Do You See What I See?

Trip 8: Perth to Koolan Island

Purpose: Annual Weed Monitoring

Total Distance Traveled: 3768 km

Distance Traveled Year to Date:  24,073 km

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I believe that is completely true. It is true of art and architecture. It is true of the human form and it is most certainly true with respect to the natural world. Until my Honours year at UWA, I had always imagined that everyone was predisposed to love nature and the natural world. I thought that everyone must experience nature or be regularly exposed to the natural world for their own well-being and to ensure the maintenance of ‘sense of self’. But this is not at all the case. 

In March 2000, I attended a lecture at the University of Western Australia that was being delivered by an architect. He was one of those nouveau, trendy, clean yet crusty looking lecturers; you know the type. Tweed jacket, canvas patches on the elbows. Scarf and a little man bag. But what a lecture! 16 years on I still remember it like it was yesterday. 

He questioned the value of the natural world in the context of our own well-being. Does a child that grows up among the skyscrapers in Hong Kong appreciate life any less just because he or she may never have experienced the natural world? That child may still witness beauty but it will be the beauty of an artificial landscape rather than a natural one. A mountain range at sunset is beautiful but then so is a city skyline at sunset so is a child exposed to former any better than the child only exposed to the latter? What is the true value of nature and is it really worth preserving when the built landscape can be just as beautiful and have a greater functional value to us as humans. 

Now imagine how blurry the lines get when you start to consider the individual elements of a natural setting and their intrinsic value on ones well-being. How deprived is a child that never witness wildlife in a natural setting and, further to that, how deprived is a child that only experiences feral fauna in a manicured landscape. Is the child that grows up with Central Park as their wilderness any worse off than the child that grows up in the rural south-west of Western Australia? 

When all is said and done a fox is cute with its pointy ears and a big fluffy tail and camels are cool because they are so very significant, big and clumsy. But both are feral and they are not a part of our natural landscape. In fact, every single individual should be culled. Unfortunately we are obliged to love them less simply because they are not a native. Whether they beautiful or not, we should not value them in the same way that we should value a brush-tailed phascogale or a massive male western Red Kangaroo. What a shame. 

Consider the picture below. A tropical vine thicket framing a sheer cliff face of ironstone in the Kimberley of Western Australia. Beautiful isn’t it. But look a little closer. The gorgeous tropical vine is the noxious weed passion vine which is ubiquitous and devastating the wetter micro clines of the tropical savannah. The cliff is an abandoned iron ore mine pit hanging wall. Not so pretty anymore is it? Or is it?