Herald.com | 10/18/2005 | Mother Nature -- Unforgiving, devastating

If nature were a politician, would he (she?) get trounced at the polls, or would we lavish it with support, awed by its power?

Consider some highlights of its accomplishments over the past 12 months: One quarter of a million people washed away to their deaths in December's Asian Tsunami; a major American city destroyed by a hurricane; entire villages in Central America declared mass graves after mudslides; more than 30,000 people buried in an earthquake along the Pakistan-India border.

Every one of these events -- in addition to a host of other floods, famines and assorted tragedies across the globe -- destroyed countless lives beyond the actual death count. Each one brought a pain so intense to so many people that even watching the stories on television could prove unbearable. And yet, we insist on proclaiming our love for ''mother'' nature. Disaster survivors routinely credit God (nature?) for their good fortune in living through their ordeal, but we seldom hear anyone criticize it for our misfortunes.

Sure, much of what nature wreaks is made much worse by man. And often the devastation could have, should have, been eased by man. Recriminations fly freely when it comes to our own misdeeds and those of our politicians after natural disasters. The levees of New Orleans should have stood stronger. The government's response should have come faster. A tsunami warning system should have been in place. Both of these tragedies could have been much less lethal had fewer people lived along low-lying areas. Earthquakes would kill fewer people in better-built structures. And we can only fathom what hell we are unleashing as we heat up the Earth and melt the glaciers.

Yet nature has been callously slaughtering humans like so many ants under a careless giant's boot for as long as life has existed. From Noah's flood to the plagues of Egypt, we've looked to ourselves to place the blame. After all, even the most arrogant of politicians might just respond to criticism a little better than nature ever would.

The catalog of death from the whims of nature dwarfs most, though not all, of mankind's excesses (mankind scored high in its ability to kill during the 20th century.) A third of Europe's population died of bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. Smallpox, drought, cyclones, earthquakes. Nature's casual cruelty spared no continent long before SUVs revved their greenhouse-gas spewing engines. And the killing is far from over.

That strange custom of calling that most unmaternal force ''Mother Nature'' brings to mind the kind of mother that raises terminally disturbed children, condemned to a lifetime of therapy. (Perhaps that's where we learned our bad habits, from that not-so-loving mother.)

And yet we persist, claiming that we love nature and arguing that we should love it even more, no matter how many millions of lives nature destroys, no matter the warnings that a new flu pandemic will likely kill millions more.

The reality is that much of what we call human progress is a record of humankind struggling to defend itself from the indiscriminate cruelty of forces we cannot quite understand.

Floods that killed tens of thousands in the Netherlands spurred the construction of sea walls that allowed the nation first to survive and then to thrive. Science came to the rescue after centuries of plagues, flu and pestilence that devastated entire continents throughout the ages.

So, what if nature really were a politician? My guess is that it would receive enormous support from awed and frightened voters.

And there lies a lesson for environmentalists. Is it any wonder more people don't embrace the message that we should protect the environment and love nature, even as nature batters and assaults us?

The secret to their future success is to turn their message around. Instead of telling us to protect nature from man, they would gain more followers if they told us to protect ourselves from nature. It sounds less cuddly than hugging trees and showing us fluffy panda bears. But taking a page from the politically popular war on terror, they could remind us how much pain we have already endured, and how much more we will suffer if we don't take all the necessary measures -- whatever they may cost -- to protect ourselves from the madness and cruelty of nature.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs