The three greatest challenges of modern society are solving pollutionproblems, creating a consciousness for protecting the
environment, and increasing food production. If any one of
these is neglected, humanity will become extinct. The earth has already
been damaged extensively. Endless greed for material possessions has
brought about serious air and water pollution that is destroying nature,
including the ozone layer that protects us. If present trends continue,
humanity will find itself destroyed by the traps of material civilization.
For the past twenty years, I have been working to sustain and preserve
Brazil’s Pantanal region. The Pantanal—a region that lies in Brazil,
Bolivia, and Paraguay—is the world’s largest wetlands area. It is listed
with UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. I am carrying on a global environmental
movement to preserve the living creatures of the Pantanal in
the pristine state in which God created them.
The Pantanal—where the sea, land, animals, and plants live in
harmony—is a magnificent place. Simple words such as beautiful and
fantastic cannot begin to describe its value. Photos of the area taken
from the sky are so beautiful that a collection of these photos is one of
the best-selling photo collections in the world. It is humanity’s treasure
trove, where rare species such as the white-throated capuchin, the red
howler monkey, macaw, jaguar, anaconda, ostrich, and caiman live.
The flora and fauna of the Pantanal and the Amazon basin exist as
they did at the time of Creation. The Pantanal is Edenic. Human beings
have destroyed a great many beings that God created. Too many species
of plants and animals have become extinct because of human greed. In
the Pantanal, though, the original forms that God created still remain.
I am working to establish a bird atrium and an insect preserve in the
Pantanal to save these unique species from extinction.
In addition to being a habitat for many plants and animals, the Pantanal
is also an important source of oxygen for the earth. It is the “lungs
of the world” and “nature’s sponge,” producing more oxygen than any
other area. It is also a storehouse of greenhouse gases. The Pantanal is
changing rapidly, however, due to industrial development. If the Amazon
region, which provides such a large amount of oxygen for the earth,
is destroyed, the future of humanity will be dismal.
Some thirty-six hundred species of fish live in the Pantanal. One is
a gold-colored fish called the dorado, which usually weighs more than
forty pounds. When a dorado first took my hook, it felt like my body
was being sucked into the river. As I was reeling in the line with all my
strength, it jumped out of the water several times. After several jumps it
still had plenty of strength left to fight. It was so strong it seemed more
like a bear or a tiger than a fish.
The lakes in the Pantanal are always clean. No matter what is put
into the water, it quickly becomes clean again. The water is cleansed
quickly because there are so many different species of fish living there.
Each species feeds on something different. Living together in a complex
system, they devour anything that dirties the water. Their act of feeding
has the function of keeping the water pure. Fish are very different from
human beings. The fish don’t live for their own sake. They live to clean
their environment and make it better.
The back of a water hyacinth’s leaf in the Pantanal wetlands is black
with bugs. If the bugs were to remain there, the hyacinth would not
be able to live, but there are fish that eat those bugs off the leaves. So
the bugs live, the hyacinth lives, and the fish live. This is what nature is
like. No creature lives for itself. Instead, they live for each other. Nature
teaches us this tremendous lesson.
No matter how many fish there are in the Pantanal, if people are
given the freedom to fish there, the population is bound to decrease. To
protect the fish we need to develop fish farms. Because the fish in the
Pantanal are so precious, we need to develop many fish farms. Similar
facilities to protect insects, birds, and mammals are also needed. Raising
insects will help increase the bird population. The Pantanal provides a
perfect environment for all these creatures, and by focusing on how to
increase their population humankind can continue to enjoy them for
centuries to come.
It is not just fish that are plentiful in the Pantanal. The riverbanks have
pineapples, banana trees, and mango trees. Rice grows so well there that it
is possible to have three harvests a year, even without irrigated fields. That’s
how rich the soil is. Crops such as beans and corn can be grown just by
spreading the seeds over the ground. Very little human labor is needed.
Once while traveling down the Paraguay River on a boat, we stopped
at a house sitting near the bank. The farmer who lived there realized that
we were hungry, so he went into his field and dug up a sweet potato. It was
the size of a watermelon! He told us that as long as he leaves the root in the
ground it will continue to produce potatoes for several years. To think
that potatoes can be harvested without annual planting left me with a
strong desire to take them to countries where food is lacking.
People who advocate developing wetlands stress the economic
benefits of such development. The Pantanal, however, provides plenty
of economic benefit just as a wetland. The area has virgin forests of
ebony pine, and the wood is hard with high density. Natives claim that
a person could drive a spike into one of these trees and it would still
live more than a hundred years. These trees are used to produce ebony,
which does not rot and is said to last longer than iron. These trees are
so large that a man cannot put his arms around them. Imagine what
it looks like to have forests filled with such precious trees. I had some
seedlings of these trees planted on four hundred hectares of land in the
Pantanal. The trees our members planted have made the Pantanal even
more beautiful.
It is human selfishness that is destroying nature. Human competition
for the shortest route to economic success is the reason that the
earth’s environment has been damaged. We cannot allow the earth to be
damaged any further. Religious people must lead the way in the effort
to save nature. Nature is God’s creation and His gift to humankind. We
must work quickly to awaken people to the preciousness of nature and
the urgent need to restore it to the rich and free state it enjoyed at the
time of Creation.
Because it has become widely known that the Pantanal is a treasure
trove, a struggle over its future has begun. The place that we should be
protecting is about to become a battlefield for greedy humans. For the
past ten years, I have been taking leaders from countries around the
world to the Pantanal and sponsoring discussions on how to protect
this region and the rest of the world’s environment. I am gathering the
world’s environmental experts and scholars in order to encourage them
to take an interest in preserving the Pantanal. I am working to stop
the Pantanal from being destroyed by the merciless material desires of
human beings.
As the environmental issues grow more serious, many environmental
groups have sprung up. The best environmental movement, however,
is the one that spreads love. People take care of things that belong to
people they love. They do not, however, take care of or love the natural
environment that God created. God gave this environment to humanity.
It was His will that we use the environment to obtain food, to have
it in abundance, and to experience the joy of living in the beauty of
nature. Nature is not something to be used once and thrown away. Our
descendants for many generations to come must be able to rely on it
just as we have.
The shortcut to protecting nature is to develop a heart that loves
nature. We must be able to shed a tear at the sight of even a blade of
grass that we see as we walk along the road. We must be able to grab
hold of a tree and weep. We must understand that God’s breath is hidden
inside a single boulder or a single gust of wind. To care for and love
the environment is to love God. We must be able to see each creature
created by God as an object of our love. With our spiritual eyes opened
we could see that a single dandelion by the roadside is more valuable
than the gold crowns of kings.
