When one ventures into nature, warning signs abound. Moose! Steep Cliffs! Falling Rocks! Duck Crossing! Lightning Frequently Strikes Here On Thursdays! High Winds! And should you approach too closely to the ocean or defy a current, your fellow species-members will reveal a usually taciturn compassion and warn you of rogue waves and wayward sharks and malicious rocks.
These same people, though, when in the city, will happily watch you drive a car or step into a plane … and not say anything. They won’t even think anything. They won’t be alarmed in the slightest. They do it too! Yet unless you live in the middle of the Nile, you have far more chance getting damaged or finalized by a fellow species-member or one of his creations than anything from nature.
Danger is where you live, in your environment. And our environment is the city, where rabid killers roam, requiring ransoms; raged drivers careen, seeking random revenges; terrorists lurk above eyesight, waiting to drop.
Of course, we built the city to escape the tiger and crocodile, the battalions of bees, the flesh-obsessed ants. And in this escape attempt, we’ve largely succeeded. Most reasonably reasonable people admit, though, that all we’ve done is substitute the danger of ourselves—our missiles and vehicles—for all those indifferent hungry animals.
True.
Unfortunately, we haven’t simply substituted dangers, but have added to them. Let’s draw a chart to illustrate the compounding dangers.
| | Man in Nature | Man in the City |
| Dangers | 1. Beasts and Insects 2. Acts of God 3. Disease and Pestilence | 1. Technology 2. Acts of God 3. Disease and Pestilence 4. Elimination of Beasts and Insects |
| Dangers Minimized or Eliminated | — | 1. Beasts and Insects |
The fourth urban danger is not the separation of man’s environment and the tiger’s, but the gradual destruction of natural environments that, in turn, destroy—or threaten to destroy—key threads and nodes in life’s web (such as the bee) that, in turn, threaten to destroy us.
Thus, in a comic irony—comic from a divine or demonic perspective anyway—the very threat we’ve spent so much time and effort to diminish and eliminate, while appearing to have been dealt with, transforms itself in the shadows to a different form … and all we’ve done is add a new danger (our creations) and transform (unwittingly) an old one.
Yet we still, perhaps from desperation, consider ourselves clever. Likely from desperation, as we go so far as to proclaim this the age of knowledge.
What should we then react to? When should mothers scream, grandfathers solemnly warn, and sensitive people everywhere breathe cautious cautions? Well, obviously, whenever they spot the real danger … the source. Whenever they see a man.
