Letters: Never forget nature’s beauty
SIR — I was delighted to walk into St Thomas’s Church on Saturday. It was full of the most exquisite flower displays, as part of the Lymington Flower Festival.
The overall theme was ‘Green and Pleasant Land’. Each display had a different title, and I walked around I was struck by the titles, Palm Oil, Melting the Ice Caps, Forest Fires, Air Pollution, Acid Rain and Polluting the Ocean, alongside many more cheery ones.
These topics normally make me feel slightly depressed, yet seeing them represented by flowers somehow made me feel hopeful.
As we name these problems we acknowledge them, and from knowledge comes the impetus and ability to solve them. They all arise from a failure to respect and protect the planet we share, as mankind seeks greater wealth and consumes more than the planet can replace.
Perhaps this arises from a lack of connection with the joy and essential nature of the natural world, and an ignorance of the destruction our consumption causes. We share the planet with so many amazing and beautiful things, from huge, long-lived huge oak trees, to the delicate and ephemeral petals of the flowers I saw in the church.
There is an interconnection between all parts of nature that science is only starting to recognise and understand, and the planet has a need for a rich bio-diversity to continue to renew itself.
These topics are not new, but as human consumption continues ever-upwards the destruction we are causing is reaching a point where the bio-diverse world we live will change forever – the rainforests, the ocean, coral reefs, the Antarctic, to name the headline ones. And the changes are not positive.
Never mind the impact on climate change or on human lifestyles. Once humans have cut down all the rainforests or filled the ocean with plastic, it will take millennium for nature to regenerate itself. We are living in a period of mass extinction, with species we have yet to discover as well as ones we know and love being wiped out.
The science is clear and public awareness of the destructive nature of economic growth is increasing all the time. It is not just global warming that is the problem, this is just one symptom of many, the problem is how humanity is choosing to live, with little care or regard for other species or future generations.
We are custodians of this planet and we need to “preserve the beauty of God’s earth for future generations” as Vicar Peter Salisbury states in the Lymington Flower Festival leaflet.
Let’s call for change at a governmental level to ensure that each generation leaves the planet in a better state then they found it.
Emily Hamilton, Lymington
