Nature is not our friend

SL, AUGUST 2002

NOW DON’T GET me wrong: I am not opposed to nature, precisely. That would be a foolish position to take. Nature has much to recommend it. Rainbows, for instance, are popular among those of a romantic bent, and who among us does not smile to hear the sound of the breeze stirring the high leaves of the sheltering tree, or the chirruping of the sentimental songbird? Ah, yes, these are lovely things, all part of nature’s rich bounty. And you might add others: the o’er looming mountains, say, or the majestic clouds, or the delicate whorls of the wayside flower, or the playful leaping of our finny friends the dolphins.

I’m just saying that we can get a little carried away with nature. Nature is all very well in its place, but its place is over there, outside the city limits. Unless you are one of those irredeemable losers who packed up their checked flannel shirts in a cardboard suitcase and moved to the Knysna forest to make shoes out of bark, or you are reading this while cast away on a desert island in the wide salty wastes of the south Atlantic (in which case, my congratulations to whoever is in charge of this magazine’s subscription services. That delivery-in-a-bottle idea is really paying off), you almost certainly live in the city. Or if not the city exactly, then some place like Port Elizabeth or Bloemfontein. And that means that you reap the benefits of civilisation, which is to say, the triumph of humanity over nature.

As much as city dwellers whine about the noise and the grime and the traffic, it is better than the alternative. The alternative was droughts and floods and sabre-toothed tigers and Apache raiding parties that carried off the womenfolk, and your uncle Jethro approaching you carrying a mallet and a pair of pliers if you complained about toothache. The city is the home of modern medicine and hot running water and lengthened life expectancy and meals that you don’t have to hunt and shoot and pluck yourself. Plus, you go live in a cave on a mountainside and then try to get lucky with the ladies on a Saturday night. See how far you get.

But human beings are an ungrateful mob. Even as we lie in our hot baths or eat cornflakes with milk that still hasn’t curdled even though it was extracted from the cow more than six hours ago, still there is a tendency to sneer at science and civilisation. People today will buy anything, provided it can somehow be implied that it has nothing to do with modern science.

The other day – as I was passing through my local pharmacy, something I like to do to keep up to date with the latest developments in self-medication – I noticed an advertisement for a herbal supplement. “Nature’s caffeine!” declared the advertisement. Think about that for a moment. Where do these people imagine caffeine comes from? Do they think coffee is some kind of synthetic drug cooked up by a bunch of mad scientists in Berlin? It doesn’t seem to matter. People see the word natural and they assume it must be better for you than something that doesn’t have the word natural attached. If the cigarette companies had clear thinking PR departments, they would long ago have sold themselves as “Tobacco! Nature’s Nicorette patch!”

Recently I had a dose of the flu and popped into the chemist to stock up on those products that I love so: pills and fizzy things that make you sleep and not hurt so much. Clutching these precious fruits of civilisation, I was making my way to my car when I bumped into someone I knew. She clucked and tutted at my purchases. “That stuff is bad for you,” she sighed. “You should get a natural remedy.”

She went on to mention one of those appalling garden potions: milkwort, or essence of frangipani, or hemlock, or something that once grew in some Knysna hippy’s Wellington boot during the rainy season. “Natural, eh?” I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “natural is better for you.”

I glared at her and sniffed. “Has it occurred to you,” I asked, “that influenza is natural. Tumours, thrombosis, cataracts, snakebites … these things are all natural. I want what is not natural. I want to be healthy all the time. I want to live longer than I would in nature. Human beings made these drugs,” I shook the packet, “and human beings know more about what is good for human beings than nature ever did.” I sneezed, and shook my fist at the skies. “Nature,” I told her, “is not our friend.”

You would do well to remember that, dear readers. Sip your wheatgrass and decry modern farming methods if you must, but when the Apache raiders start circling, don’t come crying to me.