Rainforest Trip

Rainforest trip: check! I’ll be honest, before I considered signing up for this semester abroad, I didn’t even know Australia had rainforest. Now I can tell the difference between complex notophyll vine forest and simple microphyll fern forest without blinking an eye. What a difference a year makes, eh? While we are on the subject, I’ll give a few quick notes about the remarkable habitat diversity found in North Queensland. The various soil, rain, and wind conditions provide support a plethora of forest structures. Most people think of rainforest as thick jungle with near impenetrable undergrowth and an abundance of vines, and some of it is, but more often it is something else entirely that can only be adequately described after careful observation. For example, the canopy could be dominated by convoluted fig trees (known as “stranglers”), the appropriately named paperbarks, or even deciduous cedars. It could also have numerous gaps or few, which is often indicative of the level of recent cyclone damage. The understory is sometimes quite easily navigable. After years of study, scientists now have a better understanding of why these things occur. The study of the relationships between geologic factors, habitat types, and native wildlife, known as landscape ecology, is truly a fascinating area of study!

Perhaps more interesting is the animals themselves. My personal favorite is the Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo, a truly amazing marsupial that spends most of its life high in the trees, eating various leaves and stems. It was one of the few things we didn’t see on the trip. Two cassowaries (the breathtaking flightless bird I mentioned in an earlier post), a delightfully awkward emu, a couple of coppery brushtail possums, several pademelons (small, hopping rainforest kangaroos), sugar gliders (the marsupial equivalent of a flying squirrel) and last, but certainly not least, a 10-foot amethystine python with a partially digested pademelon (we think) inside! So cool. An equally interesting part of the trip was meeting people who have lived in, studied, and cared for the Australian rainforest most of their lives. The owners of all of the hostels and campgrounds we stayed at had a working knowledge of basic ecology and the lifestyles of the native wildlife. Even Jack, our “professor” for the trip, owns property in North Queensland, from which he studies tropical bird communities. Over the past 10 years or so, he has been part of a volunteer-led reforestation project designed to reduce future damage to rainforest wildlife by connecting isolated habitats. Bottom line, it’s nice to know that there are people out there who actually care about this stuff. Understanding the world is great and all, but, in my opinion, research doesn’t do much good if it’s never applied to real world situations whenever appropriate. These people understand that, and hopefully you will too by the end of this blog!

Now that we are about halfway in the semester, I think it’s about time I started answering the questions I laid out at the beginning of the blog. In order to know the difference between scientific and experiential truth, we’ll need to investigate the history and methods of science and religion.

First of all, let me say that the history of science and religion is complicated. Some Christians label modern scientists as anti-religion or even demonic, while some scientists bemoan the way that religion has restricted and continues to restrict the advancement of human knowledge and the betterment of society in general. Clearly, lumping large and diverse groups of people into a big ol’ mental boxes and calling it a day isn’t going to get us very far. In order to understand and cooperate with people that are different from us, we need acknowledge differences, while simultaneously trying to find some common ground.

 Admittedly, I haven’t studied this a whole lot, but as a naïve undergrad, I like to think that all great scientists are united by an insatiable curiosity, whereas great religious leaders strive to find meaning in the existence of humanity and the universe itself. The purpose of the scientific method is to better understand the intricate inter-workings of the natural world by stripping away cultural biases, observational misconceptions, and supernatural explanations: in short, to learn about the natural world in terms of the natural world, by looking at the natural world. And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s been quite successful. The purpose of religion, on the other hand, is to describe how to live a life worth living in an incredibly hectic and confusing world. It accomplishes this primarily through tradition, story, and teachings, and for many people, it does this quite well.

To summarize, we have two disciplines that have distinctly different purposes and methods. These methods are not interchangeable. To illustrate, I will share two anecdotes; one personal, one hypothetical. I’ve heard a scientist friend of mine remark, “I’ll believe in God when I see the evidence for it. Until then, I’ll remain agnostic.” The problem with this is that it treats faith like a science experiment. You can’t get supernatural insights if you are only looking at the natural world.  Simple logic, right? However it goes both ways. It is, by definition, impossible to get scientific insights from religious principles or texts. Think of it this way. Imagine a scientist comes to you and says, “Hey, I had an amazing revelation today! Atoms are mostly empty space. That means that God cares more about nothingness than actual matter!” You would respond, “You’re nuts!” and not think twice about it. Scientists feel the same way about creation science. Not because they hate the concept of God or Christianity (most don’t), but because such arguments do an injustice to the system they follow and the community they are a part of.

Please understand that my goal here is not to take sides, but to build bridges. It pains me to see two groups of people with rich histories and so many resources at their disposal hating each other for no good reason. Perhaps if we, as a race, stop demonizing each other, we can work together to accomplish that which we do agree on. Such as the continuation of life on this planet as we know it. Peace.

