IS MOTHER NATURE TICKED? © 2005 FairyWoman.com In an online group to which I belong, someone recently posed this question [paraphrased]: There have been many devastating tsunamis, mudslides, avalanches, icebergs, hurricanes, and other natural disasters recently. Are these things just part of the natural evolution of our planet, is God/Goddess punishing us, or is "Mother Nature" ticked off? Can we do anything about it and if so, should we? My response: I believe that major events of this sort are bound to happen occasionally in the normal course of climatic events. No matter how "stable" we perceive *anything* (our relationships, our health, our furniture, the distance between the Earth and the Sun), that thing is in a *constant* flux of change, whether we can perceive that change or not. Changes yield effect, plain and simple. There have been earthquakes and storms since the dawn of time because of natural changes in the world around us. Today's technological advances allow faster and more widespread communication than has ever been possible previously. Each day, we are bombarded by incoming information in the form of newspapers, television, radio, and Internet. Not only does this allow us to learn of natural occurrences more quickly than before, but it also "puts us there" with images and sound-bites. Communication has shrunken the world in our minds. More than ever, we feel events are happening right in our own backyards. Should we worry that these things are happening in our own backywards? YES, we should be. Although some of these events are, indeed, happening in the normal course of climatic events, some of them are being caused by our very actions. WE, AS A SPECIES, ARE RAPING THE EARTH. It is no great mystery that some of the world's religions "predict" natural disasters as a signal of the "end of time" because mankind's rape of this planet will bring about the very demise of the species at the rate things are going! I am a voracious reader, so please forgive me for citing an example without giving its source, for I honestly cannot remember where I read it. A study of the ecosystems in South America has determined that due to the deforestation of the rainforests in the Amazon region of South America, the silt in the Amazon River has increased. This change in the Amazon's silt is slowly killing the coral reefs in the ocean near the mouth of the Amazon River by burying the coral reefs in muck. As the coral reefs are dying, the aquatic life that is typically found near those coral reefs are also dying, or migrating to other areas. Without the fish nearby, birds are going elsewhere in search of food. Without the birds there, the insect population in the area is on the rise, AND SO FORTH! EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED! WE ARE RAPING THE EARTH, and yet some people have the audacity to sit back and say that "God" or "Mother Nature" is causing it because She/He is angry? GIVE EVERYONE A BREAK! We, as a species, just need to wake up and grow up. Perhaps that is the very reason why there is such increase in Earth-based religions, Goddess-worship, Eco-Consciousness, and the like — we, as lovers of Mother Earth, are here to sound the wakeup alarm for the rest of the dullard, sleeping world. © Imbolc 2005 FairyWoman.com — ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No portion of this work may be reproduced without prior consent from the author.