Nature (short story inspired by Ed Elliott Sculpture)

The first time I saw them, I was six. My family lived in a village called London. A small place where hundreds of years ago, millions lived. It was hard to believe the pictures that I had seen. Hard to believe that our small timber house was built on the remains of a great city. But the city was long gone, buried under tonnes of rubble and rotting moss. The trees and wildlife had come back to this place, and very little survived of what once was.

They came out of the forest. Slow, peaceful, calm. They came from the very wood that we burnt for warmth. But they moved, and flowed, and had a beauty about them that was mesmerising. The ground seemed to ripple below them, propelling them forward with hardly a sound. Their faces were smooth and expressionless, their eyes dark pools that followed our every move.

They were our judges. And it was judgement time.

It had started so slowly, but we noticed it. Warming summers, vicious winters, the polar ice caps melting, volcanoes exploding, rivers flooding. The experts had called it Global Warming. The planet was changing, and as its inhabitants, we blamed ourselves and tried in our own feeble way to amend what we thought we had done wrong.


We fitted solar panels, insulated our houses, built wind and tidal farms, cut back on deforestation, protected green belt land, drove electric cars. We even stopped using pesticides on our crops. We fought to protect as much of nature as we could, but still we pillaged more than we saved. And all that time we thought we were behaving, nature was waiting.

We though we were educated. How naive we turned out to be.

Particle physicists and scientists had investigated and tested our very beings and everything that surrounded us. They told us that they understood how nature worked and that all living creatures on earth had evolved over millions of years. They told us that plant and animal life was inert and did not have a conscious mind like humans. That we needed them to survive.
But the reality was that nature didn't need us.

It started with underwater earthquakes sending tidal waves that swept miles in land, washing away man. Volcanic eruptions that buried cities in meters of lava and ash. We didn't listen.

Then the solar winds burnt us, increasing cancer rates and making it unsafe to be outside at midday. Wild animals began to infest inner cities. Foxes attacking us. Rats overrunning the sewers. Seagulls attacking people in the streets. We still didn't listen.

Then a moss began to spread world wide. Soft and green, we treated it with pesticides, but it persevered. It grew on buildings, roads and even the cars. It grew in our concrete jungles and its roots were deep and strong. When the buildings began to crumble, we began to worry. But we still weren't really listening.

We hadn't seen the bigger picture.

At sea, whales and sharks began to attack our vessels, sinking tankers, cruise ships and submarines. The birds attacked planes, sacrificing themselves to send the craft crashing to earth.

Asteroids destroyed our space craft and satellites. Earthquakes swallowed our mines and our oil reserves. Then we almost destroyed ourselves when we fought over what little resources we had left.

Then there was quiet. We were without fuel to maintain our power. Governments fell and infrastructure decayed. They called it The Second Dark Age, and life expectancy fell year after year. Suddenly, fifty was old.

And they came. And we feared them. But we also respected them. They didn't attack. They just observed. They are our judges. And they are judging us.
We call them Nature.


Thanks to Ed who allowed me to use his beautiful sculptures as inspiration. See his amazing work here www.edelliott.co.uk