Know Your Place
Thursday, July 26
Apres le deluge, moi
Still, look on the bright side. The watercress harvest will be excellent.So, who's to blame? Some people think it's the Environment Agency. They had years to prepare for this, and they still couldn't get it right. Plus the sandbags were rubbish. Others think it's all the fault of the government - they held back money that should have been spent on flood preparations. The local councils were pretty shoddy too and should take their fair share of the flak. Still, at least we can all agree that the big rugged firemen were heroes.
After the deluge, the finger pointing. We seem desperate to find someone, anyone to blame for the extent and the extremity of the July floods. It must be someone's fault; someone must have slipped up, let us down, taken their eye off the ball. We need to believe this, because the alternative is much more frightening. The alternative is to accept that we - humans - are not in control.
This, for me, is the real story behind the floods. For a tiny moment, we saw our real place in the natural order of things. We saw that we are not in control of the natural forces that surround us. We saw that no matter how clever-clever we are, however many gadgets we make, however many fictions we construct to convince ourselves that we have Conquered Nature - we haven't.
It's tempting, in this context, to see the floods as 'Nature's revenge' for our profligate ways. But this is wrong too. Nature doesn't take revenge. Revenge is a human concept, and Nature does not obey human laws, however much we would like it to. It doesn't love us or hate us. We are not that important. Nature just is and we, whether we like it or not, are part of its web. If we break or try to reposition too many of its strands, the web will collapse. In future, a new one will doubtless be constructed, but we might not be around to witness it.
This is the frightening truth that we have always been afraid to face. Nature does not care, and we are not in control. Flapping around looking for someone to blame for what rivers do when it rains is a good way to obscure this truth. It was nobody's fault, and it was everybody's. It happened, and we are likely to see it happening again pretty soon. After centuries of human triumphalism - all those fantasies about conquering the seasons, seeding the clouds, living forever, colonising the galaxy - perhaps we are about to experience our true position in the world once again. For a species reared on dreams of its own inevitable glory, it won't be a pretty sight.
Posted by Paul at 6:19 PM 
