What is "Natural?"

A couple of things have gotten me thinking about this. One is, not surprisingly, labor and delivery. The other is the Little House on the Prairie books that I finished re-reading this month.

Like a lot of Americans, I've become more inclined to think well of products labeled "all natural" and usually for good reason. While "organic" is so overused it borders on absurd, "all natural" usually indicates no preservatives or no added hormones or generally less crap. I'm pro whole wheat and I vote.

Of course, in the 1880s you didn't have the options that we do today. Your food was organic because you either grew it yourself or you bought it from the guy who did. Food was carefully caught or harvested and carefully stored. They weren't processing the heck out of everything and there was no throwing away leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. Things were all natural by default.

The problem is, to paraphrase Bart Simpson, nature is a hideous bitch goddess. Like us, she is corrupted. What was good and pure is compromised.

Take the Rocky Mountain Locusts that extended their breeding ground into the Great Plains in the 1880s, devestating millions of acres of homesteaders' crops. Two competing "natural" forces collided: man, tilling the ground to produce food for survival and a bunch of hungry grasshoppers.

The Earth has always been meant to produce food for man (whereas we could argue about whether or not man was meant to hunt to survive), so in an important sense, farming is natural. So, too, do locust have to eat, and they frequently travel in swarms, so it was completely "natural" for them to migrate east for more food.

... A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before, wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder in "On the Banks of Plum Creek."

There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind...

The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.

They ate everything that was green and good; every leaf, every ear of corn. They ruined Pa's crop, and then they laid their eggs for a frightening reprise.

Au naturale.

It is no wonder we developed pesticides. Man, unlike beasts, can develop artificial means to protect itself against predators or the elements. Isn't that a kind of natural?

The truth is, we don't know precisely what nature should look like, only what it does. And sometimes it ain't pretty.

All creation groans Scripture says. Not unlike a woman during childbirth I suspect. In anticipation. Agony and beauty wonderfully, horrifically, inexplicably entwined until the end comes.

This is why we need thoughtful people to wrestle with questions of medicine and science. We are not called to conquer nature, but sometimes we have to try to temper her awful power--not because we can but because she is imperfect too.

And I will go easier on women who opt for comfort measures during childbirth. What is natural is not always good.