Slid­ing qui­et­ly along the shore­line of a lake cre­at­ed 12,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age retreat­ed, brings the dif­fer­ence between change caused by nat­ur­al process, and that wreaked by human fol­ly, into baf­fling focus.

When the forces of Nature reshape the world  they cre­ate things that even when stark, are beau­ti­ful. When human­i­ty does the same, it’s more often than not ugly destruc­tion, no mat­ter how you look at it.
The  stump of a once tow­er­ing white pine felled by age, a vio­lent storm or the weight of ice and snow, can take years, per­haps decades, to rot away.

In the process, it’s a nurs­ery for a wind­blown seed to take root and become a sprout of new growth.
Imag­ine the odds of that hap­pen­ing. And yet, it did.
That’s the process of nat­ur­al change, a ver­sion of tak­ing with one hand and giv­ing with the other.
Now try to cal­cu­late a sim­i­lar small mir­a­cle occur­ring in the unnat­ur­al, relent­less changes being wrought on Gaza. Accord­ing to an esti­mate by the UN Envi­ron­ment Pro­gramme, each square meter of the tor­ment­ed ter­ri­to­ry con­tains an aver­age of 107 kilo­grams of debris that includes asbestos, unex­plod­ed ord­nance, human remains and the tox­ins released by weaponry.
And that was cal­cu­lat­ed a year ago. A UN survey in July this year, con­clud­ed that: “More than 86 per cent of crop­land is dam­aged, while 12.4 per cent is undam­aged but out of reach”, and like­ly to remain so as long as the fight­ing continues.
That leaves just short of 1.5 per­cent of Gaza, rough­ly 200 hectares, direct­ly avail­able to feed more than 2 mil­lion peo­ple, who pri­or to the war were main­ly self-suf­fi­cient in fruit, veg­eta­bles and chicken.

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Fifty years after the Viet Nam war end­ed, civil­ians in that rav­aged land, as well as those in Laos and Cam­bo­dia, are still being killed and maimed by unex­plod­ed ord­nance and suf­fer­ing the last­ing effects of her­bi­cides like Agent Orange, a chem­i­cal designed to oblit­er­ate crops and nat­ur­al foliage.
Efforts to clear unex­plod­ed Amer­i­can muni­tions and land­mines and a reha­bil­i­ta­tion pro­gram for war vic­tims have been halt­ed, cour­tesy of the Trump administration’s slash and burn of USAID.
This 1960s anti-war poster sums it up in a sin­gle line. The rem­nants left by con­tin­u­al war between the forces of weath­er and aging also last for decades.
But as the roots of ancient white pines fade and bleach, they become nat­ur­al art.
Ift his one was giv­en a clever title and an uncon­scionably high price tag, it’s a fair bet a big name art auc­tion house could sell it to some­one who’d buy it just for the brag­ging rights of own­ing it, and no idea that the time-weath­ered stump is price­less, but only where it is now.
The price tag for reclaim­ing (or obtain­ing in the eyes of some) the  ruins of Gaza will be record-set­ting, but so far the only plan for it is what amounts to a crime under inter­na­tion­al law: dis­plac­ing what­ev­er res­i­dents are still alive when the war is over, and trans­form­ing the ruins into a  “Riv­iera” only the crass and the taste­less would find appealing.
The prod­ucts of nat­ur­al trans­for­ma­tion, on the oth­er hand, are more often than not wor­thy of that over­worked adjec­tive,  awesome.

And yet, puny though we are in com­par­i­son, instead of spend­ing time and resources fig­ur­ing out how not to, we’re doing our utmost to reduce both the nat­ur­al world and our place in it.
Being pre­pared for and fight­ing wars, for exam­ple, is a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to glob­al warming.
The Con­flict and Envi­ron­ment Obser­va­to­ry (CEOBS), which mon­i­tors the envi­ron­men­tal dimen­sions of armed con­flicts and mil­i­tary activ­i­ties, cal­cu­lat­ed that  “the total mil­i­tary car­bon foot­print is approx­i­mate­ly 5.5% of glob­al emis­sions.” If the world’s mil­i­taries were a coun­try, it would have  “the fourth largest nation­al car­bon foot­print in the world.”
One endur­ing sym­bols from this part of the world, which leaves no print of any kind, is the loon, whose feet are so far back it can­not walk on land, but can swim and fly so well they nev­er need to bother.
The­o­ries on why they fre­quent­ly raise one foot include stretch­ing, cool­ing off and part of their preen­ing process.
An appeal­ing fourth pos­si­bil­i­ty is to imag­ine it as one of “flip­ping the bird” at the time­less idio­cy of humanity.

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