Love of Nature from Parents

I love reading, and especially love the feeling you get when the author makes a point so powerful, you feel like a train just ran over you. Here's an excerpt from Dr. Jane Goodall's book, Reason for Hope. It's a story that she's told time and again, whenever you attend her lectures, about her trying to find how how chickens lay their eggs as a child. In summary, she had hidden herself in the chicken coop for 4 hours at least, waiting for a hen to enter and lay an egg, while elsewhere, her family (especially her mother Vanne) were in hysterics, thinking that she had gone missing and had even made a police report. The following excerpt describes what happens after she had observed the egg-laying.

"Filled with excitement I squeezed out after her and ran home. It was almost dark--I had been in that small stuffy henhouse for nearly four hours. I was oblivious of the fact that no one had known where I was, and that the whole household had been searching for me. They had even called the police to report me missing. Yet despite her worry, when Vanne, still searching, saw the excited little girl rushing toward the house, she did not scold me. She noticed my shining eyes and sat down to listen to the story of how a hen lays an egg: the wonder of that moment when the egg finally fell to the ground.

Certainly I was lucky to be provided with a mother wise enough to nurture and encourage my love of living things and my passion for knowledge. Most important was her philosophy that her children should always try their very best. How would I have turned out, I sometimes wonder, had I grown up in a house that stifled enterprise by imposing harsh and senseless discipline. Or in an atmosphere of overindulgence, in a household where there were no rules, no boundaries drawn. My mother certainly understood the importance of discipline, but she always explained why some things were not allowed. Above all, she tried to be fair and to be consistent."

It really set me thinking, about parents in general here in Singapore. I have often seen that when children go missing and then found again, parents just whack them. No questions asked. No thought given to the fear, or excitement of discovery, such as in Jane's case, experienced by the child. Imagine Vanne had been one of such parents. Would there have been a Dr. Jane Goodall, the Jane Goodall Institute and everything that she has done? If we really thought deeply, all of those things, inspiration to us and people like me, the survival and profound ethology of chimps and the livelihood that she has made possible for thousands in Tanzania, all of those might have hinged on that one reaction by Vanne when Jane reappeared, and thank goodness for what did happen.

Conservation, and nature in Singapore, I feel suffers from a desperate lack of parental guidance. Sure there are a bunch of parents who bring their children to guided walks and things like that, but a vast majority bring their children up on a diet of materialism, and the belief that humans do not need wildlife (both plants and animals) for survival. Zoologists and botanists are conventionally thought of as biology students who cannot make it to medicine. How many parents out there wholeheartedly support their children when they say they want to study zoology instead of business or medicine or law? We need a massive change in mindsets.

Shopping to Save the Earth?

I've been meaning to blog about this but I just have been too caught up with tests and thesis submission. Anyhow, I am referring to Compass Point's claim that it's shoppers can "Save Planet Earth" simply by shopping there. . Let's try and dissect the poster.

First, it says, if the shopper spends $20, he/she can "Share" eco-friendly tips. Apparently the "best" tip wins the shopper $120. The greatest irony is this: The best eco-friendly tip in reality is to stop mass-consumerism, shopping, and advertising. I'd be damned if that won you anything.

Going down the poster, it says "Learn to be Green", and by attaching a loan receipt of four books from Sengkang Community Library to any $20 receipt, it wins the shopper a monopoly set, and a chance at %100 Metro vouchers. First of all, it seems they left the learning to be green part to the shopper, without specifying the type of books. Heck, he could borrow 4 books along the lines of "How to destroy Planet Earth in 5 minutes" and still win everything on offer. In any case, Singaporeans being Singaporeans, they'd probably just borrow books for the Monopoly set. And it still doesn't address the consumerism problem.

The next three seem to look a little friendlier, but two of them still require you to spend. And honestly, "Saving Planet Earth" is a load of bull. Planet Earth would do well without us. More like saving ourselves. These corporate people should get their perspectives right.

Now we look at the wordy parts. "Carry it green at Compass Point". Apparently, you spend $30 dollars and get a free Compass Point Shopping Bag. So if you spend below $30 you don't qualify to join the Compass Point (Pseudo) Environment Club huh.

"Shop and Learn How You Can Save Planet Earth". And then it says you get a free $5 voucher when you spend $100, I think with that Compass Point Shopping bag. I honestly don't see the link between the title and it's description. Labelling everything green out of desperation I suppose.

"Lucky Green Dips". Instant lucky dip with $50 spent. How's that green again?

"Going Green Saves You More". Even more bizzare stuff. It says, bring your own carriers or containers to enjoy offers from some participating outlets. And then one of the outlets is Best Denki. IF you buy refridgerators. Sure, my Compass Point Shopping Bag can fit THOSE. CITIGEMS are participating too, and you get a diamond pendant at a hugely discounted price. Point number one. There is no such thing as a green diamond / precious metal mining company. Number two. Retailers don't discount at such rates unless they are sure they are still earning from it. Too bad to those who bought these lumps of metal and carbon at their original prices.

