“A beginning is a very delicate time” – Frank Herbert – Dune
My love of nature and my interaction with the environment have been central to my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve been around a while. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, so this journey is not so much a beginning for me as it is the beginning of me sharing my stories about my interaction, understanding, and love of nature. It is a story about the connection with our incredible planet, Mother Earth, and all living beings around us (including our fellow plants and animals).
“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century, he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.” —Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Cousteau is one of my childhood heroes. He brought to life the beauty and wonders of life under the sea for all of us and helped increase our understanding of our home, Mother Earth.
I worked as an engineer for a contractor for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center as part of our space program. The Voyager 1 space probe took a photo of Earth, in 1990, from approximately 3.7 billion miles away. The Earth shows up in that photo as a pale blue dot. Carl Sagan points out that “To my mind, there is perhaps, no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than his distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
There can be no more important endeavour for mankind now than to do just that. Preserve and protect our home, Mother Earth.