As I open this channel, I went back to our writings to be reminded what we were thinking when we started this journey of Common Planet five years ago. I found following, which I wrote when I was nine years old with my brother, Ben.
"We are brothers living in California and we are very much interested in animals and their well being. The first book we wrote together was A 200 year old Turtle and we wanted to write it to help people realize importance of protecting animals. We also wanted to everyone can play a part in it no matter how small you are! The earth is an art of incredible balance. Beavers are cute, but if coyotes and mountain lions go extinct, there will be nobody there to stop beavers from cutting down all the trees and leaving non behind for others. If that happens, people will suffer in the form of scarcity of food and natural disasters such as landslide. People fearlessly hunt down turtles. But seriously, would you like a whole ocean full of jelly fish?? Our parents will never allow us to go to the beach.
In the book, the 200 year old turtle survives a lot of natural disasters and even wars. But even the brave 200 year old turtle cannot survive man-made pollution.
We once visited the San Diego Zoo, and learned that a number of animals were about to go extinct such as Southern White Rhino because of what we humans had done to the planet and the animals. And dinosaurs went extinct and that was enough!
We are all co-habitants of the earth and we do not have the right to take away the earth from the other co-habiting animals and from our descendants. "
It was a good reminder why I am doing this today, and why I am so passionate about helping animals. Let's be reminded that if animals cannot live on this earth, so cannot humans.
Daniel, January 2022