If you were to listen to a typical conversation between a creationist, that is, someone who believes a god or God created the world and all its creatures in a short amount of time, and an Darwinist arguing that all animals that exist today are descended from millions of years of evolution, the conversation will almost inevitably reach a point in which the creationist will argue: “Look at how perfectly designed each creature is; look at how technical and intricately complex the human eye is, or how ingeniously balanced all creatures, prey and predator, are woven throughout their environments. How could something like this just happen?”
The Darwinist, if he’s smart enough, will probably respond with something like “You only think that all the animals are perfectly designed because you’re only looking at the winners. You aren’t paying attention to the untold billions of creatures who weren’t so lucky and went extinct throughout the ages.”
If you’re at all versed with environmental law, then you might know that as far as the government is concerned, humans are the unparalleled masters of our world. We control everything, the power is in our hands, and therefore all the responsibility of taking care of the planet is on our shoulders. And it’s completely understandable, to an extent, why the government focuses so much on human activity and trying to reduce things like climate change and endangerment to local wildlife. After all, humans did wipe out animals like the dodo and the passenger pigeon.
But if you’re at all versed with environmental science, then you know that environmental lawyers need a reality check. Nature is way more complicated and more powerful than humans think it is, and while it’s good to reduce our waste, clean up our garbage, and drive a car with better gas mileage, the belief that we control our world to the extent that environmental lawyers and the EPA would have you believe is just arrogance. Climates on this planet were in flux before humans ever evolved. The idea that natural climate change would stop altogether once humanity figured out how to light fires is just not reasonable.
Similarly, there’s the idea of animals going extinct. We like to think of dinosaurs going extinct because of some sort of meteor, or cataclysmic event that wiped them all out at once. But the reality is that the periods of paleontology that contain dinosaurs include the Late Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. Sauropods like diplodocus and apatosaurus were already extinct by the time tyrannosaurus and Parasaurolophus would have lived. And while that means that Littlefoot would have been extinct before Ducky could be born in the Land Before Time, it also means that meteor or no meteor, dinosaurs were already going extinct for millions of years, rather than a single mass extinction.
Even today, many animals go extinct each year for reasons that have nothing to do with humans, pollution, or climate change. They die out because that’s the true reality of nature. It’s not some loving, earthy mother who cares for all her children; it’s a cold, unthinking, unfeeling system that only allows the fittest to survive. Say what you will about human societies being biased; natural selection is the truest meritocracy in the world.
All of this brings me to a type of monster popularized by H.P. Lovecraft: the eldritch horror. Some being so powerful, it could kill you without even noticing. You are an ant to such a behemoth, and it doesn’t care if you live or die. Nature doesn’t want you dead; nature doesn’t want you to live. Nature just doesn’t care. One of the deities in the Cthulhu mythos that perfectly embodies this is Shub-Niggurath. She is the closest thing the mythos has to a fertility goddess, and yet, despite being the source of all organic life, she’s barely intelligent. She’s usually depicted as a bloated, giant, writhing mass filled with mouths and appendages, constantly belching out new monsters, eating half of them, and the ones that escape are said to live awful, wretched lives. And this, according to Lovecraft, is the source of all life, including that which eventually evolved into humanity. This is how he viewed mother nature.
In continuing my series on monsters, I wanted to look at different ways cultures around the world have examined nature itself as an unstoppable, Lovecraftian entity in its own right. Myths around the world talk of giant behemoths that represent natural forces, such as the world serpent Jörmungandr from Norse mythology, who caused earthquakes whenever he struggled against the sea, or Typhon, the monster Greeks believed was under Mount Etna causing volcanic erruptions, and of course there’s Apep/Apophis, who had to be decapitated every night to stop him from destroying the entire world.
This isn’t the only place we see nature portrayed as monstrous. In American folk tales, many heroes end up wrestling against monsters that are clearly meant to embody the untamed wilderness of Great Plains. Grizzly Adams is known for fighting a bear, a more mundane example, but on the other end we have Pecos Bill trying to wrangle a tornado, a particularly American example, since nowhere else in the world faces tornados with the same frequency as the Great Plains. Pecos Bill is also rumored to have beaten a giant tarantula, but in the case of the tornado, they skipped the metaphor and just had him fight with a natural disaster as if it were a typical giant monster.
Nowhere have I seen this fact of life captured better than in Studio Ghibli’s presentation of nature in movies like Princess Mononoke, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Ponyo. In each of these films, nature is shown to be mostly indifferent towards humanity at best, and outright genocidal at worst.
In Princess Mononoke, the animals and wilderness are just as murderous and cruel as the humans who live in iron town, and the humans who are shown damaging the environment are always shown to be trying to survive. To hate them is to hate not only most the human race, but most of the animal kingdom as well, who would commit the same acts of environmental destruction if it meant keeping themselves alive.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind takes a slightly different approach in its focus on how nature can recover from even the worst of human actions. Although the toxic forest is shown to be inhospitable for humans, it’s actually teeming with life; new life that found a way to survive in the polluted environment. The beasts that live there were specifically made to look as alien and creepy to us as possible; not as fluffy animals, but giant, disgusting insects. Even so, they are not ‘monsters’ in our usual sense of the world; just animals in a new environment trying to survive. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind shows that humanity’s conflict with nature isn’t really about protecting the environment; it’s about protecting humanity’s place in that environment. It’s worth noting that in real life, bacteria that exclusively eat plastics have evolved in our oceans as a direct result of human pollution, showing that nature is far more capable of adapting itself than we give it credit.
Finally, in Ponyo, we’re reminded that anime comes from the island of Japan, and that islands can have a…touchy relationship with the ocean. While the titular protagonist’s father Fujimoto demonstrates that he has no love for humanity (despite formerly being one himself), Granmammare (the personification of the sea) herself is indifferent on the subject. Later, when Fujimoto tries to destroy all human life with a prehistoric-level tidal wave, the ocean itself is treated like a horrendous monster threatening to swallow up the island itself, all at once a single entity trying to eat the island and a swarm of smaller beasts crushing civilization in a wet stampede. Here in particular we see nature portrayed as a nigh-unstoppable giant that could wipe an entire civilization off the face of the earth in a day.
No Western cartoon movie that I can think of has stood the test of time quite like these anime movies, and I think that’s because unlike the film Ferngully: the Last Rainforest, where nature is shown to be innocent and naïve, or the tv series Captain Planet, which only showed pollution as a result of villains (one of whom was a mutant rat, so maybe not all human pollution), Ghibli treats both the environment and the humans with respect, and is much more aware of which side really holds most of the power.
More than anything, I think this is why people are so resistant to the idea that climate change could still occur naturally, or that animals go extinct for reasons that have nothing to do with humans. Some people will say that we shouldn’t acknowledge natural climate change because it might give people an excuse to stop cleaning up after themselves, but there are literally people in Europe right now trying to enact a Mr. Burns plot from the Simpsons by blocking out the sun in areas that are “too hot” to reduce global warming, as if that won’t have terrible consequences, I don’t think that’s really what motivates people to become climate activists. When the solutions people come up with tend to make things worse than the initial problems, I think people area really just trying to exert some form of control over things that are infinitely larger than themselves.
As George Carlin once said, the Earth is going to be fine. The people are…not.
