Regardless of whether you believe in a God or not, everyone associates nature with divinity. Atheists will try to convince themselves that beautiful landscapes aren't a work of God or any higher being. The religious will work to convince themselves that it is. And anyone in between will be weighing up both arguments.
You can fall in love with nature, just as you can a wife or husband, boyfriend or girlfriend. You can find yourself, be yourself. I know that staring out at the Indian Himilaya and walking in the valleys of its surrounding foothills is where I've been truest to myself. I figured out what I wanted in life, only to return home and lose all concept of my dreams that were so perfect they seem detached from modern and artificail reality. So conceivable in the wilderness, in a life of tent living and trekking, those dreams were lost to the baffling power of the modern world. It was nature that made me see what I wanted: to immerse myself in religion, straddle continents in a bid to see the whole world and live the simplest of lives by farming, teaching and living of the land.
The impact of nature is humongous. Just 2 weeks and I was a changed - or realised - women. I had been on a pilgrimage to find myself and settled for nothing but what was true in my heart. Just 2 weeks. And that was all thanks to nature.
Ask a gardener and they'll tell you how much dedication is needed to maintain a healthy, natural environment. Ask a building developer and they'll tell you how easy it is to destroy everything.
The fragility of nature is awe-inspiring. Rainforests, deserts, mountains, beaches all create such a strong image in the mind and heart but they are so helpless.
When I walked down to the beach behind my house one evening, I felt the weakness and powerlessness of the nature. The beach had been a pleasure spot for us on many muggy evenings and warm winter afternoons. White, coarse sand that singed the skin from the bottoms of your feet spread for kilometres. And the sea that lapped at the shore had been so clear and turquoise. Looking out, the horizon was made of the ocean. Just ocean.
Only I went one evening and realised all those features were gone. Bulldozed, the sand was laced with tyre tracks. There was now a walkway. Nice? Bit at all. Sand had been dumped out to sea and lorries full of more sand and rocks growled along it. At the end of the arm of sand was an island. Trucks were loading the island with rubble to pad it out and laying out the foundations for, what we later found out, was to be a hotel out in the water. All the sea that had once run rampant, crashing against the rocks and dragging small boats out to sea was now stagnant; baking still in the man made lake. The vast expanse of sea that we had taken our kayak out and paddled half way to the Burj Al Arab was now drowned under many feet of imported sand.
The future income prospect has not, so far, been worth the damage. The UAE, Dubai particularly, has grown so fast within the past few decades. Sprawling and generating a brimming economy we were hardly in need of any more development.
But maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe I haven't. But the toll of the land is heavily evident. It's a beauty that's list FOREVER! Something as natural as that is never coming back. Ever. And when they realise it will be too late. For that one, seemingly unimportant, beach in one of the hottest places in the world, it is already too late.
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