Why Bother with Man?
John Poch
January 1, 2002
Anyone who believes that nature is wondrous might question why God created humanity. One need only walk out on a mountain promontory and survey the scene, taking in the lush feathery greens of the valley below, the purples of the cliffs on the opposite slope, the reds and oranges of the sky at sunset. Perhaps a mountain lion leaps impossibly from one rock to another a couple hundred yards away. Stunning.
But pan to the left. A little further. There. See that subdivision? Sky-blue plastic Wal-Mart bags are caught on tree limbs here and there, and in one front yard rest the discarded shells of a 1950s clothes dryer and two dead refrigerators. Gazing across the subdivision, it seems the neighbors are having some sort of sheet metal competition. Pan back to the mountain lion, who at her worst leaves only some droppings behind, and not without covering them. Now think, why would God create man? It's a fair question.
You don't need something as grand as the mountain lion or the mountain to understand that nature is divine. Whitman found the sacred in a blade of grass. Blake proclaimed that everything that lives is holy. He knew his Bible, in which the origin of mankind is rooted in an orderly garden. The oldest profession, contrary to other reports, is farming. And naming. Maybe agrarian poets like Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate were getting at something essentially human, after all, when they urged the South not to surrender to the prevalent industrial ideal of the 1920s.
But then, nature isn't all it's cracked up to be. The romantics skewed our ideas about the relationship between nature and man. There is no doubt that poets like William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, sitting under trees, occasionally throwing themselves onto ...
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