Back when I was a girl, I lived in a town close to Manchester in the UK. While my school was in an urban area, it was close to a large green space called Tandle Hills. This large patch of wild was the perfect antidote to living in a town, giving the residents space to get out into nature and breathe.
One day at school, we were told that there were plans to build an amusement park on this beautiful patch of wild. I sat there in horror, as my classmates jumped around in glee. “What about the trees,” I wailed. “What about the lovely trees.”
I currently live on the Camino de Santiago in Northern Portugal and there is a railway line that passes very close to my home. Every day, without fail, I watch three different trains go by, each carrying around 70 to 100 logs. Each log is the size of a full-grown tree.
Every time one of the trains goes by, I feel angry or upset. I don’t care if I sound like a tree-hugger. Mother Earth never fails to lift me up and bewitch me with her vast beauty.
I’ve been in love with Mother Earth for as long as I can remember. Every single type of landscape leaves me with feelings of awe. I love the lush, green rolling hills of northern England, the barren land under the never-ending deep, blue skies of Spain, and the sand dunes under the twinkling stars in the deserts of Morocco. I love mountains and valleys, streams and lakes. I desire a patch of wild to grow my own fruit and vegetables above anything else. Most of all, I adore the trees.
I don’t want to live in a world without the wild. Do you?
I recently read that only 14 percent of the wild remains as deforestation continues unabated to satisfy our consumer needs. We only have to look at the destruction of the Amazon to raise cattle for food to see how we are destroying our wild.
How do we change this? Well, the answer is really simple. We stop living in a consumer-driven society. Less is more, my friends. Less is always more.
Perhaps we need to fall back in love with Mother Earth. We have to be honest and say that humans are not altruistic by nature. We need a reason to take action. So let the reason be our love for Mother Earth, from which we remember to respect and honour her, for the tremendous job that she does in sustaining all of humanity..
Let’s save the wild for ourselves and our children. The way humanity behaves may mean we leave behind a barren Earth for future generations.
(c) Samantha Wilson 2020. All Rights Reserved.
