Nature, God and us...

With the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth comes the shocking statistic that 50% of the UK population do not believe in evolution.

What?!!

150 years after The Origin of Species and 50% of people do not believe what is plainly in front of their eyes. I thought that argument was settled with Watson & Crick's (and poor neglected Rosalind Franklin's) discovery of DNA in the 50s. OK we've had an anti-science regime in the US for 8 years and the learning of the Arabic word has been crushed by religious fundamentalism, but I always hoped that rationality reigned supreme in Blighty.

And what has this got to do with eco-living? Well, the creationist theory states that after creating all the organisms in the planet, God created man and gave him dominion over all the other beasts, plants etc. Evolution puts us right into the middle of nature, part of it, not on top of it - this was a fundamental mindshift and the one that scared Darwin himself. While we can damage natural systems, we cannot dominate them. We need the environment as our life support system and we need to align to its systems - solar powered non-toxic cycles of materials - and stop going against them.

While I write this there are people on the radio who can't understand why "in this day and age we can't handle a couple of inches of snow". It's Nature, baby, and she's bigger and stronger than us.