Message for "Orca-live" by Paul Spong

Years ago, as I stood on the deck of my home at Hanson Island looking at the full moon hanging in the sky above the mountains, spilling a great pool of liquid light across the ocean towards me, I felt so utterly at peace that the thought suddenly came "If only I could share this moment with the world, it would know peace too." At the time I was beginning to experiment with the technology of listening to the sounds of orcas in distant places, using technology to help me understand where the whales were and something of what they were doing. So it was perhaps natural that that moment under the moon became translated into an idea called a "Nature Network", which was simply the notion that technology could be used to bring people closer to Nature. We are creatures that came from Nature, and we cannot escape our ties to her. Everything that we are, from our physical being, to our cultures and ideas of beauty had their beginnings in Nature. Nature nurtured us, she is our mother. We need Nature, but we have allowed ourselves to become too distant from her. If we are to have a future, and if our world is to have a future that we are part of, we need to recover our connection to Nature. Some few of us, myself included, are blessed by living surrounded by wildness, but most of humanity lives in cities that are far distant from the natural world and isolated from it. Many people try to connect with Nature by travelling long distances to experience the wild world for a brief time. But Nature cannot remain intact in the face of too much human intrusion. Therein, lies a great dilemma. How do we bring people closer to Nature without disrupting her? My hope for Orca-live is that it will help bring people closer to the world of Orca, enabling them to experience it as I do. I am so thankful to NTT Data for sharing my vision and making this experiment possible.