Autumn is on my mind. My memory tinkles with piano keys struck by Roger Williams playing "Autumn Leaves," and hears dead actors Walter Huston and Eddie Albert singing "September Song" in Knickerbocker Holiday. "The days hurry by when you reach September," but the heart says, "Why rush?"

Fall has a funny feeling of in-between. There was a place in my adolescent years where a hillside creek emptied into a basin of clear water, ice cold, to form a pool twenty or so feet deep. In the heat of summer, we'd let ourselves be swept down the rushing stream and into the mirror-­surfaced pool, and then float, roasting on our upper sides and freezing on our submerged sides. (Later, when we were old enough to have tasted Baked Alaska, burning on the outside but ice cream on the inside, we would recall Standing Rock swimming.)

The pool and dessert images remind me of fall, that time of the year when the blaze of leaves seems inconsistent with the nip in the air, when summer hesitates to go and winter hesitates to enter, a time of being in between.

In recent years, as autumn creates masterpieces of colors seemingly impossible to create, much less to repeat, year after year, we've been troubled that such a season of beauty could have become the source of human conflict.

Autumn points all of us to the natural world outside our man-made habitats. But how we individually see what is there depends to a great deal on what we want to see. Unfortunately, all of the interests in the economy and in the environment that have intensified in recent years have created two separate and warring ways of seeing nature.

The extremes of the two views are exploitation and preservation. Man needs natural resources to fuel an economy that, if allowed to sag, increases poverty and suffering. On the other hand, man needs to preserve natural beauty as a source of spiritual renewal and needs to conserve natural resources to share with future generations.

To both functions, nature presents illusions each side wishes to find there.

The conservationist ignores the savagery of forest animals and the decay of plants and the ravages of weather, and hopes the rich resources in the trees or beneath the soil could be found elsewhere or used more sparingly. The producer is interested in meeting the public's demand for products that are made of those resources. Both sides, until recently, have been overwhelmed by the sheer plentitude of nature. Only as population has grown and as the world has demanded more products has there been any real conflict.

And that is a true tragedy. The very thing that brought everyone together -- namely, the size and beauty of raw nature -- has now become both the thing that divides us into warring camps and the battlefield over which we fight. Nothing so uniting as nature ought to be so divisive.

Perhaps human conflict is a biological necessity. The physical world is incapable of expanding; it can only diminish in size as trans­portation erases distances and as natural wealth is converted into currency, and currents, and spent. But the population increases as the earth decreases, the human race feeding and growing off the salt-lick given it. Will we eventually, when our grazing lands are too scarce, go the way of the buffalo and the buffalo nickel? Or will we, forced into conflicts over forests and fields, somehow uncover hidden natural laws of peaceful co-existence and reason?

Fall reminds us of The Fall. When Adam and Eve were charged with stewardship over the globe, could they have known centuries would pass before any real test was made of how faithful they were to their work? Was their Fall only a faint portent of the bigger one yet to come, when Eviction from Eden would assume the proportions of Exodus from Egypt?

The renowned church historian, Roland Bainton, often retold the story of an Englishman driven through the American mountains when trees were at the height of color. His American driver turned to him when the tour was over and asked, "Well?" The Englishman replied, "Don't you think it's a little overdone?"

Our Eden has so awed us (for we have willingly wanted to be awed) that we have either exploited it or else frolicked in it but have not given it the careful attention caretakers of creation are charged to render. The Creator of nature also created human minds to tend it, and it would be sin not to use those minds now that they are so desperately needed.

My brother and I used to fight over the last piece of pie, until someone -- our mother or grandmother -- taught us never to take the last serving on a plate. We were always to leave something, in case unexpected company came by. Or, to use her words, "Jesus may drop in."

Surely there are ways for people of good will to picnic together at nature's table and still leave enough for the sons and daughters of God yet to come. We must not rush to join either side but must seek and nurture the "in-between" of justice for both sides.

Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.

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