Destiny and the control-of-nature freak
Commetary by DICK DORWORTH
Consider control. Contemplate self-control.
There are those who consider self-control, like self-reliance, to be an
admirable and beneficial quality to cultivate and protect, to nurture and propagate.
Self-control is a worthy endeavor, achieved through such attributes as restraint rather
than indulgence, generosity rather than greed, compassion rather than anger, taking what
is needed and no more rather than whatever can be gotten and then some, thinking of the
consequences of present actions for two or three or seven generations into the future
rather than just of immediate profit and short term convenience, and, of course, being
careful rather than careless.
Consider control that is out of control: that is, mankind’s
attempts to control nature. Contemplate the environmental disasters that have grown from
man’s efforts to control nature. Pick any one for consideration. There are many.
Consider the control-of-nature freak. Contemplate his value system. It
is harsh work.
The credo of the control-of- nature freak has never been stated more
explicitly than by Mormon hierarch John Widtsoe who wrote in 1928, "The destiny of
man is to possess the whole earth; the destiny of the earth is to be subject to man. There
can be no full conquest of the earth and no real satisfaction to humanity, if large
portions of the earth remain beyond his highest control." Widtsoe was writing
specifically about irrigation in western America, about turning desert into farmland,
alkali into oasis; but his larger meaning (and intention) was to assert mankind’s
title to the center of the universe, to make man the measure, and the recipient, of all
things. Such pretension has all the real substance of a mining claim staked somewhere in
the astronomical spaces between the most distant (from earth) stars of the Milky Way, but
it does provide a bogus justification for a variety of abuses of the planet and its many
forms of life. It epitomizes all that is narrow, myopic, ignorant, craven, narcissistic,
witless, dumb and, ultimately, self-destructive in man’s relationship with the planet
he inhabits.
Any one-sided relationship defined by words like "destiny,"
"possess," "subject to," "conquest" and "highest
control" is, to put it mildly, out of balance. That is, insane.
Consider insanity. Contemplate its fruits. Drink the waters of most of
America’s streams and rivers at your peril.
Widtsoe’s credo inspired the great American writer, teacher and
thinker Wallace Stegner to write, "That doctrine offends me to the bottom of my
not-very-Christian soul. It is related to the spirit that builds castles of incongruous
luxury in the desert. It is the same spirit that between 1930 and the present (1986) has
so dammed, diverted, used, and reused the Colorado River that its saline waters now never
reach the Gulf of California, but die in the sand miles from the sea; that has set the
Columbia, a far mightier river, to tamely turning turbines; that has reduced the Missouri,
the greatest river on the continent, to a string of ponds; that has recklessly pumped down
the water table of every western valley and threatens to dry up even so prolific a source
as the Ogalalla Aquifer; that has made the Salt River Valley of Arizona, and the Imperial,
Coachella and the great Central valleys of California into gardens of fabulous but
deceptive richness; that has promoted a new rush to the West fated, like the beaver and
grass and gold rushes, to recede after doing great environmental damage."
Widtsoe’s words are deeply offensive to nature itself as well as
to the better nature of man. It represents a doctrine that underlies the on going
despoliation of the world’s environment and its quality of life for the majority of
its inhabitants, human and non-human alike. This is the doctrine which justified the
damming to death of the great rivers, the Columbia, the Snake, the Colorado and many
others. This is the doctrine which continues to see not the death and decay and pollution
but, rather, only the power and profit of turning wild and free running rivers and all
they sustain into fetid barge canals, undrinkable holding ponds and slack reservoirs.
In truth, the Snake, the Columbia, the Colorado and the others are no
longer rivers, nor are they natural. This is done in the name of commerce and progress and
control. This is done in the narcissistic, arrogant, out of control notion that the
control of nature is man’s destiny.
This is done in the tragic insanity that there can be, as John Widtsoe
wrote, "no real satisfaction to humanity, if large portions of the earth remain
beyond his highest control."
Consider real satisfaction. Contemplate the source of satisfaction.
There is no such thing as virtual satisfaction. To be real, satisfaction must be natural;
otherwise it is perverse.
To control nature is always a death sentence to the natural. Like
putting a tiger (or any creature) in a zoo cage, the control of nature kills the tigerness
in the tiger, the natural in nature, the real in real satisfaction.
Despite the whacked out proselytizing of Mormon hierarch Widtsoe, the
destiny of man is not, as man is all too slowly discovering, to his consternation and
discomfort as he slowly wakes up in the befouled bed of his own environment, "to
possess the whole earth." He does not have that much control, thank God.
