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Water forests like these – the
meeting place of forest and
sea – encapsulate so much of life’s
essence. Start with water, add
photosynthetic organisms, now you
have oxygen and carbohydrates – the
origins of all the life around us.
For the villagers replanting the
mangroves was no ornamental exercise.
One of the fisherman, Arnold, had
explained to me that when he was a
child there were plenty of fish in the
harbour. Now they travelled for over
seven hours by boat and sat on a
platform for days in the open ocean,
in the hopes of getting a good catch.
Overfishing in Bahowo isn’t something
you read about, yet it’s the equivalent
of going to the grocery store and the
shelves are empty.
I sloshed further into the
mangroves. When mangroves sprout,
the first shoot is like an upright arrow,
a stalk pushing up out of the mud. That
shoot will sprout leaves. A root system
grows beneath in the mud. In Asia a
mangrove tree can grow to be nearly
30-metres tall.
The quiet presence of these
trees belies the fact that they are
a potent counter to the globalenvironmental behemoth – climate
change. Mangroves store 50 times more
carbon in their soil per square metre
than the same amount of Amazon
rainforest. They are part of what’s called
“blue carbon” – carbon stored in coastal
and marine ecosystems. Along with
mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrass
sequester enormous quantities of
carbon dioxide.
I turned around and looked out
towards the ocean through the canopy
of mangroves. The sunset had turned a
brilliant orange. Alexander and Nyomen
sat motionless in the boat exchanging
hushed words. So here’s where they
planted the seedlings, I thought.
The seedlings were all around me,
half-a-metre to metre-long shoots
of life pushing up out of the water:
2,000 of them.
Beauty takes all kinds of forms.
When you’re surrounded by several
types of beauty and they converge all
at once, that beauty takes on a unique
power. The myriad of dark, shiny
seedlings, the calm sea air and the
radiant hues of dusk converged into one
thing: the beauty of the individual acts
that put these seedlings in the ground.
Our modern world exists in theBELOW The mangrove
seedlings viewed from
above at low tideshadow of monumental issues, climate
change, mass extinction, increased
violent conflict. But the solutions?
As much as they are broad-ranging,
they are also specific, close to home.
Acts with intention. People roll up their
sleeves and get to work.
Two hundred students had come
from Samratulangi University to plant
the seedlings. The boys slept in a large
marquee tent erected by the army.
The villagers invited the girls to sleep
as guests in their homes. They worked
in the thick mud in scorching heat,
planting the 2,000 seedlings one by one.
In the 1980s Indonesia had over 42
million acres of mangroves, an area
the size of Tunisia. By the 1990s, half of
them had been ripped out for firewood,
timber or to create fish, lobster and
shrimp farms. But the Indonesian
government and public opinion have
started to shift to support restoring
mangrove “green belts”.
Madgid Blongkot started a
mangrove plantation on a beach in
North Sulawesi. He employs five people