If you live in a college town, certain rural hamlets or a gentrifying hipster neighborhood, we're guessing you have hippie friends who swoon over the natural world, and urge you to "live natural" and "breathe in nature."
Sure. Breathe deep, Aquarius. Inhale flowers and butterflies and baby lemurs.
But, also: watch your back, homie.
Mother Nature isn't always a sweet lovely grandma with nothing but warmth, peace, love and Werther's Originals. If nature's a grandma, it's a Southern grandma who beats your ass with a ladle for no real reason. Cancer, floods, hailstorms, lightning. This planet is a blue and green octagon, and nature is Brock Lesnar.
If you need more proof, here are four wrenching GIFs to show your patchouli-soaked, flower-skirt-wearing, Prius-driving friends that we go hard on Earth, and if we humans hadn't engineered our way out of the food chain, we'd be getting our asses handed to us every day, just like this.
Turtle rips up mouse
What's amazing about this GIF isn't just that the turtle scissors Mickey, it's that the mouse keeps swimming for safety even after losing its lower half. Nature is so merciless it's almost as if she's looking to rub it in. FUCK.
Elk goes "127 Hours"
A victim of geometry, fate and physics, this sad elk died cursing nature. He was like James Franco in "127 Hours," only without a pocketknife. Lesson: rocks aren't even alive, and they'll still fuck you up.
Eagle allies with gravity to ruin a goat's life
Do eagles understand gravity? Know that they can use terminal velocity to smash an ungulate? Seems so. Honorary doctorate in physics for this bird? And example number three that life wants to rip up other life.
Even plants are ruthless
"Little Shop of Horrors" wasn't just a pretty decent musical — it accurately portrayed the heartless bitch that is the plant world. Here, a sundew gulps down a fly. Don't turn your back on your potted geranium, folks. You never know.
There's plenty more where those came from. And, if you were surprised by any of this, consider that you are nature, too. Is your nature that much kinder than all this? Didn't a cow suffer and die for your lunchtime hamburger? Didn't a Chinese factory worker lose a digit to manufacture your Galaxy 7?
Light and dark, sweet and fuggo. It's just real, son. "No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Your hippie friends might be right about organic food, eating less red meat and climate change, but they're wrong to say nature is anything but naturally harsh.
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