My wife and I climbed a steep arroyo yesterday just above Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.  There were a few things for us to always consider in the back country in New Mexico.  The first is to stay together if at all possible for mutual aid. Out on the desert we were ants on boulders making moves that didn’t sync with our ages and variety of fragilities.  The second consideration was the set of storm clouds coming in slowly as if they were picking a spot to bless with rain.  The last place you want to be caught in a ‘male rain’ in New Mexico is in an arroyo.  Nature in this ‘no country for old men’ is nonnegotiable and says with a wink before disaster, “nothing personal”.  The implied violence of the gathered, shattered arroyo boulders and rock in this twisted landscape is all too obvious. A good decision carries additional weight out there.

I get the impression too many of the men and women in government these days have not spent much time in the open back country where consequences are not generated by opinion.  Apparently when insulated from raw nature, once you have hamstrung the truth in the web of civilization, everything is an opinion posing as truth backed by the vagaries of the balance of power.  Not so in wild nature.  Not so in Texas or Bangladesh.  Not so on this planet.  Rising, rushing water in the creek or the arroyo rises and rushes and does not check for ID before it does its work. For the religious I would say God gave us wilderness as a cautionary check on our rising hubris as a species.  Religious or not, we still haven’t figured out ‘there is no planet B’ and regardless if you see the story of Noah’s flood as allegory or literal truth, the message is the same.

A modest proposal for Good.

Good might be realizing that science, when done with discipline and correctly can be an accurate support to the Bible, Koran, Upanishads, or origin story and science does not need to be the whole story.  The ‘whole story’ exceeds the human mind so we may as well stop obsessing about the quantity of human intelligence and imagination and get back to very hard work of using the intelligence we have, whatever its scope, to understand the work of this planet’s beautiful systems of balance. For this writer, science denial is a kind of weird sacrilege and concurrently so is the demand that human kind’s slice of science be the whole story.  We seem to be offered a touch of very temporary creative control of some of the earth’s systems, but to deny science and its feed back messages is no different than giving your five year old boy a fully operational earth mover for his birthday and resenting your neighbor’s complaints when he levels the hood’s garages with the cars in them celebrating a new toy he doesn’t understand. This year we are directly witnessing earth’s feedback regarding the job we are doing in her nonnegotiable systems and the message is tragic and clear. Good is the the humility, faith and courage to make the sacrifices to do something about the impending tragedies using and developing the science we have.  We, as a species, may be the beloved of God, but let’s face it, we seem to be subordinate to the workings of the creator’s wilderness nature. Good is submitting to the daily messages and cautions from nature. Good is recognizing science as an enhancing lens rather than a political opinion. Right now, in this time, good is changing our ways and most certainly not doubling down on our arrogant errors.