Fall Guide
Autumn in Tennessee is an unreliable beauty. You can never be sure which face she’ll show. If there’s a decent amount of rain in August, followed by some nice chilly evenings in September, we get stunning foliage that rivals anything New England can brag about. But odds are always good that an arid summer and lingering heat will make our fall season a dud. Instead of strutting their stuff, the trees just do a slow brown fade until we wake up to an ice storm one morning and say, “Ugh, it’s winter.”
Photos: ericengland.net
So, no IMAX foliage experience this year, no leisurely weekend drives to gawk at the beauty of the changing season, no wallowing in sentimental nature love inspired by the bright palette of a wooded ridge—assuming we can find one that hasn’t been scoured for yet another fortress of luxury town homes. And we still have to rake the damn leaves. Bummer.
It’s far sadder, though, for the birds and other wildlife that have spent the past couple of months struggling to stay alive as their usual sources of food shriveled in the rainless heat. They’ve had no summer abundance to fatten on, and a lot of their winter food simply isn’t out there. It’s already been eaten up, or never appeared at all, thanks to the weather. To make matters worse, house-proud humans have replaced great swathes of natural habitat with barren lawns and useless decorative plants, creating an even slimmer margin for survival. One of our Disneyesque fantasies about nature is that all the little animals have some magical ability to cope with natural disasters. They don’t. Famine trumps instinct, and there’s going to be a lot of death out in the woods this winter. Think about that while you’re snarfing down your Thanksgiving feast.
Everyone seems eager to blame this year’s grim weather on the effects of global warming. That sure feels like a reasonable explanation, and we do dearly love an explanation for what discomfits us; but the truth is that it’s impossible to know whether a particular meteorological misery is the product of human-induced climate change. There have always been droughts and heat waves. They are part of the natural dynamic of the earth. This may be one of the worst years on record, but records have been kept for less than an eye-blink of time. The Mound Builders surely sweated through some comparable summers. Still, there’s a lot of breast-beating going on about how we’ve brought this on ourselves, and how even worse things are in store.
No doubt they are, but all the fretting over our collective environmental guilt, like our disappointment at the dreary fall colors, misses the real lesson of such a cruel year, which is this: we’re not important. The earth is indifferent to us, and to all our fellow creatures. It doesn’t regard our pleasure or our suffering. It just rolls on and does its thing without consulting our preferences, one way or the other. Not that we don’t affect it. Our actions have indeed endangered the current configuration of living things. Climate change, in theory, could do us in altogether, along with a lot of the species that have shared our existence. But life in some form will go on, and the absence of our cohort won’t matter to the earth at all. We’re no more or less significant, in the great terrestrial scheme of things, than cockroaches and mold.
We’re the cleverest of critters, and one of the special gifts of our oversized brains is an inflated sense of our importance. We can’t help thinking that the fall leaves and the spring flowers are put there to please us. We like to believe that tornadoes and hurricanes are either punishments from [insert name of deity here], or karmic payback for our heedless abuse of the planet. It’s all about us. Ironically, that self-regarding habit of mind is precisely what has imperiled our continued existence. The belief that the earth belongs to us, was somehow made for us, has fostered the fantasy that it is able to absorb our limitless demands on its resources. It’s our faith in our primacy that has led us to the brink of destroying this unique environment that keeps us alive.
We like to think we’re wising up on that score, but our current penchant for casting ourselves as saviors of a wounded planet risks becoming another ego trip that encourages us to forget that, in the end, we control nothing here. Certainly, we need to do all we can to change our ways in hopes that the planet will repair itself to our benefit, assuming we want to keep hanging around on this rock; but even if we do everything right, there will still be droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis...and, of course, the occasional disappointing autumn.
Jettisoning our idea of ourselves as masters of our domain may not be very gratifying to the ego, but it frees us to interact with nature in the most intimate way. We can look at a spider web and really see it, without analyzing its architectural impressiveness or recoiling from its “ick, a bug” factor. It simply is at that moment. We can experience it as a manifestation of life on earth, not greater or less than ourselves—in fact, not separable from ourselves. When we put aside our expectations, and yes, even our sense of responsibility, then we can truly understand our very small place in the universe.
We could certainly use some of that understanding these days, as the human race simultaneously rapes the earth and agonizes over the consequences. Surrendering to insignificance is the antidote to both ills. Harmony with nature comes easily when we approach it with humility. When we accept the transient, powerless nature of our lives, we begin to lose the desire to savage our environment—not because we feel guilty, or righteous, or fearful, but because we give up the fantasy that we should control the earth and our experience of it. We stop wanting to shut ourselves away from the world, inside outsized houses and automobiles. A hackberry looks as pretty as a Bradford pear. We accept the world as it is, and learn to see beauty in whatever face it shows us.
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