Page 112 - ECOlogic Book

Revenge of the Elements
(Fall, 1996)

Earth. Air. Fire. Water. A modern man or woman might wonder why these
are known to primal peoples as the four elements. We have our own
periodic table of 118 elements including lanthanoids and actinoids and the
latest, likely to be named Copernicium. Hence, the notion that the elements
could be reduced to just four might seem archaic or naïve. But the four
elements as understood by pre-literate societies are much more nuanced
than that. Anthropological lore has it that these elements represent the four
ways of disposing of the dead: Burial in the Earth; “Tree Burial,” as when the
dead are placed in the branches of a tree while Air does the work of
decomposing the body; Cremation; and Burial at Sea. While this
explanation may be partially correct, to my mind it does little to explain the
reverence held among primal peoples towards these elements.

I thought about the elements as I was raking leaves one breezy autumn
afternoon in 1995. Still searing through my memory was an image from the
previous night’s TV newscast of the fierce fires that billowed up the canyons
of Malibu, gulping houses as firefighters looked on helplessly. “There’s
nothing we can do to stop it now,” one of them said. “The fire is creating its
own weather before it, drying out everything in its path so it goes up like
tinder. The heat of the blaze is causing updrafts that pull the fire up the
hillside like a roaring inferno. All we can do now is wait till it gets to the
ocean.”

I thought about the flooding along the Mississippi that summer, of how cold
and miserable those people looked. They would have liked to have a little of
that Malibu fire to keep them warm. The people in Malibu could have used
some of that excess Mississippi water. I remembered the pictures of the
California interstate overpass that had buckled in an earthquake a few years
before, and the Florida hurricanes. New Orleans?

These images were still alive in my memory when the record-breaking
Eastern snowfalls came, in early 1996. By now, other memories had
accumulated: the Australian fires and the earthquakes in Kobe, Japan and
the San Fernando Valley, hurricanes Fran and Hortense. Earth. Air. Fire
Water.

Natural disasters. How puny they make the human feel. Of how little value
our technological cleverness in the face of such power. In fact, it appears,
these “natural” disasters remind us that we’re not so smart after all. We

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