Aboriginal Camping Trip

Pictures are up! I’m still not up to snuff when it comes to making cool-looking blogs (or being creative in general for that matter), so I decided to leave bulk of the pictures on Facebook and post one of my personal favorites below. It was taken on the last morning of my homestay at a place called Earl Hill. It’s about a 20 minute hike straight uphill, and I got a lot of spider webs to the face on the way up, but I managed to make it to the top by around 6 am. I watched beautiful, but subdued colors for 15 minutes or so, and naively thinking the show was over, Istarted to head back down the hill. Then, 100 yards down the hill, I look to my left and see a brilliant burst of yellow light shining from above a cloud low on the horizon. I literally sprinted back up the hill to take a few pictures and take it all in. So beautiful!

Last week, I had the great privilege of embarking upon a camping trip led by aboriginal elder Russell Butler and his son Darren. In order to better appreciate the native way of life, we weren’t allowed to bring computers, cameras, or even watches. Aboriginal culture is all about living in the present while acknowledging the past. Even quite recently, a mere two-hundred years ago, they had no concept of man-made time divisions such as hours, minutes, and seconds. In fact, to this day, many of them see our time system as lifeless and dehumanizing, which is a fascinating topic of discussion that I don’t really have a lot of information on. Yet :) 

First, we visited Undara, a charming campground in the Australian savannah; the “bush” as it is commonly referred to by locals. This region is too far away from the coast and its abundant rainfall to support large rainforest systems, so the landscape is instead dominated by cool, open eucalypt forest, which is nearly as beautiful and significantly more comfortable than the rainforest with its stifling humidity. The natural landscape is characterized by sparsely distributed, wild-looking eucalypt trees, grasses, rocks, snakes, birds, and best of all, an abundance of wallabies and kangaroos. There was a group of about 20 rock wallabies right at the campsite, many with joeys still in the pouch. The cutest ones were getting too big and had to stick their legs out the front. When they stuck their heads out for some fresh air, it looked impeccably like they were chillin’ in a Lazy Boy. So cool! During our stay at Undara, we had a wonderful ranger and guide named Ross who was just a bundle of energy despite his advanced age. He treated us to two solid hours of Australian folk songs (complete with a ukelele) and stories on our first night there and guided tours of stunning lava tubes up to 50 feet in diameter thereafter; one with a single bat community of over 500,000 members.

Our second campsite was a solid half-hour drive through a cattle plantation to a remote, sandy riverbank site in a similar climate. This was really in the bush. Here, we passed the days reading, cooking, fishing, swimming, and having ideological discussions about education, religion, culture, and whatever happened to be on our minds. Not bad for a week of school, eh? Over the course of the week, “Uncle” Russ taught us about his tribe’s religious stories, innumerable culinary and medicinal uses for native plants, as well as the intricacies of spear throwing. I even managed to win my very own woomera (throwing stick) in the end of the week contest!  The trip also opened up my eyes to the immense difficulties facing opportunities facing aboriginal communities today. In order to understand the full scope of what’s going on, we’ll need to delve into the social and environmental history of this continent.

Scholars agree that Aboriginal Australians had one the longest, if not the longest, uninterrupted occupation of a single continent in human history before European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, they developed a complex culture involving webs of intertribal and interfamilial relations, a widely established system of law, and unwavering religious devotion. Hundreds of tribes, languages, and dialects dotted the Australian landscape. There are many profoundly beautiful aspects of this culture and much that European society could learn from it, even today. First and foremost is a commitment to the land. The religion, tribal associations, and food supply were all intimately connected to and dependent upon the land which the tribes occupied. The resulting respect for nature led to sustainable living on both an individual and communal scale. No large-scale wars broke out between the tribes, because they loved and took responsibility for the land they had. The semi-nomadic nature of the tribes ensured that plants and animals were free from the stress of having to cope with year-round human use. In some tribes, kangaroos, an important source of lean protein, were protected by religious customs, which outlawed hunting at their breeding sites. Amazingly, all of this was accomplished without a written language. They instead depended on the much more personal process of orally transferring information from generation to generation. The result was continuity, in the truest sense of the word. It wasn’t perfect, but also wasn’t marred by some of the drawbacks of the European colonial system which left a trail of minority oppression and cultural and environmental destruction in its wake.

This is getting a little long, so I’ll come back to current aboriginal issues later. Suffice to say that they have experienced a similar degree of racism, injustice, and long-term abuse to that suffered by African Americans over the last two hundred years, and they are about twenty years behind the United States in terms of public perception, prejudices, and their place in society as a whole. There are a number of reasons for this, none of them simple, but there is a lot of movement toward political social reform, especially amongst the younger white Australians and elderly Aboriginal Australians. I’ve had almost a full week of rainforest ecology lectures back in Cairns and am (almost) ready to embark on a 10-day rainforest field trip in the morning. I’ll have details on that in my next post. Thanks for reading!