“When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is ‘over yonder’ in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement”
Timothy Morton
What is it with nature?!
On the subject of the word ‘binge’ the Cambridge Dictionary offers us:
Binge
noun uk informal
an occasion when an activity is done in an extreme way, especially eating, drinking, or spending money:
a drinking/eating/spending binge
‘He went on a five day drinking binge’.
The use of the term is practically always pejorative (with the exception of its employ in the course of braggadocio – usually by the young!) and by way of illustration of the weaknesses and excesses of human beings.
So – what does that have to do with nature?
I have previously waxed lyrical in these jottings concerning the abundance and vigour of the flora and fauna of the west coast of Canada. Springtime is a particularly verdant season and it can be difficult to keep up with the garden when it is putting on its annual growth spurt. Spring – however – does at least make some sort of sense to me, following hard as it does upon the heels of the fallow winter months.
Autumn is different – or so it would seem to me at any rate.
In the autumn we get fungi! In just a few days these amazing organisms burst en mass through our lawns and beds in a manner reminiscent of the creature from ‘Alien’ (though without the lawn bit of course). They are omnipresent for a short period and then wither and vanish again for another year – as though never there. Do they lurk underneath the grass the rest of the time, just waiting for the ordained moment to burst forth like a joke waiting for a punchline (that would be the one about the ‘fun-guys‘!)?
Then there are fruit flies (time flies like an arrow, etc!). Exasperated home-owners reach for Google to plead: “How do fruit flies come out of nowhere?“. May-flies famously live but a single day; fruit flies, sadly, can live for forty to fifty – seemingly all of it during the autumn and mostly around the recycling bin, which they can – apparently – smell from several miles away.
Worst of all in my view – however – are the spiders.
During the rest of the year – and particularly during the hot summer months – these arachnids lurk sulkily in dark corners, or scurry away furtively when stones or suchlike are turned over unexpectedly. Every now and again they stir themselves, get their arses into gear and produce a bit of desultory webbage – as though to demonstrate that they still can.
Come the autumn all that changes! The spiders are abruptly jolted into action and start weaving the most outrageous structures as though their lives depend upon it… which, of course, they may do! I know nothing of of the annual cycle of these tautologically multi-legged arthropods.
What I do know is that the creatures themselves seem to double in size and to multiply exponentially in number just as soon as the temperatures start to fall, whilst their sticky ambuscades become more and more elaborate and are thrown across ever more infeasible spaces. The end result is that it becomes nigh on impossible to mow one’s lawn (as did I yester-eve) or to cultivate one’s garden without getting a face full of spidey-silk!
Bleuch!!
What I want to know is – if binging is frowned upon in humans, why is it considered acceptable throughout the rest of nature?
In the midst of a brace of posts on the closely related subjects of teaching and learning – comes this life lesson from the world of rugby…
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