The one that takes the cake though, is the Grand Prize of their lucky draw. You get a CAR!! Spend all the money to be green, then burn it all away with the petrol! How smart!

In a nutshell. It's a scam. CASE should get on their backs. Token effort is given about being green, and it's just a bandwagon to jump on to generate sales of ignorant people who want to be on the same bandwagon with little effort. This a blatant attempt to DELIBERATELY mislead shoppers. There no way to shop to your way to "green-ness". Unless you are shopping to buy forest patches to protect. Which Compass Point and their Frasers Centrepoint management have obviously no interest in. It's like "Buy more cigarettes and learn how to prevent lung cancer!". Bunch of bull excreta.

Educate her? She knows!

I refer to the letter on the Straits Times Forum Online posted below:

Feeding wildlife: Educate uninformed adults

I APPLAUD recent measures to punish those who feed wildlife in public parks.
I was at the Singapore Zoo last Friday with my young son and came upon a girl, perhaps no more than 10 years old, feeding twigs to the goats at Children's World, the children's section of the zoo.

Next to her was her mother and a prominent sign that reads 'No feeding'.

I gently reminded the woman of the notice board. Her retort? 'Everybody feeds the animals'.

Her child continued to feed the goat, which was lapping up whatever she was picking up from the ground. This clueless child will unfortunately grow up thinking her behaviour is perfectly acceptable.

The innocent child was not at fault. The parent, an educated adult, should have known better.

What more can be done when harsh penalties have been meted out on obstinate offenders?

More aggressive education is key, perhaps to both school-going children and misguided, uninformed adults.

Koh Wee Hoon (Ms)


I think Ms Koh is too kind. First of all, if you are a Singapore student of age 10 and cannot read and understand "No Feeding", then something is seriously wrong. Secondly, if everyone was doing something, it doesn't mean that it's the right thing.
Third, where were the zookeepers? Fourth, why didn't more people point her out? This reminds me of something Martin Luther King Junior once said, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people". The world is going to pot, precisely because of this.

Does the zoo have some kind of punishment for these? Feeding animals where you aren't allowed to feed them, and running the risk of feeding the wrong things to them should be dealt with as the equivalent of animal abuse (and if you ask me, the penalties for animal abuse isn't quite severe enough). Parents who blatantly ignore the signs should be fined on the spot. Children who see their parents ignore the rules and laws may grow up to believe that either their parents are above the law, or that some laws can be violated. Cutting their parents down to size would go along way to enforcing to children that the signs cannot be ignored.

Criminal Education?

This post is in reference to Joe Lai's post, Embracing Nature Conservation: How?.

Dave Santucci wrote a short article about the inspirational powers of being in close contact with animals. I won't disagree with him. As someone who is out in the field relatively often, I know how it feels to be up-close and personal with members of other species, be they crocodiles or platyhelminthes.

However, to have to hold animals captive in an area that isn't even 0.1% of their original range is a different thing altogether. If done on humans, it is called unlawful confinement, except in mental asylums and prisons, because they are considered the lower end of society. Mr. Santucci has assumed that humans are different, are on a higher level. Isn't that being elitist?

People still have not understood the difference between appreciating the whale sharks and dolphins for their presence in the wild, and appreciating whale sharks and dolphins as toys. What the aquariums possibly promote is appreciation of the animals as toys. We make them do tricks, and ride them like the kiddy machines that mothers put 50cents into to keep their kids entertained for two minutes. If someone forced another person to learn and perform tricks on command, it's called forced labour and violation of human rights.

While I have mentioned that I am continually inspired by contacts I make with wildlife while doing field work, my love for nature, and wildlife came from reading, fighting spiders and catching grasshoppers as a kid, and unlike what Mr. Santucci would like to believe, from the television. Has he wondered why we use the term “wildlife”? These are majestic creatures born to be wild, free, away from urban, human organisation and oppression. Appreciation of nature must come through responsible education, not education “by hook or by crook”. When we want to learn French (or whatever) culture and language, we do a French immersion programme. We don't go to France and kidnap a Frenchman. The same principle applies to the Whale Sharks.

Man's Greatest Mistake

I never thought one of the random conclusions I make when I am thinking to myself could actually be (sort-of) supported by a renowned academic. You see, normally I read, and what the brainy people say kind of influences me, so this coincidence really kind of struck me. So what was that controversial conclusion? Here it is: Agriculture is the root of all evils and problems that humans are facing (well one of the roots, at least).

