I don’t really like nature. Well, that’s not entirely true. I will readily admit that nature is gorgeous. Her mountains and fields and forests are stunning, and her animals are breathtaking.

But personality-wise, nature is repulsive. She delights in the process of birth and death, delivering what can only be a miserable existence to most of her creatures. Disease, malnutrition, injury, predation … even without resorting to excessive anthropomorphism, I would venture that these afflictions simply cannot be much fun for the animals that must endure them.

In fact, my biggest gripe with nature, by far, is that she’s trying to kill me.

Humans have been waging a war against nature for as long as we’ve existed. We’ve battled her frigidity with fire, fought her diseases with medicine and turned her strengths into weaknesses in a process of perpetual exploitation. And on a small scale, we have been amazingly successful.

As F.W. de Klerk remarked last week, we have stood out from other species not by adapting ourselves to nature, but by adapting nature to ourselves.

It is this ability to separate ourselves from our natural constraints that has contributed the most to our liberation. We can move water thousands of miles, control pests, manipulate nature’s atomic building blocks. We can carve giant heads on big rocks.

We treat nature as a set of metaphoric zoos, from test tubes to national parks, in which we manage everything from water to fire to life.

Of course, this management has been shaky. There have been times where we were too eager to revel in our newfound power, when we shot bison after bison just because we could.

In other instances, we have sought to extend our ethics to nature. The international community, for example, prohibits whaling because of its cruelty. Additionally, we have developed standards for the treatment of animals, something nature never bothered to do.

And in still other situations, we have assumed a laissez-faire approach to the natural world. Oddly, this approach has required no less effort; except in those areas of the world practically beyond our reach, we have actively established sanctuaries where we allow natural processes to play out naturally.

The debate over chronic wasting disease in our state’s deer population is particularly revealing. Some hunters consider the DNR’s massive eradication program shameful; most upsetting was the suggestion that DNR agents would swoop down in helicopters, shine the deer and mow them down in a hail of gunfire.

Yet massive extermination sickens some hunting proponents who would normally be trumpeting their contribution to the DNR’s “wildlife management.”

Like an occupying power, we have a good deal of unease about the role we should play in the microenvironments we have conquered. Naturalists are different from nature-lovers, who are different from environmentalists. And every term has a connotation unique to the individual.

It is this comparison that leads me to our president. I’m not sure how Bush would describe his relationship with the environment; I sense that he would not be too eager to claim the title of environmentalist. His administration is certainly a big fan of supply-side everything: the solution to a power shortage is more power, the solution to a forest fire is fewer trees.

I also suspect that Bush is a nature lover in the best 19th-century sense of the word. It was during this period of technological revolution when our battle against nature turned from one of survival to one of conquest. Nature is there for the taking, and the view from a Texas ranch would clearly suggest that there is plenty to take. Nature, after all, is enormous.

Of course, nature does occasionally shock us with a show of power: Earthquakes point to the need for stronger structures, floods necessitate larger dams, new diseases mandate new treatments. From his Texas ranch or White House portico, Bush has nothing to fear.

It is this focus on mastering our microenvironment that allows us to remain immune to the threat from our macroenvironment.

And we’ve taught nature a thing or two. Just as humans turned her strengths into weaknesses, nature is now using our strengths against us: our power plants, our emissions, our chemicals. But while the rest of the world has begun to awaken to this threat, I fear that the Bush administration continues to believe in the notion of a tamed nature.

This belief, like nature itself, is dangerous. After all, nature’s instrument of destruction is no longer fierce predators or threatening topography. Nature’s weapon is us.

Bryant Walker Smith

is a columnist for the

Badger Herald in

Madison, Wisconsin. He appears courtesy of U-Wire.