My Best Memories

By Naturalist Activist

When I was five, my mother took me to the zoo in Rome. It was almost closing time when we found ourselves near the lions, one of which had cubs. The zookeeper, who like all Italians loved bambini, took one of the cubs out of the cage and let me play with it. It was one of the best experiences of my childhood, stroking and holding this great furry, purring kitten. I at once determined to become a zookeeper.

When I was eleven we lived in an isolated ranch house in the middle of the countryside in North Carolina. In the evenings the fireflies blazed by the thousands in in the field behind the house, and the whippoorwills called to each other. A moonflower vine grew up against the house, and one full moon night I watched its huge white flower open, like a gigantic morning glory. A large, pale green, long-tailed luna moth, attracted to its sweet scent, came and hovered over it, sipping its nectar. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.

A few years ago my husband and I camped our VW van on a dike next to a small stream flowing into Lake Ismarida in Northern Greece. Across the stream tall canes grew, and in them lived Mr. and Mrs. Little Bittern. In the early mornings we would look for them through our binoculars. They would emerge cautiously onto the edge of a swaying cane to study us, too. We felt we had formed a relationship based on mutual curiosity, and we were sad to leave.

On winter trips to the Amvrakikos Gulf in Western Greece, we camped out on a spit of land in the middle of the lagoon. We would get up early, before dawn broke, to watch the great egrets as they left their perches in the tall trees of the offshore islets and winged their way over us to commence their day’s fishing. These great white birds would turn first pale blue and later pink in the light of the rising sun. The sight was heart-achingly beautiful.

Last August, as the almost-full moon was rising, a pack of young jackals surrounded us in the gloaming. They put back their heads and howled, a thrilling musical sound so intense we could feel it vibrate within us. They were only a few feet away; they trusted us and we weren’t afraid of them. I don’t know what that moment of contact meant to them. To us, it was like being admitted for those few moments into their world.

As I look back turning the pages of memory, it seems to me that most of the really stunning pictures in my mind involve birds, animals, insects or flowers. The fox-cub left to wait by its mother in an apple orchard in the light of the setting sun, the vivid orange of its coat and gold touching the apple leaves. The squacco heron caught with the bright green frog dangling from its beak. Our first sight ever of that elusive bird, the great bittern, beak pointed skywards and an eye on either side of the reed it was hiding behind. A field of bright blue lupins. The field mouse we saw in Norfolk, standing upright in front of its hole and clutching an enormous blackberry in its tiny front paws. A huge, barnacled sea-turtle swimming away into the blue depths off Lefkada. A pair of pink squids with enormous eyes that would approach when I waved my hands at them, waggling my fingers. The first time I ever saw a sea-horse, a tiny golden creature that tightened its tail around my finger when I picked it up and swayed gently in the current. A jackal sniffing a purple zinnia in our summer garden. The kingfisher that landed on my husband’s hand one day when we were bobbing about in the sea.

As I think back on these memories, I remember, not so long ago, a world that was full of creatures of the air, land and sea. They made my world a much richer place, but they had their own worlds, and their own place in them. Each one of them had its own life, its own consciousness, and each of them was, in some way, the hero of its own story as it hatched and grew, evaded predators, found things to eat, a mate to breed with—as it lived.

Are we more important than the trees, the plants, the bees, the butterflies, the birds, the fish or the animals? We seem to think so. I don’t mean the things we do to make ourselves homes or the fields we clear so that we can grow food. Many creatures modify their environments to some extent in order to create homes for themselves, and in doing so inevitably come into conflict with other species that have other needs. Wholesale destruction of the environment, though, is another thing.

There are many things wrong with the way we treat the natural world, and some of them at least are avoidable. For instance, we don’t have to use most of the plastics that break up to pollute land and oceans, and we could easily change our ways if we wanted to. Why don’t we? I don’t know.

What really bothers me is that we are killing the world around us so we can have mobile phones and mobile internet. Most of the wonderful things I remember and cherish are no longer there: no kingfishers on the sea shores or river banks, no fireflies flickering in the gloaming, no sea-horses in the seas. All these things are disappearing even in the most pristine places, where the air is clean and the water is clean and the forests are largely untouched—except for the cell towers. We’re killing everything in nature so we can have mobile technology. As we’ve moved up the scale from bigger to smaller wavelengths, more and more creatures we share this world with have died, and the world has become an unutterably poorer place.

We can still change that. We can at least save what’s left, if not because we care about other creatures per se, because we ought to recognize that it is in our own best interest to do so. Unless we are planning a future based on cannibalism, we need plants and insects, birds and animals. It’s time we turned the cell towers off.

Read about the real-life effects of 5G on insects, birds and animals:

“5G Cell Towers Cause Massive Insect Decline on the Greek Island of Samos, Part 1″ at https://app.box.com/s/bt4k6qitbya2vzv2zafgglilop5rb7im (copy and paste link into your browser)

and

“5G Cell Towers Cause Massive Insect Decline on the Greek Island of Samos, Part 2” at https://app.box.com/s/924728ibqipzy9v0suskuae15xjbhjk7 (copy and paste link into your browser)

If you live in the UK, or are a UK citizen, please sign the parliamentary petition “Protect Plants and Animals from 5G Millimeter Wave Radiation”. It needs 100,000 signatures to really do any good, so please get others to sign, too. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/621158

If you live in the EU, or are an EU citizen, please sign this petition, which needs one million signatures by March 2023. https://signstop5g.eu/

This blog was originally posted at Anti-Wireless Shop Website, protesting wireless technologies on behalf of people and nature

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