The Sheltered Valley

I have a theory regarding the relationship between man and nature; it's meant to be allegorical more than anything, since we don't really have any way to determine whether or not it was true in the past, as it implies that the past may have been retroactively changed as a result of present observation. (The Creationists only wish they'd thought of making such a bold and unarguable claim to support their nonsensical asserions.) I first came up with it in the form of a little story-seed called The Sheltered Valley, which was actually not about exactly what I'm writing today, but shared a somewhat similar underlying theme - the idea that Mankind had pretty much screwed the pooch where Nature was concerned and was ultimately responsible for all his own miseries. So "Sheltered Valley" is now pretty much my codename for any idea with this as it's basis, and here's my first fully-developed "Sheltered Valley Hypothesis".

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There was a time before time, before civilization and possibly before conscious thought, when human beings lived in perfect harmony with the natural world. We got killed a lot, but we didn't care, because that was just life. There was no fear, no pride or pretention, no boredom, no ennui or existential anguish, no discontent of any kind - just animals holding a place in a harmonious natural cycle.

But we destroyed that paradigm entirely long ago; nothing lives that way anymore, hasn't for at least 200 years, probably 500, and even that is only in America, the old world has been without it for millenia. Whenever humanity sets out to tame a wilderness, he imposes his view of Nature Red in Tooth and Claw on the world he imagines grasping in his greedy hands; before he ever sets foot under the canopy, he has reshaped it to his will. Those who do not want to see the true nature of Nature never will; they see only what they expect to see.

Mind you, all of this is not me claiming that what we did was wrong, nor certainly that we should try to undo it; whether or not we should have jumped off the cliff, we did, so our only choice now is to succeed in flying. We have wounded if not killed Nature; now we must be prepared to take her place.

Ultimately, I believe that Nature has created us so that we may replace her; she has earned her Repose, and offers us a little of it as well, but also intends us to take up the burden of perpetuating existence which she has carried for billions of years. She used the only method available to her, evolution; nothing existed before her, so she used nothing to build something, and the something she built contained a lot of nothing, making it fairly fragile. That meant she could justify an extremely inefficient method of refining the almost-nothing into something which contained a lot of non-nothing - that's us. We dream new things into being with very little effort; that's our purpose and role in existing. We are standing atop a foundation of quicksand, trying to build our castle faster than it can sink - and we're doing fairly well at it, no matter how tempting it might be to believe otherwise.