In ancient times, man and nature lived together in harmony, since men’s lives depended on nature itself. So man felt an instinctive love for nature, with the awareness that it was something much greater than him and consequently he had to respect it. Problems started when man understood that he would have to modify nature in order to survive and to make it more comfortable for himself, for example by razing forests, killing animals, polluting the atmosphere with his factories and destroying entire ecosystems, without caring about the damage inflicted on nature itself.
Certainly, these actions had many consequences, which at first were thought as a divine punishment, especially when religion was deeply rooted in society, for example as it was in the Middle Ages with epidemics and famines. But there were other opinions about a punishment made by nature itself, which rebelled against human actions through natural catastrophes. A poet of the first generation of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, discussed this topic in his most famous work, “The Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner”. The story concerned a mariner starting a journey on a ship with his crew. One day they ran into a storm, but an Albatross helped them as a guide, until the mariner, for no reason, shot it with his crossbow. Following this event, it was as if nature wanted to take revenge for the crime committed against it, stopping the wind, so that the mariner and his crew were stuck into the sea. Only through the love for other elements of nature, as the water snakes, was able the mariner to obtain redemption, with the punishment of having to tell his story to anyone he met on his way. The moral teaching is that every crime against nature will cause a revenge by nature itself and since every element of nature was made by God himself and he loves both man and nature alike, men also have to respect nature.
This message is very current also for what ecologists are trying to do today, showing that it is important to have respect for nature because without it there would be no life. Thus there are conflicting opinions about the cause of these natural phenomena, as some view them as punishments by God and others as a rebellion of nature itself. The hypothesis closest to the current reality is the second, considered more rational and scientific, and also less abstract than the religious one.
Written by: Savarese Lara Maria, Cascone Anna Maria, Serrapica Salvatore, Donnarumma Sara, D’Auria Alfonso.