Nature Book Archives - Patrick McCusker

Some years ago I spent a wonderful ten days on an island nature reserve in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the first time that I saw horseshoe crabs. Everything about them spoke of ‘ancient’. Indeed they have been around for over three hundred and fifty million years.

But in the world of these horseshoe crabs there is now a problem; they are harvested for a property in their blood. Their blood is strange in that it is copper based. Scientists utilize this property to test for the presence of bacteria.

In the past these crabs were harvested in their millions for processing into animal feed and fertilizer.

Horseshoe crabs still come into the shallows of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico – but in far fewer numbers now.

(Extract from the book – Planet Dancing.)

‘Perhaps we will never know reality through science alone. A biologist may throw out a line and draw in a very small fish – but he cannot pull in the water in which the fish swims. Science can tell us something of fatty acids. It can tell us of zygotes and polar bodies but it cannot give us an understanding of ‘whale’ or of the ‘silence of butterflies’. It cannot talk to us of the ‘comprehension of ghost fish’. It cannot tell us of the ‘sadness or of the happiness of kelp flies’. Perhaps most things will never be known through science. Perhaps most things will never be known at all.

The Hawaiian people have a word – Lokahi – They use this word to define Unity-Nature-God.

Lokahi should be the conservation word of this new century.’

(Extract from the book – Planet Dancing.)

Patrick.

Patrick McCusker

Patrick McCusker

Fiction and Nature Conservation Author and Lecturer

FEAR

Planet Dancing

Nature Book

Ancient Eyes in the Surf

Extract from Planet Dancing.