'But now the fungicides were no longer working as they had. “La roya does not respect them,” Gabriel told me through a translator. One day, with no warning, the golden dots bloomed on a few leaves on a single plant. Gabriel sprayed them, and sprayed again, but the spots widened, then turned dark and dry and cracked through the middle. The leaves crisped, curling at the edges, and fell from the plant when breezes jostled them. The dust, the fungal spores, drifted across the field and infected another bush, or fell to the ground and splashed onto the next plant when rain fell. The cycle of slow plant death began again.'

I did not know that I would see the vision of Miyazaki expressed in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind realized in my lifetime.