The spells of nature

Living in the middle of almost unspoilt nature gives one a completely different perspective about who we are and what life if all about. We people feel so secure about ourselves and go about with our little lives without the slightest care in the world. We watch TV chat shows and frantically twitter to our thousands of followers that X just kissed Y as if that petty fact would be of such terrible importance that we'd want the whole world to know about it. Well, I pity those people... I truly pity them. Because what do they know? It clearly demonstrates how much we're living in our insignificant cocoons, totally unaware about what truly matters. And then, we wake up in a nightmare, like the people in northeast Italian Liguria, and the fair city of Genova in particular. In a matter of minutes that city was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mud, leaving many people dead and a chaos of debris and crushed cars. And this is only a small example of how fragile we are. Ask the people in Japan, in Pakstian, in the eastern Indian Ocean or everywhere else where nature recently demonstrated its true power. 

And yet, when destruction has come and gone, we take up our lives again and continue unabated, as if that what happened was only a bad dream and we feel good about ourselves because we're living so far away from the place where it happened. It is written in an old, stupid book that man has power over anything that lives on this planet and that we can use this Earth as we please. How wrong can anyone be! Because there's an unchangeable law of nature, which says that every action is countered by an equal and opposite reaction. Burn down the forests and soon we'll cause a greenhouse effect and the earth will slide away in massive, uncontrollable avalanches of mud, killing everything in their path. This is just one example. Another is the following. Some idiot who was keen on hunting thought it'd be a good idea to release rabbits in Australia. Of course, they had already shot all of Australia's natural predators such as the Australian wolf before that. With the consequence that the rabbit population soon went out of control and they turned most of the continent into a wasteland. "Oh", said man, "but then we'll introduce a predator of our own to control the pest!" And so they released wild dogs to kill all the rabbits. But soon these dogs turned on a better prey: the kangaroos and other animals who weren't prepared for this new threat. And so on. Everytime man has tried to intervene with nature, it ended in tears. And I'm afraid that we'll never learn. Never! Just look around you! Just listen to the people! If you ask anyone about the importance of saving nature, they'll all say "yes" immediately. But their actions are completely opposite! Some quotes I picked up over the past months:

- "Roes are a pest because they spread ticks."

- "Wild boars are a pest because they create havoc in the garden."

- "Cattle should be kept indoors because otherwise you're not certain what they eat and then the quality of the milk may not be consistent."

- "It's not necessary to sterilise cats because most of them die anyway in the winter."

- "What's that? Silicone? Paint? Acetone? Boh... don't bother, just throw it in the skip." (said to me by a tenant of the local special waste disposal facility!) 

Doesn't this make your blood boil? Well, it certainly does that with me. Anyway... While in Liguria they were assessing the damage, I managed to take these photos. Even in its fury, nature can still be stunningly beautiful, can't it?

And then I saw mummy roe deer, resting in our field only 20m away from our house. Well, she can spread ticks as much as she likes in our field and if any idiot ever lays a finger on her, or on her calf, he'd better start running... terribly fast!