We’ve surpassed the victorious days of the industrial revolution when the phrases like ‘using nature’ and ‘defeating nature’ were common in social life as well as science and engineering. We are realizing that we are just one of the Earth’s species, the one of suspicious dominance that is.

Some of us had a privilege to grow up in a social and natural environment which promoted, I believe, synergism of nature processes into our genes. I speak to animals and plants, and I register the response. I feel responsibility for each of them and I feel pain if I hurt them. Where are the roots?

Both my grandfathers, on mother’s and father’s side, were forest-rangers and both tribes still supply that vocation in their respective villages. Till my college years, I grew up on a small farm where field work and care of domestic animals were, regardless if you are age six or eighty-six, every day challenge to your potentialities. My mother talked and sang to domestic animals, each of them was called by name, even chicken and rabbits. She was known to grow plants other people in the area didn’t succeed. I’ve developed, I believe, a special relationship with the soil. Even today, when I garden for pleasure, turning the soil induces a deep sensation in my mind.