A walk in the park

 The past weekend, on the last sunny summer Sunday afternoon, I had decided to go for a run. But the balmy weather instead inspired me to take a walk in Botaniska, the Gothenburg botanical garden, which is located a mere 2 km from the city centre. Botaniska is embedded in a nature reserve, with a fluid border between the two. I’m glad that I decided for a walk, because it gave some important insights which I would not have been able to pickup, had I as planned been running through the same surroundings.

 

The first insight I got from looking at the explosive colour choreography exhibited by the Dahlia flowerbeds. There, the extraordinary shapes and neon colours made the flowers look “unnatural”, even though they were merely expressing some of natures ability to excel in form and fragrance. Nature itself in the form of bees were intensely attracted to flowers, loading up pollen to bring back to the hive. 

The second insight I got walking along the winding paths in the rock garden. There I could observe a more subdued form of nature, with moss and leafs covering the stones. To see the hidden beauty there, I had to look down, to slow down to take in and appreciate what I saw.

This brings me to my third insight which is intrinsically linked to the Corona time we are living in. To stop the virus from spreading we are trying to give each other physical space and social distance. Therefore, I had to step aside to let others pass and someone else needed to wait for me. This creates a common possibility to slow down, something we should appreciate and keep even when the pandemic has gone away.

As I left Botaniska and ventured out into the nature reserve, I started to see the 30-40 year old manboys on their MTBs, cycling determinedly and with head down through the forest. I wanted to yell at them “Hey, slow down, step off your bike, take of your helmet and be here, instead of speeding to your next goal”. But they kept whisking by.

There are hard times ahead, with the ongoing Corona crisis, the accelerating climate crisis and the political crisis with rise of right wing nationalists. To meet these challenges and prepare for a better and more just world, we have to understand that we need to be in the nature, that we are a part of nature. We need nature to survive as much for our minds as for food. We are still natural biological beings, despite all the technological gadgets we carry around,

Accepting oneself as a being a part of nature will be difficult for those who have been attracted the fake news promoted by some politicians but also to the synthetic and technological world where nature is something to be subdued and conquered. It takes courage to shut down the lights and take a walk in the dark. When I slow down I find new paths and new directions even in this forest where I have been running so many times. I can put away my phone and see the details around me and listen to the silence. 

Nature is now in its recharge time, when both plants and animals are filling up their reserves to sustain the winter and be ready for the coming spring. So while the dwindling evening light and the cooler evenings may make us sad, we should take this as a personal inspiration to recharge mentally and physically. There will be hard fights ahead if we are to keep our civility and our connection to each other.  

Gathering strength for the coming winter also means to be prepared, be mentally as well as physically prepared but also to be organised. To be organised and connected was the core message in a recent @GaslitNation podcast. We need to be prepared, we must not be caught off guard. 

Nature is resilient when given space and time. We need to find our own pauses to be as resilient.

 

 

 

 

 

PS

Thanks to Bar La Lune for good pause environment

Beyond the olympics: Saemangeum, the Korean story you never heard about

For a Swede, the 2018 winter olympic games got of to a good start with Swedish cross country skier Charlotte Kalla being awarded the games first gold medal. But while we salute her and continue to watch the olympic competitions, there are other things to think about. Sadly, it might be hard to host winter olympics in the future due to climate change. But I want to tell you about another story, little known but of great significance.

Even though it’s still winter, the light is slowly returning at northern latitudes and we start to look forward to the coming spring.  One of the most revered signs of spring is the return of migratory birds on their way to breeding grounds high up in the Arctic.  The long summer days will help them as they feast on the abundant food they need to bring up their offspring and prepare them for the long flight southwards when autumn comes. It is hard to understand how a bird, 15 cm in length can endure a journey of 5-6000 km. A crucial factor is the availability of “refuelling stops” on their journey. For wading birds, such as the spoon-billed sandpiper these pitstops are found along the shores and especially on tidal mudflats, where the coming and going of the tide both replenishes and makes available food in the form of snails, mussels and other invertebrates.

So what has this to do with Korea? More than 10 years ago, on the altar of economic “development”, a man made ecological catastrophe occurred in South Korea. To foster “economic growth” an area of “useless land” was reclaimed from the sea. Across the mouth of the great Saemangeum estuary a sea wall was built that closed it of from the sea. Many square kilometres of the estuary's tidal mudflats were turned into a desert of dry grass. Where previously the calls from hundreds of thousands of wading birds had been heard as they made a stop over on their way to and from the Arctic, there was now silence and rotting carcasses of birds that had starved to death. At the end point of their flight to winter quarters, ornithologists found numbers of birds suddenly plummeting. 

I was myself completely unaware of this catastrophe until I started reading Michael McCarhty book “The Moth Snowstorm”. McCarthy grew up by an estuary close to Merseyside in England and fell in love with the wilderness and the birds coming to feed on the mudflats richness of food. Knowing in his heart what the Saemangeum estuary had looked like and witnessing how it now had been turned into a deadscape was nauseating for him, causing a combination of grief and anger. All the more since it was a both a manmade and a totally unnecessary accomplishment, since the reclaimed land still lay barren a decade after the sea wall had killed it. 

 

The Saemangeum sea wall is an unseen tragedy since the effects are mostly felt far from its origin. It is also one of many causes for the ongoing thinning of biodiversity and species. Long before a species goes extinct, it starts to decline in numbers, but we often don’t notice it. Only when a species like the spoon-billed sandpiper becomes critically endangered do we act, putting breeding programs in place if this species its deemed important or attractive enough for us, humans, to keep. Then it is often to late and even if we “succeed” we don’t know how many other species that disappear unseen.  

Saemangeum is on the east side of the Yellow Sea, a semi enclosed bay with China on one side and the Koreas on the other. Both China and South Korea have been very active in draining and building in their coastal zones, turning them into ports and industrial parks. Paradoxically for the migratory birds in Asia, North Korea might be their best hope for the future, because the lack of industry and low tech agriculture has left large areas of the North Korean cost in a more natural state. Therefore, a future democratic North Korea must be given guidance to protect what is left of nature in order not to succumb to the growth and development paradigm. 

We should not put all the blame for the Saemangeum tragedy or what has and is happening in other areas around the Yellow Sea on South Korea and China. We are complicit. As we watch the olympics on our Samsung mobile, we are fuelling the powers of consumerism, growth and economic development. We have a choice. Do we want future children to grow up and like Michael McCarhty be awed by the contact with nature, or do we want to show them what nature once looked like on our new flat screen TV? In order to even be able to make that choice, stories like that of Saemangeum needs to be told.