Since I left school, I’ve been searching a way to stop people from destroying nature. My grandmother once gave me a beautiful Time Life book about tropical forests of the Amazon.
A few years later I read in a newspaper of the destruction of those beautiful and precious habitats of so many, most unknown species. It struck me deeply. However, this shocking discovery did not prevent me from reading newspapers. On the contrary, since then I followed the news about nature and later environmental issues, on a daily basis. Together with the knowledge I gathered during my education at Wageningen University, my insight in environmental problems was sufficient to understand the causes of the destruction of our beautiful planet.
Since my first colleges at university I’m searching for ways to stop environmental pollution and to make people care for nature. This quest brought me to several projects, eg. a real life demo plant of alternatives for illegal tropical wood, in a little harbour in Friesland.
Five years ago I started to write a book, because I didn’t see any progress in my attempts. My view of the roots of the ecological problems differs from ‘mainstream’. That insight, and the direction in which we can find a solution, I want to share.
The research I started took a long time. My questions rendered very few answers, but lots of new questions, forcing me to dive deeper and read more articles, websites and other sources. And that process continued for five long years. Day and night the mattter kept me busy, thinking, writing, meanwhile making thousands of notes.
The temporary results of my scientific approach consisted of a couple of books, that did not got published. After four years, a first publication saw the light, but the respons was not what I hoped for. My conclusion was that the chosen form was not suited to get the message to the reader, so the work went on.
Recently a ‘condensed’ report of my research was published1, leaving enough material for another book, and even more. On this blog I share my knowledge and insights in a couple of ways. Blogs, quotes and background documents all point in one direction: make it personal.