I should elaborate. Agriculture is considered to be essential to our lives. It provides us with our nutritional requirements. It allows civilizations to feed millions of hungry mouths. It’s become so deeply rooted in our mindsets that when we find resource problems, more often than not, we ask if agriculture can help (think biofuels from palm and other rubbish along those lines). Heck, some even wish money grew on trees! Looking at that, agriculture should be good right? WRONG! It’s not! In fact, it’s evil, and mankind is so hopelessly stuck in this situation, we can’t hope to get out of it for the next 20 generations, or we destroy ourselves because Mother Earth decides to purge humankind, whichever comes first.

Putting all your eggs in one basket

The history of “civilized” mankind has been marked by numerous famines due to crop failures. Agriculture is one of the great examples of putting all your eggs in one basket. Sure, you can plant corn and potatoes and whatever plant that can be grown, but when the drought comes, it’s placing like your basket of eggs (maybe different types of eggs signifying different crop types) with a weasel – they’d all be gone. Then what happens? Famine, death and disease. With the current severe winter going on in China, Japan and Europe, we might see this repeat itself all over again. Of course, the problem can be alleviated a little by having stores and stockpiles, but it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?

Agriculture resulted in the flourishing of human cultures, or does it?

The advent of agriculture has been deemed to be one the events in the history of man that allowed cultures to develop, because supposedly, it allows people time to think, where the “savage” hunter-gatherers would be running around the whole day trying to find food. I believe that is widely off the mark. The Inuit are still hunter-gatherers, so too the Kalahari bushmen. Dare we say they do not have a culture? Or that we have a superior culture? With regards to time, the bushmen spend a maximum of 19 hours a week gathering food only. Compare that with the farmers, especially here in Asia, where it is considered a virtue to be in the fields from daybreak to sunset (hardworking or just plain inefficient?). The amount of leisure time is a no-go argument right from the beginning. Hunter-gatherers had even more free time than the farmers.

Health

Another argument put forth by many is that agriculture allowed the improvement of nutrition for humans. However, by now, we all know that most of agriculture is skewed towards carbohydrate-rich crops like potato, rice, wheat, etc., and certain meat and milk producing livestock, e.g. cattle, sheep, goat. Modern diets are lacking in variety. These in turn limit the nutritional values of our diet. In Asia, people cannot do without rice (not me though) but rice itself, besides being a carbohydrate source, really has much of little else. Including things like Vitamin A, which was found to be lacking in the rural poor (farmers) in India, and there had to be a Golden Rice Project to try and fix the problem (see, agriculture again). In fact, paleontologists have found that rather than indicators proving good health, like longer life and bigger build, early farmers had a smaller build and appeared to live shorter and were disease-riddled. The phenomenon of size has still not recovered, as modern Mediterranean populations, like the Greeks, Turks, and Italians, are still considerably smaller sized that their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Agriculture also meant that populations have had to be clustered where resources are, in order to have access to them. The increase in population and livestock densities thus results in the easy spread of disease, like tuberculosis, (bird) flu, etc. (By the way, I believe that bird flu is firmly the fault of farming, and not fault should be put upon migratory birds.) The clustering and the emphasis on storage of food and resources also resulted in another evil.

War

As agriculture gained importance, so did the necessity of fertile, arable land. The lack of such land will bring down any agricultural city state, and in order to get more land, a population cluster would have to expand, until they meet another population cluster, and tensions would rise. More often than not, the overwhelming desire for more land would result in the invasion and annexation of the lands of other populations. It is the same with any resource that is land-locked. Like oil. This doesn’t happen often with hunter-gatherer communities, as they are often nomadic tribes. The less physical people resorted to economics, but as the Chinese say, trade-zones are no different from war-zones.

Overpopulation

Well as many of us attest, the world is overpopulated. This is a result of agriculture too. Instead of a large forest with good food scattered through the area, we have now grown a lot of not-so-good food in a smaller plot of land, and exchanged quality for quantity. Nonetheless, it means that people are now able to feed more mouths, and so they they reproduce at an increasing rate. The limitations on quantity of food have been shown to limit the population growth rate in hunter-gatherer populations to a new child every 4 years, versus one every 2 years, in agricultural societies. This is because hunter-gatherer mothers had to raise a child until he or she is old and strong enough to keep up with the adults, something which is not necessary in a farming community where the family or population is much less mobile.

Class Divisions

Hunter-gatherers do not have stores of food. Essentially, they ate what they had gathered or hunted, and so there was no concentration, or “wealth”. Where there is a concentration of resources attached to individuals, then there are bound to be social “parasites”, like kings, and governments, which tax people, because there is a gain in doing so. You can’t tax people when they have nothing to tax from, and even harder when because you can’t bully similarly strong people as you into listening. On the other hand, in farming communities, it becomes possible for a small group of healthier elites to rule over the weaker masses, basically by bullying them into submission. Nevertheless, one hundred weak, hungry people can still overpower one healthy person, and so, social upheavals are commonplace in such societies (Also because everyone wants to sit and get fat while doing nothing).

