Lost in a forest

In his TED talk, Shubhendu Sharma explains how you can grow a forest in 10 years... yet I know from experience you can do it in less - even in three years if you plant some larger trees from the start (1.5 meter specimens) and if you provide all the strata a forest requires (including a rich layer of mulch).

A couple of years ago, after returning from a trip to Kibale Forest in Uganda, I wanted to replicate the unique density and lushness of an African tropical forest in my garden and I decided to dedicate a corner of the garden to it. It is hard to explain the magic of a tropical rain-forest yet it is even harder to accept how humanity is capable of destroying it at a rate of one football field every six seconds. According to Worldometer, a site which everyone knows well thanks to a bat in Wuhan (or not?), about 25 people will have been born during this destruction of 6 seconds.

I often explain to visitors in our garden, and during public talks about butterflies which I regularly host if there is no pandemic, that nature maintains its gardening schedule in a very different way than we humans typically like to do: a bird lands on a tree and drops a seed and if that seed decides to germinate right next to another tree, that is totally fine and the trees will start competing for sunlight, creating a dense ecosystem in this battle. We usually plan(t) the next tree ten meters further, since we envisage a beautiful canopy, one day. If you want to bring life to your garden, what about planting not 2, not 3, but 30 trees in a 10 m2 space? I have done just that, and the result is mind-blowing.

Whenever I have to buy a bag of firewood, I take out a block of wood and donate it to the garden. Our daughter Luna knows this well already and if I don't stop her, she will move all the logs from the fireplace to our man-made suburban bush-veld - "Daddy, can I give these back to nature?" In doing so, we contribute to the local miniature ecosystem - the wood soon becomes the new shelter for countless creatures such as spiders, woodlice and snails, is slowly degenerated with the help of creatures such as termites, which aerate the soil in the process, while the nutrients of the wood and its microbial and fungal helpers and byproducts are all enriching the soil at the pace of nature - where and when it needs it.

Why do people spray poisons in their living spaces - on their foods - or under their arms even?

My 'little Kibale' forest has developed into an incredible jungle over the course of just three years. Two years ago, our neighbour trimmed a giant cork-oak and after doing some effort to collect them, some of the large stumps ended up on the floor of this establishing forest - today, just two years later, they have almost completely been 'eaten' by the forest. Four weeks ago, our other neighbour's gardener across the road was sweeping leaves from a Pin Oak - and I gave him bags so I could spread the leaves in our garden beds - free humus - the best smell after Jasmine right now in Johannesburg! This last summer we recorded Natal Acraea (Acraea natalica) butterflies and Spotted Sailor (Neptis saclava marpessa) butterflies in and around the forest patch, two butterflies which are definitely not common in the Johannesburg suburbs. Through careful planning (or rather often by nature letting do its thing), we have now observed 50 different species of butterflies in our city garden. If I lift a piece of wood that is still fairly intact, it teems with life - read this: life. Why do people spray pesticides in their living spaces - on their foods - or under their arms even?

I am so lucky and grateful to have been born in a family of nature lovers; my mom was a biology teacher and I vividly remember how each year she would come home with a dead rabbit as she had to for prepare her next day class, showing the location and explaining the function of all the organs, including the lungs, for which she would ask the most ill-disciplined pupil to blow some air through a straw. My sister, brother and myself used to be her mock audience for many years and you never guess what we would have for dinner the next day... One starts wondering if the classic Belgian dish Lapin aux pruneaux, a delicious stew made with beer and prunes, is perhaps the result of the local government school curriculum.

Close your eyes and think of an orange - can you taste it?

Why do I consider myself lucky? Because I believe many people have lost a fundamental understanding of nature and its principles - they are working against nature instead of working with nature. I find it hard to believe one can be truly happy without nature and by damaging nature in striving towards material possessions, since we are nature. We are part of it and essentially a vessel made out of billions of bacteria with the most powerful computer mounted on top (our brain - close your eyes and think of an orange - can you taste it?), yet most of what we do is in fact destroying this intrinsic ecosystem with every action we take. One of my favourite quotes of all times attributed to Einstein goes like: "there are only two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity...".

It is indeed incredible that we are arguably the only species capable of consciously and deliberately destroying our own breeding grounds.

I recently came across a post about the Dalai Lama:

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered "Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

Fifteen years ago I visited my then recently widowed great aunt in Saskatchewan, Canada. My great aunt Yu Lin, an avid Yoga practitioner, told us many incredible stories about my great uncle, yet she also taught me some invaluable lessons about nature and especially about respect for nature. As she took us to some sacred Native American healing sites, she would explain to us that "we should never just take something from mother nature - we have to ask her first, and we e.g. usually offer some tobacco before asking to take a piece of a healing plant".

"smoke is good - it balances you"

A little later, she would burn some carefully crafted smudge-stick of locally harvested sweet grass, move it over my face and body and utter: "smoke is good - smoke balances you".

Yu-Lin would repeat those words while smoking cigarillos as we would start preparing dinner as a family and I would become very happy since for one moment that little man in my head telling me with every pull "these cigarettes are killing you" finally had a worthy enemy - this lady was full of wisdom and my hand-rolled cigarettes without filter were definitely not going to kill me - they were a much needed accessory each time I needed to pick a healing herb and they were going to balance me!

I had never really understood what Yu-Lin had meant with those words, until one early Spring morning in 2017, when attending Yoga classes with teacher Toni in Johannesburg. It had been a late one with friends the previous night and while I had given up cigarette smoking since my arrival in South Africa ten years before, I had enjoyed a Cuban Havana that night (a Bolivar, my all-time favourite as I like things strong). My Yoga moves never went that well before yet that morning I was completely in the right space - since this was so counter-intuitive after a late night out, I suddenly remembered a whispering voice: "smoke is good - it balances you"!

Talking about smoke, as a youngster I really started to get worried (and in fact depressed - is this the world my grandchildren will have to live in?) when I first saw images about citizens of densely populated places in Asia having to wear masks on their daily commute since the air was so heavily polluted that it posed health risks. Now read this again. This was 20 years ago. The weeks following the initial lock-downs have clearly demonstrated how it once was to breathe relatively pure air. Should this not be my right as a human being? To be able to breathe healthy air?

Today, most of us are wearing a mask and I am absolutely confident that we will win this battle against COVID (in the end, there are many commercial benefits linked to it) - however, if we do not fundamentally change our ways and develop a deep respect for the only real mother we all have (Gaia, or mother nature = our food, our water, the source of all our medicine, the air we breathe), humanity (read: your children and their children) will soon face more profound challenges that only occur in our worst nightmares or in Sci-Fi movies.

Do we really want this movie to become a reality? I honestly don't know what the cure is.