My name is John Wilson.
I currently reside in Hamilton, ON. Canada, however, I did not start up there. I was born, raised, and lived my younger life in Southwest Scotland. South Ayrshire to be precise. The land of Burns and Bruce. I grew up in a small coal mining village at the head of the Doon valley, approximately fifteen miles from Burns’ cottage in Alloway, close by the river Doon. For many years I fished in the river and surrounding lakes. Climbed the trees in the area and hiked the surrounding hills and mountains. But that is not why I became an environmentalist. All these things were done by many boys of my age back then. I always had a strong connection to animals. That included birds and fish. The way they moved, the beautiful colors they displayed, their methods of making a living. All these things fascinated me to no end. As a young boy, my three favorite naturalists were (the now) Sir David Attenborough, Peter Scott and Gerald Durrell. I think my favorite was Gerald Durrell, but I suppose Sir David is now the only one who is globally recognized. I followed the adventures of each one, read their books and watched their TV shows.
I had a collection of birds eggs. (Strictly illegal now.) I collected Owls pellets, carefully dissecting them to reveal the wing casings of large beetles and mouse skulls, displaying them by carefully gluing the salvageable remains of their regurgitated meals onto pieces of cardboard. It might surprise someone who had never performed this delicate operation how many mouse skulls can be extracted from just one Owl pellet. They seem to all fit together in a kind of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. At one point I kept a small collection of animals in my father’s garden hut at the rear of the house which I optimistically called “Wilson’s Zoo.”
Again, not the reason I became passionate about nature and the environment. I remember the exact moment I realized that I valued animal life above all. At the age of fifteen, I along with my younger sister and other school mates left our small village and embarked on an epic journey to the European continent for a two-week school trip. First Paris, then by train down to Annecy in southeastern France, close to the Swiss and Italian borders. I thought that it was marvelous. The exotic clime, new species of beasties to observe, the spectacular views of the surrounding mountains. All these captivated me to no end. We were scheduled to take a one-day trip up and over the Alps via one of the mountain passes down into Switzerland and Geneva. During that bus ride we saw little to nothing of the countryside, the fog and clouds smothering everything in white and grey. It almost reminded me of back home up in the hills sometimes when the mist came down.
We arrived in Geneva, disembarked the bus and proceeded to make our way down to one of the parks by Lake Geneva close to where the huge fountain sprays into the air. I stood there amazed and fascinated by this grand spectacle. I am a very keen observer of everything, not just nature, and noticed that now and then one of the local seagulls would get engulfed in the spray as gravity took hold and brought the water back down to earth in a chaotic waterfall. The unfortunate bird would spiral down into the water. Perhaps they got sucked in by the air currents or some other phenomena. During my short time there I saw this happen twice. As I walked about the park along with other tourists, I began to observe a man festooned with cameras around his neck snapping away at what, to my mind, was almost anything and everything in sight. For some reason I watched him carefully. He seemed to fascinate me. His intensity, his meticulous attention to the way he framed each image as he looked through the viewfinder. He approached a lone tree in the middle of a field of grass and continued to snap away. It was at that precise moment that I saw the wobbly head and open mouth of a small baby bird lying sprawled on the grass directly under the tree. It had obviously fallen out of its nest and was totally helpless. Before I could open my mouth, the tourist stepped on its entire body crushing it instantly. So intent was he on the view out and up that he failed to notice what was directly under his nose. Immediately I felt the blood rushing into my cheeks. I felt sick to my stomach, and at that moment I realized that I would protect animals above humans. That image has stayed with me for almost sixty years. I now believe all those years later that this was the moment I began to be conscious of what humans were doing to the planet.
I hope that my rather traumatic narrative does not upset too many people. It was not my intention to do so. However, I think that my story could quite easily become a metaphor for the way we are treating our only home. We have as a species the capacity to do so much yet continue to use our powers to pursue the wrong goals and ends. Time and time again we observe that nature has this amazing capacity to recover and rebound from all that we are throwing at it. I wonder just how bad it will need to get before we begin to realize that we belong to nature, it does not belong to us.