Bejewelled with Jewel Beetles

An extract from Nature's Gifts, a small display at the Cape Town International Conference Centre 2003-2007.

Our modern lifestyles tend to divorce us from the natural world and we spend our lives confined to cities, cars, offices, buildings, seldom freeing our psyches on open landscapes of contemplation, seldom listening to the natural world.

Every day we are adorned by the gifts of nature – the freedom, the visual pleasures, the food we eat, the opportunities for spiritual contemplation and transformation. While plants and animals easily attract our interest, the importance of insects as part of our support system is largely overlooked. We indiscriminately poison them, crush them and ignore them. Each species has a function and a place in nature’s intricate web - it deserves to be here, it earned its place, it survived the journey of evolution. 

We need to walk more lightly on the earth and contemplate the natural world as the gem that it is. Only when we love and understand it and accept that we are an integral part of the system, will its true beauty be revealed. M. Cochrane.

Photography by Herschel Mair