For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it

The conservationist Tom McMillan once declared with grave truth: “For 200 years we’ve been conquering nature. Now we’re beating it to death.” In these words lies not only lamentation, but a call to awakening — a cry that pierces through centuries of arrogance and ignorance. For two hundred years and more, humankind has gloried in its dominion over the Earth, mistaking mastery for wisdom and conquest for progress. We have split mountains, tamed rivers, cut forests, and harnessed the winds — and in our triumph, we have forgotten that we, too, are part of the very nature we wound. McMillan’s words are not a condemnation of science or discovery; they are a warning against hubris, against the ancient sin of believing we can control what we do not revere.

From the earliest civilizations, humanity sought to understand the natural world — the rising of the sun, the cycles of the seasons, the breath of the wind. For the ancients, nature was divine, a living force to be honored and feared. But as centuries turned, reverence gave way to conquest. The Industrial Age dawned like a titan, its fires devouring coal and its machines tearing through wilderness. The forests fell before our axes; the rivers darkened with waste. We called it progress, yet progress without wisdom becomes destruction in disguise. McMillan’s words remind us that what began as conquest for survival has become a war of excess — a battle against our own life source.

The phrase “beating it to death” carries the weight of violence, not against an enemy, but against a friend — a mother, even. Nature is the womb that bore us, the air we breathe, the soil that feeds us, the oceans that cradle the rhythm of life. Yet in our pursuit of dominance, we have turned that sacred relationship into abuse. The planet groans under our appetite: the glaciers melt, the forests burn, the seas rise. We are striking the Earth as though it were an enemy to be subdued, forgetting that each blow lands upon ourselves. McMillan’s words echo like a prophecy — that if we do