matter how many photos of his kids were inside. Maybe I'm as cruel as Mother Nature is, but I'm usually in the minority opinion.
Edit:
One more thought, like these posts weren't long enough already, and I'll shut up, because i'll truly have run out of things to say on this subject. My oversimplifications above are just that. It's all a matter of perspective.
If I take a step in closer, I can tell you I'm not always as cavalier as I sound here, though I mean both just the same. Both are the truth.
I can tell you there may be no other man I've seen so crushed as the old man I once spoke to soon after accidentally setting his own house afire, quite literally. He and his wife, with no family and no money, were headed to a brief reprieve from the cruelty of man offered by the Red Cross, but then who knows? I know the devastation, the feeling of violation, the loss of property can cause. Revolutions have been fought over it. I've talked to plenty of people crushed worse, but they were generally people who accidentally killed their own children (The purposeful ones don't care so much.) or who were intentionally crushed, damaged by others, as children. When I take a step back from that devastated boardwalk, my thoughts depend upon the end result on the greater good over time. A public park is a good trade.
If one were to take a further step back from my observation about the health of the atmosphere during the pandemic, one might falsely assume I would be one of the many in my country who advocated simply letting the virus run its course, killing many more of the weak than we wound up doing. I was not. I believe such a decision is far more devastating to man in terms of the greater good in less-tangible, though possibly more-important, ways than the death toll. How one deals with adversity is the measure of a man. Man measures his societies, in quite a few ways, and rightly so, by how they care for those who can't care for themselves: the sick, the poor, the infirmed, newborn infants, mothers in childbirth, the elderly, prisoners. My country scores poorly amongst industrialized nations in all these categories. Mental health, whatever that is exactly, is important, too.
I can't recommend being as cruel as Mother Nature, and it's not how I live my everyday life. I don't recommend it for any society. These things are complicated, and we don't understand how exactly they work yet. But I know our health and the planet's are inexorably tied, at least for now. Mother Nature is cruel, and she can devastate our planet worse than we can. While our planet is hardly helpless, I think we should help ourselves by helping our planet, just as we should care for anyone who has lost his house to fire.
Cruelty is not the will of God, as I would imagine it, not as judged and administered by man. We are not helpless. We can make healthy decisions. God helps those who help themselves, they say, and I suspect from first-hand experience He just might look after drunks. After all, someone needs to. I don't drink anymore, so I'm screwed. As for the rest of you, slainte mhath.
