When I came to the country 20 years ago and spent a few days alone, I knew I had to live here. I had been hearing about the destruction of natural life for years but paid little attention to it, like most people. The trees and hills and hawks and wildflowers transformed me. I could never go back.
I understand now that nature and a life with animals around me are essential for my physical and mental health. I am not sure humans are fit to keep the planet healthy or even want to. In our country, making more and more money seems much more important than preserving the earth or the animals who live there.
“The world has been turned into steel and glass,” writes Joan Chittister. “We must go on guided nature walks now to see what we are missing. Maybe that’s why we no longer see the price we pay for our demise.”
When the animal rights movement gets through driving domesticated animals out of our lives and into their obscurity and death, and the builders run out of earth to build on, then the only place our children can see an elephant, horse, or pony is on YouTube.
It’s almost impossible to persuade people to preserve what we do not see, live with, or value. We are paying for and pursuing our demise. Perhaps it is just too disturbing to think about or focus on. Or maybe that is the price of being so greedy.
Rachel Carson wrote: “The more we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” Rachel Carson was sadly mistaken.
Carson said that hopeful statement long ago; sadly, history has proven her wrong. The banishment of working animals from human beings and the destruction of environment after environment is well underway. Our former president says it’s a hoax, and most people in his party agree.
It seems most people in the world agree with him. I don’t. Worthy people have warned us for years, and the truth is now upon us. I hope the next generation will do a better job than we have to get humanity to see the truth.
I can’t take care of the world and shouldn’t, but I can care for myself. I’ll never again live anywhere where I can not be close to nature or the animals who have been our partners on the planet since its creation.
And Maria and I are committed to doing everything, large or small, that we can to save our beautiful earth.
Great! Someone else who understood that real life is in the nature, with animals. Even in my country (as well as throughout the world…I think) the only interest is producing to make money, a lot of money, even to the detriment of our wonderful planet. Most of humanity has not understood that nature, without us humans, can live and indeed improve the situation to which we have reduced it. On the contrary, without nature we are finished.