Illustration by Blake Lavia
They had disappeared. I don’t remember when it exactly happened. I just know that one day, I realized they weren’t there anymore. The world had become more silent, less colorful. The flowers didn’t fly like they used to, while the stars didn’t come down at night to brighten the countryside. When it rained, the snails didn’t invade the roads to the point that I couldn’t walk out of the house without hearing a crunch underfoot. The lizards had stopped lazing under the sun, on those hot summer days. They just weren’t there anymore, and that’s when I left.
The world turns on its axis, and things change, they always change. Yet, I had thought that certain things would remain the same. I never imagined I would see the world die. My mother used to tell me, when I was just a child, and we walked through the olive trees, that she remembered a time when butterflies of all colors populated the countryside. Big butterflies, small butterflies, yellow butterflies, orange, blue, purple, black, white. They were winged flowers, rainbows in disguise, showing you the way to another way of life. I wanted to see those butterflies, those incredible beings that from flower to flower kept our ecosystem alive. But she was right, they weren’t there. Butterflies surrounded us, but they were all the same color, and not as many as she remembered.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
Yet, there were butterflies and, when it rained, snails came out of the grass and covered the yard. They were big snails, their houses majestic constructions that undulated with the snail’s slow march. My grandmother used to tell me that people ate them and would go out to harvest them after the rain. I always made a face when she told me, but I also smiled and asked questions. My grandmother knew the countryside. She told me what plants you could eat, like wild lettuce and berries. Through her, I felt like I knew my ecosystem as well and, as I grew up, I started exploring my surroundings.
I dove into the underbrush underneath my house, getting scratched by brambles and tangled in ivy. I used to call it the Cats’ Kingdom, for the local felines prowled underneath those bushes, probably contributing to the songbirds’ demise. At the time, however, I didn’t know that, and I ran wild with my friends, inventing stories and learning the stories of the world I inhabited. I knew where to find the lizards in the summer, and how to corner them so, to the lizards’ great chagrin, I could hold them in my hands. I am culpable of many lost lizards’ tails, but that’s how I learned that the tails kept on twitching even after the lizards lost them, and that the lizards regrew them.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
I found porcupine quills, rescued hedgehogs from the edge of the road, ate wildflowers and hunted wild asparagus. I knew where to find capers and when the blackberries would come out in the late summer. I ate figs from the fig trees and danced under the linden trees. I spiked my fingers picking chestnuts and spent hours looking for pine nuts that would be inevitably smashed when I pride them open with a rock. I was part of the world I inhabited, and the world was part of me, and that’s how I believed it always would be.
Things, however, change, as they always do. Society had been moving away from the fig trees, and the lizards, the snails, and the butterflies. I went to school, I practiced sports, and I had less and less time to spend outside, to look at the world change, those I loved saying goodbye. As I said before, it was a slow demise but, eventually, even in my busy life, I realized that my friends weren’t there anymore. The butterflies were sporadic at best, bees and bumble bees remained, but in lesser quantities. There were less colorful beetles, and no more lizards, no more fireflies. Only the crickets remained at night to sing, but no more dancing lights.
That’s when I left.
I embarked on a long journey that took me to far away lands. I explored different ecosystems, learned different stories, met different people. I got to know bold eagles, ospreys, loons, mudpuppies, sturgeons, bluejays, hummingbirds, rivers that looked like lakes and lakes that looked like seas. I met the ocean, and their big waves and incessant wind. I met cormorants, pelicans, whales, coral snakes and so many other incredible beings. It was an eye-opening experience, the vastness of this world, the myriad of beings, so many that I couldn’t even see, breathing the same air and drinking the same water I drink. Yet, the more I traveled, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. I hadn’t grown up in those far away lands. I didn’t know the meaning of those marshes, or the shape of those trees. I didn’t know what flowers you could eat, or where the paths in the mountains would lead.
It might be weird to say, but the rocks themselves seemed to speak another language from the one I knew. The moss told another story, and the rivers sang a different song. Yet, it is in this far away land that, as an adult, I started rediscovering what I had lost. I found fireflies again and witnessed mesmerizing choreographies. I followed owls at dusk, had chipmunks running up my shoes, and crossed paths with moose. I chatted with geese and dreamt of flying with turkey vultures, high up in the sky. The world I thought I had lost started talking to me, once again, and I found a new bond, a new way to listen and to speak.
It was with those new stories that I, over the years, returned home. At first, it was the birds I noticed. I don’t exactly know why, but I had no childhood memory of birds, except for the swallows, and those too were almost gone by the time I left. I rediscovered so many birds I had never seen. White marsh birds, cranes, and so many others I still don’t know. Yet, nothing was more surprising than finding lizards again one summer, and butterflies and, the most magical of all, fireflies. It was a mystery, at first. How and when had they come back. Where had they gone? Had I just been blinded by modernity and my daily life to the point that I had stopped seeing them?
It was walking that I found the sign, a poster placed by the town on one of the medieval walls. The town had banned pesticides three years earlier, and the world had come back to life. It had just been waiting, wishing for humans to see reason. I had never seen so many varieties of butterflies. There were big and small butterflies; so small that they looked like flower petals fluttering in the breeze. There were white butterflies, yellow butterflies, purple butterflies, orange, black, blue. There were myriads of pollinators, beetles of all colors and sizes. The countryside was alive, and I was alive with the countryside.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
Memories started flowing back, and I remembered what I knew, what I had forgotten. It was like meeting old friends, just with a different lens. I was an adult, and even if I knew the story of that land, I had lost touch with my once neighbors. Yet, the question remained. Pesticides had rendered a flowering nature a dead terrain where only a few resilient species could thrive. In how many other places is that happening and on what scale? What have we lost? What are we losing?
I don’t know what we’re leaving to the future generations. I just know that in a small corner of this world, the sliver of cultivated countryside where I grew up, the banning of pesticides has allowed a myriad of different beings to come back and thrive. I am sure that many more will return, as time passes, like the brown snails that erupted on rainy days and covered roads and sidewalks, a coral reef teaming with life. I want to think that one day, I might be able to tell their stories to my children, so that they, too, can learn what it means to live in this world. What it means to be part of life.
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In 2017, the Town of Carmignano, Italy, banned the used of the pesticide glyphosate. Since then, Carmignano has participated in a project called "GlifoBee," which monitors the glyphosate content in surface water and pollinators. In recent years, there have been no traces of glyphosate in bees, beehives and surface waters. Since 2018, Carmignano has also been a member of the European network of "Pesticide Free Towns."