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This article provides a unique look at nature by taking us back in time to the first settlers of America. These settlers had great fear and respect for the environment and for the effect it could have on them. They had an almost morbid fascination with the sun and the power it had over the balance of the body. With disease more prominent and more deadly, one had to be wary of the dangers of nature. Many diseases were attributed to exposure to too much heat. While these people had a worse understanding of their environment that we do now, they had to live with its effects everyday. Whether this actually makes them closer to nature than we are today is an interesting question to ponder. With all the medicine and technology we have today, it’s easy to subscribe to the idea that nature’s effect can be conquered or beaten. Settlers back then however, had to deal with the daily physical effects that the environment could have on you.
One of the most provoking parts of the article was the idea that environment, the heat specifically, could actually shape a race of people. The English believe that hotter climates made people ‘wittier’ and smarter but less physically strong than people from colder climates. That’s why these people were often conquered by Northerners. We tend to ascribe stereotypes to different regions even today. The simplest example is the way Northerners view Southerners and vice versa. When we talk about these differences we rarely discuss environment. However, it was the environment that first created these differences. The warmer climates of the South and the flatter topography led to the agrarian focused, plantation style economy. It was the environment that paved the way for slavery and made the South so dependent on it.
Jumping into the minds of these settlers raises some interesting questions about nature. Does nature actually have less of an impact on us now or are we just better equipped to handle it? I would argue that nature doesn’t have less of an effect on us than it did on the colonists, we have just developed better ways to counter that effects and live with nature. However, I don’t subscribe to the idea that you can ever conquer nature. No matter how many diseases we cure or preventative measures we take, the environment will always have an effect on us. The countermeasures that the settlers took, although comedic to us now, expose an attitude we still have today. Rather than seeing nature as something we live off of, we see it as something dangerous that we have to fight against. It is something unknown that has to be explained. I have to wonder if this attitude has something to do with the American Exceptionalism that Henry discussed in his post. Perhaps we would feel vulnerable or defeated if we left ourselves at the mercy of an environment we could not control or understand.