What I’ve Done to Help Nature over 5 Decades

Nature Prompt 3rd Week/Reciprocal

Thank you for this nature prompt, and for the opportunity to reflect on this to the editors of ‘Reciprocal’ and to Sahil Patel for the idea.

This is a reflection on what I have done over the years for nature.

I was an early supporter of Greta Thunberg. I supported her ‘School Strike for Climate’ campaigns on Fridays on Twitter for almost a year. I received a thank you for this, which was heartening. I also posted about this activist on Linkedin because at the time no-one was listening.

I was very aware of the anxiety of what we called generation Z, a whole generation affected by our seemingly wandering blindly into the demise of our planet and Mother Nature with it. I and campaigned locally to try to get two supermarkets to cover cheese in something other than plastic and to change yogurt pots. I even stopped buying cheese for while as a protest.

I asked greengrocers why they didn’t use paper bags, and telephoned retailers to ask them what they were doing about plastic and by what date. You can sometimes find their telephone numbers on products so it’s worth making use of them.

I protested about paper cups in my regular coffee shop off the motorway because they weren’t recycling the cups.

I have promoted pesticide free gardening with my gardening business and do not use pesticides at all for gardening.

When I could afford to, I only purchased organically grown food and milk.

I have been buying 40-50% of my clothes from charity retailers my whole life, apart from when I made my own clothes as a young woman.

I have been recycling my whole life, as my grandmother and Mother used to do this - it’s a habit.

When a mother in my late thirties with five children, I remember being so exhausted with cleaning and sorting the recycling on top of all my other chores that I burst into tears.

I have always bought cloth bags to carry shopping, with a brief lapse I admit to. My most recent recycled bag is made from a Sari.

I walk into town every day, and rarely take the car. (This is a short run of a few k and these short runs are polluting for the planet.)

When writing my A Level French paper, I wrote about the demise of the blue butterfly instead of recycling. I learnt how to talk about recycling, but I wanted to expand my knowledge of French in an area I was interested in. As the blue butterfly was not part of the syllabus, my tendency to push boundaries may have cost me a few marks, but this is just conjecture.

I have been lucky enough to own five houses; as our family grew we moved to bigger houses. This gave me the opportunity to plant trees in the gardens of five houses in England. The trees I planted were, eucalyptus, mimosa, cherry, willow, Cercidiphyllum japonicum ( I liked this tree so much that I put it in my debut novella), fir, apple, plum, pear, olive, lemon-scented cypress, maple, and hazelnut. I have also planted some beautiful magnolia trees in some gardens I tend locally.

I had forgotten all this. It has been heartening to read back.

I will continue to find new ways to help our beautiful planet.

I look forward to reading your stories on this subject.

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Nearly forgot, I enjoyed this story from Mon Esprit– this week:

I also enjoyed this one from ‘Just to Talk About’ from Gianfranco Vigneri – enjoy…