“Nature has given birth to children, and has given birth to them in order to kill them.”Giacomo Leopardi · Zibaldone · 1832 · p. 4127
Nature is not a mother but a blind machine that makes life only to waste it.
Leopardi rejects the idea of nature as a benevolent mother. For him, nature is a blind machine: it generates organisms in abundance precisely because most must die early so the rest can live. A turtle hatchling emerging among hundreds of eggs and eaten by gulls on its first day shows the logic: survival is not nature's gift, but the side effect of its waste.
The card says nature wastes life. The next step is more uncomfortable: nature is not cruel either. Cruelty requires intent, and that is exactly what Leopardi denies. The machine does not hate you; it simply does not know you exist. When a gardener watches aphids devour his tomatoes, he does not ask whether nature is kind or wicked. It is neither, equally. The consequence is liberating: we stop looking to nature for blame or for rescue. But one question remains: if nature has no plans for us, where does our feeling that life should have meaning come from?
Why it matters Useful for anyone tempted to treat the natural as a guarantee of goodness, from healthy diets to naive ecological rhetoric.