In the marshmallow challenge a bunch of CEOs and primary school kids were given marshmallows and toothpicks and told to build the tallest structure possible within a certain amount of time. The kids did it faster through rapid experimentation, failure and adaptation. The CEOs procrastinated as they tried to work out how, and took longer. I was reminded of the marshmallow challenge when I was in a talk by an associate from Ozfish the other day. They have been working with Australian primary school children to plant mangroves in Western Port in southern Victoria. It’s a similar example where kids beat professionals to restore mangroves.
Mangrove forests have existed forever
Western Port is the location for the southern most mangroves in the world. Like elsewhere, much of this natural infrastructure was cleared for convenience. But tiny increases in sea level have reminded people how important these mangroves were all along. So there is investment being made in their restoration.
The problem with mangroves though, is that they grow where wave action is high intensity. Existing mangroves didn’t just appear. They co-evolved with the coastline and you could track that back millions of years. Effectively, there is no start point for any existing habitat. At least on a human timescale these forests might as well have existed forever.
The first time mangroves have ever been planted by an animal
Mangroves need animals to function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More as a forest but not normally to set seed. They drift on the currents and drop onto the shore, or simply fall off a tree. The sharp point buries in the mud and seedlings that are fortunate to survive, do best.
This will be the first time in the history of planet Earth where any animal has intervened to do this for them.
This excites me. This is what animals evolved to do. To simultaneously destroy and create habitat for themselves. Functioning forests depend on us, perhaps more now than ever but we also depend on them. Right now we are seeing human animals do something that’s never been done. It’s Earth-shatteringly momentous.
For this reason, planting new forests also represents a real challenge. Scientists first had to design a way to give seedlings a better chance of staying put during tides. The ‘John Eddy Restoration method’ is simply where saplings are attached to a bamboo cane first. John is a lifetime volunteer and coordinator of revegetation for the local community around Western Port. It seems he also came up with the idea through sheer force of will, trying, failing and learning.
Then comes the job of doing what animals do which is maintaining the landscapes they live in. This is where things get interesting.
Experimentation versus doing
Scientist usually design systematic planting regimes based on rows and columns of saplings. Each one is presumably monitored to understand the growth and success rates. Experimentally, this makes sense.
Systematic sampling across gradients (e.g. distance from shore), means you can measure outcomes and relate these to environmental factors such as salinity. It might even contribute to working out the best way for saplings to survive. Because, if you can control for other factors, you can say with some accuracy … the bamboo method works better than other methods.
Systematic planting, such as this coastal protection work by Melbourne University, doesn’t replicate natural variation. It is likely ro reduced the chance that plants can adapt, by making the assumption that survival depends on factors that occur at a similar spatial scale to the experiment’s rows and columns. When kids plant mangroves, they tend to be more clustered and survive better – like the way people have cast seed onto ploughed ground for centuries.
If you’re funding this work, you might even demand such mathematical rigour. After all, it’s a neat way to control for variation and gives you a nice graph at the end of it. One would expect to be able to explain that planting in a particular way, some distance from shore, enables a certain percentage of survivorship, for example.
But this is an experiment. It’s not ‘doing’. For that, we need all the human animals involved and this has a novel outcome.
Primary school kids seem to do mangrove planting better than scientists
At the same time the Universities were given finance to undertake mangrove regeneration, primary school kids began planting mangroves in Western Port.
In nature, mangrove seeds are not randomly succeeding. It’s also systematic but in relation to physical factors we don’t understand. Factors that might occur at scales that are smaller than the scientists’ rows and columns. Such as small variations in mud density, nutrientEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More patches (caused by animals like mudskippers) or the microscale topography of the mud flats changing on each tide.
The primary school kids’ dogged determination and candid approach to reseeding, means they scatter mangrove saplings anywhere they feel like it.
It turns out, human animals – in this case a tribe of children – may be more capable of emulating natural outcomes than the scientists. Perhaps there is something instinctive about our behaviour and connection to the land that enables this. A form of non-linear and subconscious action that is more fitting to our co-evolution with the landscape. Something we break when we overthink our approach.
Whetever it is, the survival rate of the kids’ mangrove seedlings exceed those of the scientists.
What can we learn to do better?
There are a few takeaways from this wonderful example. We learn that using our non-linear minds, getting on with the job and doing without fear of failure, can lead to good outcomes. We don’t always need to stall progress in nature restoration just because we haven’t perfected the method. Nature isn’t perfect and our imperfections could make us a more perfect part of it.
And while there is an important role for scientific experimentation – especially as we break new ground – it doesn’t turn knowledge into reality. It’s not the ‘doing’ part. Ironically, it’s the doing that enables us to scale these efforts but it’s the part that has to fight for funding. Even though it rebuilds entire economies and saves us millions engineering alternatives, all the money flows to experimentation.
Naturally we wouldn’t ask kids to build skyscrapers. But when it comes to trying new ideas or scaling initiatives, we tend to turn off the more powerful parts of our collective consciousness.
Right now, the world’s scientists and governments are trying to think their way out of environmental crises. But what if the solution doesn’t sit with their thinking at all? What if their imagination is stifled by a fear of failing? What if the solution to many of our world’s problems starts by enabling our own community’s instincts to prevail … even those of our children?
