The headlines are stark, the details grim. A man has been killed by a shark off the coast of Western Australia, a tragedy made all the more peculiar by the involvement of the British consulate. Why, one might ask, does the consulate of a distant island kingdom need to 'monitor' an incident that is, on the surface, a local maritime mishap?
The answer, as with so many things in this age of fractured identities and imperial aftershocks, is that the victim was a British national. And so we have the spectacle of a modern bureaucracy wringing its hands over the immutable laws of nature. The sea, as every Victorian schoolboy knew, is an Empire unto itself.
It does not recognise passports, nor does it care for the niceties of diplomatic protocol. Yet here we are, with consular officials presumably pondering the geopolitical implications of a Great White's territorial imperative. The incident itself is banal in its horror: a man swimming, a predator feeding, a body recovered.
But the reaction is feverish, almost decadent. We live in an age of risk aversion, where every random act of nature must be parsed for its political meaning. The British media will wail, the Australian authorities will promise investigations, and the sharks will continue their ancient dominion without a moment's thought for the inconvenienced diplomats.
This is the tragedy of modernity: we have convinced ourselves that we are masters of all we survey, when in truth we are but jellyfish caught in a current of our own making. The shark does not care for your consulate. It does not care for your borders.
It only cares for the flesh of the unwary. Perhaps that is the real lesson here: that the Earth remains wild, and our pretensions to control are merely the delusions of a species that has forgotten its place in the food chain.
