Historically, Western art and culture has been known to revere nature as well. Before writing his famous Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil was best known for a collection of poems called Bucolics that glorified the country life; its protagonists were peasants and herdsmen who challenged each other to musical duels over romantic rights to a common lover, or even complained about real laws of Virgil’s time that made life difficult for farmers. The poet’s contemporary city-dwelling elites maintained that, though his written Latin was grandiose, highly literary, and generally beyond equal, when Virgil spoke, he had a quiet and dry voice, his sentences were short and terse, and he used a simple and rustic vocabulary.

In the early Middle Ages, Romanesque and Byzantine churches broadly featured frescoes and mosaics representing vines, flowers, animals, and stars; columns were more than ever made to look like palm trees. Late medieval and early modern scholars often used the term “Nature”—with a capital “N”—as a kind of euphemism for God: in this way they strove to speak of religion and science in the same breath.

 In more recent centuries, John Keats took up and reinvigorated the naturalistic themes of Virgil and other ancient poets, while J.R.R. Tolkien’s genre-defining fantasy novels featured sentient trees that raged against the destructive encroachments by industrial-minded men into their forests, which they were entrusted to guard like shepherds tending to their flocks. And then, of course, there’s Robert Frost. Just evoking his name will make anyone who’s ever read his poems think of the woods.

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I was lucky to be living here when the Pandemic broke out. Though downtown isn’t too far, my area is really isolated—things weren’t so bad here. You could definitely still feel the change though, especially in the first few months. The streets and sidewalks, though never that crowded before, became almost deserted. An ominous silence settled in over the neighborhood, aping its usual serenity like a negative image of the same picture. My rare trips to the city center felt like visiting some abandoned Rust Belt town, with the ruins of its former prosperity still looming over the scenery like troubled spirits of the departed.

Around this time, I saw a movie set in the First World War. I can’t remember its name. This is a period I’ve always had a kind of morbid fascination for—not the excited interest of an aficionado, more like the horrified inability to look away from a terrible car crash. How could people dig themselves into trenches like that; how could they live like stray dogs—all skin and bone, plagued by rats, infested with fleas and disease—with nothing to look forward to other than the inevitable call to run up a hill and charge head-on into machine-gun fire, knowing most of them wouldn’t make it to the other side? And for what? Honestly. For what. There never was a dumber war.

I grew up with stories of how my grandmother, as a child, survived the Spanish Flu pandemic that broke out right after the end of WWI. She and her sister both got sick. One day she woke up in the hospital, finally feeling better. She looked to the bed next to hers where her sister had been. It was empty. These stories stay with you.

Still, hearing them when I was growing up, they seemed so far off—relics from a bygone era, before the Internet, before cable TV, before any TV really…all they had back then was the radio, and a pretty poor-quality one at that. They didn’t even have vinyl records! Just shellac ones, the kind you spin on a gramophone, and which shattered like glass so easily, as seen in many scenes of fits of rage in old black-and-white movies. Technology, and all the lifestyle advances that came along with it, seemed to have elongated the century between the Spanish Flu and the present day into an entire millennium. World War I? The Influenza? Ha! Might as well say: “The Dark Ages!”

But when our own pandemic hit, that century between 1920 and 2020 suddenly shrunk like crazy. Suddenly, those stories didn’t feel so remote and strange to me. Suddenly, like waking from a really convincing dream, the flashing screens of our cell phones and the glass-and-steel gleam of our skyscrapers couldn’t seem to hold up the magic barrier they had kept the natural world at bay with. Suddenly, we felt how vulnerable humanity still is to the whims of the wild.

Maybe this is why so many refused to be vaccinated, or even to wear a mask. More than some elusive, conniving, deliberate indoctrination from Trump World and his QAnon groupies, perhaps the simple truth was that too many of us feared to let go of that modernist dream: the idea that, with all our apparently undeniable human superiority, we had somehow failed to make ourselves completely immune to unwanted incursions from the natural world. The fear that, despite our science-fiction fantasizing of living in an almost-completely separate universe from plants, animals, stars, and black holes, we are still very much a part of their world. A fear of weakness, basically. A fear of loss of control. After decades of solving every conceivable problem with an authoritative phone call to tech support or customer service, we had finally run up against something that none of our rights, freedoms, technology, or weapons could defend us from: nature’s wrath.

Will we heed the wake-up call and get it together in time to avert nature’s next hardball? With the Pacific Northwest scorching under record-breaking heatwave after record-breaking heatwave, will we finally start to take Global Warming seriously? When the helicopters can’t even tackle the forest fires properly because their propellers keep overheating under the blistering sun, you know the situation is starting to get serious.

But I have to believe we’ll find a way. I have to believe that…

…though hardships may toss her through fast-wreathing storms,
Plunge her into the deep, cast her on rocky shores,
Though pain pangs may scorch her, leave blistering sores,
Though new facts may quake her, unravel her home,
Humanity will never cease to roam onwards, rowing always to sunnier prairies
On coastlines bathed in the blessings of her endeavors,
Sweet nectar of Tomorrow.

From scale and fang we arose, severed the invisible string of instinct,
Learned to question the quasars and quarks,
To light sparks with matches,
To find matches, call cabs, order food, change the mood
With the flick of a finger over glistening pocket screens,
To glean refuse and make it new,
To print real steaks with machines and build limbs sturdy and true,
To send rovers to Mars, to make self-driving cars,
To tweet kudos to stars and replace bars of gold with plastic cards.
Will the silver-stringed sirens luring our planet to calm
Lull asleep the bold who face our problems head-on?
Will the restless search of Science remain obedient to Greed
Or will it rise and meet the need of our time, with every theorem and appliance
To reconcile us at last with the wild?