On Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008, a column that he wrote on the financial markets drew an analogy with Mother Nature, and I was truly fascinated by what he wrote at the start of his column:
My friend Rob Watson, the head of EcoTech International, has a saying Mother Nature that goes like this:Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That's all she is.And because of that, says Rob, you cannot spin Mother Nature. You cannot sweet talk her, and you cannot ignore her. She's going to do with the climate whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. And Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.
I have since found that neither Rob Watson nor Thomas Friedman coined the phrase
Mother Nature bats last; that phrase can be traced to bumper stickers for the ecology movements such as Earth First!, and [probably] to ecologist Paul Ehrlich. Some of the appearances of the phrase add the note that
Nature is the home team.
Indeed, Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.
