Our lease of life: the environment is our landlord

The environment is our landlord and what we use from it we rent, we do not buy.

The environment is a hard taskmaster but a fair one. It chills us with snow, bends us with hurricanes and bakes us with heat. The price we pay for living in it is high but not overly so if we curb our greed, for it can feed us and support our short lives albeit with bitter medicines and sweet herbs. We come and go while it remains; our tenure is short and our lease on living in it is full of terms and conditions which we break at our peril.

Ultimately the freeholder rules the leaseholder. the environment has dominion over the life it supports. This is old wisdom. We can break the terms of the lease, but not the lease itself and when we break the terms we are punished with due retribution and forced to offer indemnities which we can be powerless to perform.

The freeholder is judge jury and executioner in nature’s world. We might be able to influence it and even change it but we cannot defeat it, so we ought to observe its rules and perform our short lease on life, granted by the environment, as best we can, for the lease which we took when we entered this world might not be offered on the same terms to our descendants when it is their turn to look for a home.