Making Impossible Decisions

In almost any contest, everything that happens affects everything that happens thereafter.  A free throw missed in the third quarter does not make a difference in a one-point game.  Even in something as primal as a volcanic eruption, the component of human interference could apparently enter the narrative and, in complex and unpredictable geometries, alter the shape of succeeding events.  After the human contribution passed a level higher than trifling, the evolution of the new landscape could in no pure sense be natural.  The event had lost its status as a simple act of God.  In making war with nature, there was a risk of loss in winning.  (McPhee, 143)

After both the narrow saving of the harbor and the halting of Flakkarinn, a new fissure broke open and a new pounding catastrophe—the City Flow—was upon Heimaey.  Here the author suggests the responsibility of humans in the event, since they indisputably affected how the volcano affected the town.  This new stream of lava that would hit the city was probably headed that way due to the “water-hardened zone” (McPhee 142) created by the people themselves.  McPhee is saying that once these Icelanders decided to take up arms against the lava, they took responsibility for any of their future failures.  But this idea ignores our situation that Professor Field mentioned on Friday: the situation of being stuck making some sort of judgment about what to do with our natural world since we constantly find that we do have some sort of influence in it, whether we consider that influence to be natural or artificial.  As an Existentialist, Sartre has stated “I can always choose, but I must also realize that, if I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice” (44*).  In this sense, even “letting nature take its course” (McPhee 147) would only be intervening in precious nature in a different kind of way—by consciously not intervening when there is the potential of doing so.

This claim—that what eventually happened in Heimaey was in some sense brought on by the people themselves—implies that human actions are distinctly separate from nature and that they only affect nature insofar as they “[pass] a level higher than trifling,” a somewhat ironic statement since the only measurers of ‘how trifling’ something is are humans themselves.  So not only are we forced to choose how to enact (or not enact) change on our planet, but we are even forced to choose some sort of definition of “nature” and “natural” so long as we use such concepts to attempt to halt lava or to let it go on flowing.

If our definition of “nature” and “natural” is decided by humans themselves and not dictated by “nature,” then how should we define it?  Should we look out for our own human needs?  Does “nature” have needs?  Should we see human acts and acts of “nature” as separate?

*Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Ed. John Kulka. Trans. Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.