Stewards of Our Planet

Colin Braganza is a medical student at Goa Medical College who is soft-spoken and has a special connection with nature, as is revealed through his photographs. His interest in butterflies, which he used to shoot with a 2 zoom mobile phone camera (to help identify them), soon led to photographs of landscapes, birds and generally anything worth photographing. He uses a Nikon p530 camera now to capture any scene that piques his artistic sensibilities.

Nature is at its most fragile with the world’s climate spiralling out of control, besides direct onslaughts in the name of progress. How soon will it be before all that is left is just photographs? Our own existence depends on how we react to the disturbing changes that are taking place. We still have the power to do what is best for the environment and reverse to a large extent the pathway to human extinction.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

― Albert Einstein

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”

― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

― E.B. White, Letters of E. B. White

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

- Lord Byron

“All nature has come to expect from God a sense of orderliness. Whatever God does carries with it His fingerprint. And in the world around us His fingerprint of orderliness is evident to anybody who is honest with the facts. If you look at nature, you will discover a mathematical exactness. Without this precision, the entire world would be in utter confusion. One plus one always equals two no matter what part of the universe you happen to be in. And the laws of nature operate in beautiful harmony, a harmony that is ordered by God Himself.”

― A.W. Tozer, And He Dwelt Among Us: Teachings from the Gospel of John

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”

― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

“There are mystical, unbreakable bonds between all members of the natural world including humans and animals. Whether or not we remember or acknowledge this relatedness, it still exists.”

― Elizabeth Eiler

“The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.”

― Pope John Paul II

(Originally published in August 2015)