Nature's Preeminence

Nature is a patient teacher, and we her unruly, disbelieving, disruptive subjects. Rather than learn from her example, humankind has the unmitigated nerve to continually critique her formulae, certain in their hubris that human manipulation of nature's own constructs and protocols will demonstrate superior knowledge. And it seldom works.

Human activity continually clashes with nature's order, and she, patiently instructs her minute organisms to clear away, clean up, ameliorate the damage done.  When humans in the fields of science, designed to understand, hypothesize nature's intentions, and guide her gently away from her status of all-knowing designer to humble bystander, actually view the outcomes, they realize how devastatingly superior her methods are.

Still, human intervention in nature's preserves will not stop. And the degradation that is done when humans defile nature's patterns endow us with feelings of guilty responsibility, ameliorated by the fantasy of assurance that just as we have done damage to nature's design, we are capable of amending the damage, so no one will be the wiser.

In so doing, forgetting momentarily, in the abuse of our feelings of exceptionality, that nature will always be the wiser. Proof of that is everywhere. On the other hand, since we are ourselves organisms of nature's clever design, imbued with many of her own capabilities through studious investigation spurred by curiosity, perhaps she designed us for the very purpose of challenging the breadth and depth of her inventions.

Oil spills and the projected and very real damage done to our natural environment represent an ongoing saga of environmental destruction. Those oil spills create a hellish scenario of death and misery for other biological specimens. Those that do not die immediately are beset with disease and with the horrendous genetic deformations that ensue.

The effects are time-sensitive and thus limited; for nature time is irrelevant for she has ample, endless time. For humans time is severely restricted to a lifetime of action and observation. Oil is a natural product, fossilized algae compressed under extreme heat and pressure over an extremely prolonged period of time; a moment of time for nature, endless time in human terms.

When oil is spilled in the ocean nature calls forth her tiny organisms, microbes she has created for the express purpose of controlling the degradation and impurity of the waters affected. From figures released by the U.S. National Research Council, natural oil deposits lying under the ocean floor release up to 1.4-million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico daily.

When this occurs, the oil-eating bacteria go into overdrive action and make short shrift of the circulating oil. Those bacteria exist for the very same purpose in the Arctic as well; they are differentiated as cold-water bacteria, but the work they do is precisely that which bacteria produce in others of the world's great seas. 

Airplanes that spray chemicals to break up slicks of oil are likely responsible in large part for the poisoning of sea creatures. And it is hypothesized by scientific observers of the biosphere that those chemicals acted to deter nature's natural cleansing properties from acting expeditiously, as is their wont under non-interfering circumstances.

The system designed by nature is the most efficacious one, not the interventions of human science. It was observed in northern France in 1978 that coastal waters threatened by the Amoco Cadiz oil spill took 5 years to naturally recover. In those areas of fisheries and beaches treated with chemicals meant to break up the oil, cleansing took from fifteen to 20 years.

"It's a little bit surprising to some people that the Gulf is so clean given all of that oil that's going into the Gulf and the other toxic chemicals from the Mississippi River."
"It was surprising how fast they consumed the oil. In some locations, it took only one day for them to reduce a gallon of oil to a half-gallon. In others, the half-life for a given quantity of spilled oil was six days."
"Petroleum degraders are found anywhere ... And that's logical because it (oil) is a natural product. Basically, it's fossilized algae that have been compressed under extreme heat."
Professor Terry Hazen, University of Tennessee