The paper that I just saw that was similar was written in 1987 by UCLA academic, Professor Jared Diamond. The essay, “The Worst History in the History of the Human Race” (Discover – May 1987, pp. 64-66) is available online and you can get it just by googling around. He has just about the same points but he had a different order of thought, and he also mentioned sexual discrimination against women, which is an interesting point.

Agriculture is now probably an irreversible part of our lives. We cannot do without it anymore, at least in the next 20 generations. It has contributed in some good sense (we still get food after all), but is part of the problem as well. The over-reliance on agriculture has resulted in the over-reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and economics. We humans have basically screwed ourselves. However, we are the only species that have the ability to reflect, come up with solutions, and convince ourselves to endure certain pains in lifestyle changes (although we haven’t evolve to WANT to use that ability), and our species might still get away with it. We need to reduce our population that is for sure, as there are too many mouths to feed, even with agriculture. What would the future be like? Stay tuned, and find out, 20 generations from now.

Not Everything Can be Priced

I read “Economics don offers unique perspective on Nature Conservation” in the “Battle for Singapore’s Green Spaces Blog” and it’s really infuriating. This is coming from one of the people being consulted by Singapore’s government ministries and statutory boards.

He, on the flawed basis that “Nothing is free” proposes auctioning the forests like the one in Mandai, to decide if the land should be developed. The extremely flimsy way of calculation makes no sense at all. There is no way in hell that the amount calculated from surveying so-called “stake-holders” will beat the price offered by developers (henceforth termed “destroyers”). If anything, it might allow them to escape with destroying forests at a lower price! Perhaps that is what Professor Quah would like to see? Buildings everywhere, with the only greenery being roadside trees?

He assumes that he is a more “educated” person than other Singaporeans (arrogant or ignorant?). What does he know of ecology? Of climatology? Has he considered the quality of the air we breathe when we are shorn of all forests? How that would affect our drainages? Would that drive investors away? It seems that in his ideal world, there would be no forests, no animals, no other forms of life apart from Homo sapiens and destroyers running everywhere offering more and more money for more destruction projects.

Taking this outside of Singapore, destroyers have cleared mangroves (number one target for economists like him, muddy, and smelling of Hydrogen Sulphide, and apparently costly to leave alone) and mined corals (to make lime for construction of buildings) in Sri Lanka. Christmas Eve of 2004, a tsunami hit and everything was wiped out. That tsumani took between 30,000 and 40,000 lives in Sri Lanka displaced 2.5 million others. In contrast, Bangladesh, with miles and miles of undeveloped mangroves reported a grand total of 2 deaths. In the Tamil Nadu village of Naluvedapathy, villagers had earlier planted a forest of 80,244 casuarina trees, which broke up the waves and only 7 deaths and “no psychological trauma” amongst the people were reported.

Yes, in Singapore we are sheltered from these. But we are still flood prone, and still subject to the effects of sea level rising. There is a whole lot of environmental processes to go into, besides the sentimentalism and aesthetics put forward by Prof Ng. It takes more than an economist to understand this. Economists, it seems, “must be educated” to use Prof Quah’s own words.

Where is the Balance?

Recently, there has been a lot of commotion in the nature circles over the turning of Mandai into a "spa retreat", not least by a long, rather scathing post by Joseph Lai. As I did my field work in Nee Soon (and hearing the Seletar Range firing away) I thought about the multiple land use in Singapore.

Singapore is a small country, and so the government has had to find multiple uses of a specific piece of land in the urban (High-rise homes or offices built over Multi-storey carparks over shopping centres over underground MRT stations)and the less urban (I refuse to use "country-side" or "rural" to describe any place in Singapore Island) areas (SAF training ground and nature reserves and tourist spots). But the contention many have is that what works in an urban setting may not work in a different, more natural setting, especially with regards to wildlife where you cannot plan things. Sure you can plan to build a resort with a good forest setting and a way to control the bugs, but will the bug-control result in the death of the forest and giving way to stale, sterile, ornamental plantation? (Yes I said it. I have a disdain for all the "touristy" flower places and nicely manicured, "planned" parks which are not natural at all) You cannot transplant animals into tiny cramped environment and expect them to behave as they would in their natural, wide-ranging habitats.

I started my conservation journey inspired by Dr. Jane Goodall's work at the forests of Gombe, how she managed to find a balance for the people there, between livelihood and protecting the forest. Singapore may be harder, it's too small, and our forests, frankly are not sustainable on their own, and need constant care. What's bugging me now, are the questions: Does this point of balance even exist in Singapore? Or have we passed it in 1850?