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NATURE: THAT BIG SCREWUP

"...toward the harmonious coexistence of the natural environment and human beings." I see this phrase earnestly stated with one or another paraphrase in just about every corporate profile, every announcement of corporate reorganization, every statement of environmental agency intent. It implies that in achieving such harmony with the environment we are overcoming some natural barrier between us and the natural world, some barrier that we ourselves had nothing to do with creating, and that through our own noble and altruistic endeavors we will set things right at last despite the unwillingness of nature to be a party to all this progress; as though such harmony is an unnatural state we have to work to achieve, that only corporations or governments, as the primary embodiments of human intelligence, can realize such harmony, and as though for the first time in the history of humanity. Not a hint that the toxins up to IQ level are our own, spread in commission or omission by those very corporations and governments, or that we both individually and as a species came into this world originally very much in harmony with it, in fact of it, and have since distanced ourselves from it, and despoiled it in vast ways we have yet to comprehend, through selfishness, greed, nurtured ignorance and special varieties of narcissism; are we not wondrous and progressive creatures, now let us get busy and fix Nature, that big screwup, the business of big business, get this planet into harmony, fix those rivers, manage those forests, clear those oceans, repair the air, bring nature into harmony with ourselves and our ambitions. Fact is, as this tricky little self-delusional phrase indicates, corporately we're not budging an inch, and never will until we're all dead of profit. These are our resources, after all. We often lie to ourselves in this way, the privilege of our unchallenged position in the hierarchy, like the dinosaurs had.