Some months before our recent trip to Hawaii, Mary Lacques, well known for her work with Hawai’i Seed, contacted me. Mary is a friend of David Orr, a botanist with nearly 30 years of experience at Waimea Botanical Garden on Oahu’s North Shore. David describes Mary as a “local hero.” Mary contacted David about giving us a tour. David agreed.
It would be an understatement to say that David loves nature and loves his garden. It might be more accurate to say that he is in love with the thousands of plants he has tended and nurtured for so much of his life. The energy he exuded while sharing with us was palpable. His respect and reverence for nature transformed our time with him from a garden tour to a worship service. He opened our eyes to miracles that would have otherwise remained hidden from our ignorant view.
By the end of the tour, David had shown me once again that humans are as infants in our understanding of the workings of nature, and that our unnatural efforts to engineer or modify the DNA of these creations are acts of desecrations, acts of violence—physical and sexual assaults that could never occur in nature, resulting in mutilated creations that for the most part transform foods into poisons and/or receptacles for poisons, and that possess the potential to contaminate all life on Earth.
Later that evening, Ashley Lukens, Ph.D. with Hawai’i Center for Food Safety drove that point home in a presentation titled Pesticides in Paradise: Our Keiki and Aina at Risk.
I cover Ashley’s presentation here.
Many thanks to Mary and David and to so many others for the work you are doing to protect our global Keiki and Aina.
