Nature Is Not a Vending Machine (and you are nature)

This week the Times mentioned that it has been 50 years since New York City went this far into winter without snow - not fleeting chaotic flurries that disappear on the other side of your subway ride, but an honest-to-god snowstorm that interrupts the subway ride to begin with. 

Whenever weather happens - which is every day in New York in the winter - everyone comments on how uncanny it is that we are experiencing weather. And when we have that one warm week that we always get in January, or the polar vortex that rolls through every three years, the siren call amongst media and individuals alike is “Climate Change!”. 

And it’s not that we are not experiencing climate change, which is very, very real. But part of our inability to deal properly, swiftly, with climate change, or convince climate deniers that it exists at all, is our denial that nature itself is a… natural thing. 

It is most humans' stubborn perception that nature is a vending machine, and that feeding that vending machine with a date, time and location will yield the same results year over year, like Funyuns falling to the pit when you insert a dollar fifty. 

Nature is, more than anything, a complex ecosystem just trying to stay in balance. Expecting it to provide consistent, even, predictable results of what we deem to be the input - a series of behaviors that are in reality not the most important thing on earth but are in fact the leading issue the ecosystem is reacting to - is insane, cold-hearted, and unscientific. But moreover, this absolute lack of compassion and humanity we show through our expectations of the planet reveals our absolute lack of compassion for our own selves, which are in fact a piece of this same ecosystem, a piece of our smaller, more local ecosystems, and also an ecosystem unto ourselves, in our own bodies. Along with reducing the needs and expectations of nature, we have also reduced the needs and expectations of our human bodies and minds, providing no room for seasons, change, or long term consequences. We look at our own bodies as vending machines.

This is also an inherently masculine paradigm*, the concept that something, once it has reached maturity, should behave the same way every day, the only variable being the output should increase steadily, until death. When we look to a feminine perspective of time, we see so many phases, dips, swings, moon cycles, highs, lows, hormonal changes. And in this case, my argument is not that there is an optimal view of time for male and an optimal view of time for females, which would be binary and arcane. My suggestion is that we have lived in a male-dominated time construct at least since the dawn of industrialization, and that it’s possible we went way too overboard. It might be time to understand that some years it’s going to be colder than others, and some days we are going to move more slowly than others, and some months we need different nutrients, different conversations, different rest. And just as we need to be able to work with our bodies as these things are happening - a pas de deux between our ambitious minds and our physical capabilities - we may also need to employ that same collaboration with the planet (and beyond). And accept that it is not we who are leading. 

In most of the conversations I hear about climate change, the clear objective at hand is to solve the reaction. The output, the failure of the Funyuns to fall into the retrieval pit, if you will, is the perceived problem. What medicines can we prescribe to this ailing body that will make it 25 again, both in function and appearance? How do we make the planet more productive? How do we snap back??

I would propose that the actual problem is our insistent expectation of a singular, unflinching output. 

Perhaps if we allowed a little more grace - both to the larger ecosystem as well as our own - we could better understand how to change those expectations.