The Mangrove and the Untold Story

Luk Keng was chosen as our first location to run ecoliteracy programs because of its well-known biodiversity. Three hike trails within less than one square kilometre area guide visitors browsing seamlessly between brackish and freshwater wetland, stream, mudflat and rocky coast. It is a perfect place for children to “encounter” nature with immersive experiences. Once we waded in knee high seawater at low tide to a little island topped with fine mud and shells. A second time children constructed a bridge over the inlet of stream to the sea with loose logs found around. Yet another time they built a tree house in the woods on top of a nearby hill.

For many children the most impressive experience, is playing in the mangrove forest that is just taller than a 6-year-old. In spring, hundreds meter of Kandelia candel (“秋茄”) expands along the coastline, with paintbrush-like viviparous plantlets hanging everywhere. Some children imagine these plantlets as magic wands, others wrote with them on the ground. Boys usually quickly move on to rock skipping and crab catching – oh those little shore crabs. For many it’s the first time they see crabs alive and not in a supermarket / restaurant tank, nor as an illustration / picture next to a concept that always “has 8 legs”.

From pedagogical perspective, these “experiential learning” is more than beneficial to young kids for their sensorial, physical and even social development. But in a way these immersive experiences and joy comes with them is almost missing the point. By the end of the day, children may go back home with darker skin and sweating all over, yet has no new knowledge and appreciation about other lives showed up during the day. Mangrove is indifferent to Poinciana (an iconic tree in Hong Kong with big bright red flowers in early summer), and crab is just another toy that moves.

In fact, there are so many untold stories to Kandelia candel - its biological features as a result of “structural coupling” with its environment (viviparous plantlets to disperse “seed”, expansive root to fix it in waves, “pumping mechanism” to extract water from salty seawater, to name a few); its varied growth due to the impact of geo-economical forces, its role in the intricate predatory and symbiotic “web of life”, weaving in it also the floating algae, mud, mudskipper, mangrove, crab, snail, and the egret tip-toeing at sunset; its function as a pioneering species yet inability to generate immediate financial return. These stories, contingent in observation and hidden from immediate experiences are the core to understand the relationality and key to appreciation or empathy to this visually unattractive but marvelous tree.

This difficulty empathizing with the mangrove is not only for the children. In fact, living in the Anthropocene, even scientists slide in the pitfall where everything is measured up to human standard and used as proofs that non- human beings don’t have the cognitive and epistemological capacity to assert agency. Dogs, for example, have been long categorized as not self-conscious because they failed the mirror-test developed in the 1970s - only a few primates (human beings included) were able to pass.

This view was updated in the last two decades because scientists finally realized that visual sense doesn’t play as central a role for dogs as for human. Dogs find their ways by sniffing, not by looking. Inspired by the initial success empathizing dogs in their sniffing capability, biologist have also proved dogs’ ability to represent their body not as visual image, but in the context of “body as an obstacle” in real dog experience retrieving objects with their body weight.

In her bestseller The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing (2015) used the word “translation” to describe how the rare mushroom matsutake, the science and supply chains centered around it become connectors between cultural patches and value systems. Neither dog nor mangrove talk for themselves in a language we human beings understand.

Here I propose us to actively think ourselves as translators, not in the linguistic sense, but facilitators of communication and collaboration across different cultures, values and species. "Homo Viridis" soft robotics project is a literal example of translation between human and non-human (plant) senses (Christiansen, Mads Bering; J rgensen, Jonas; Belling, Anne-Sofie Emilie; Beloff, 2020). The translation is never accurate – even on theory it is impossible for human to feel beyond human senses and cognition. But it is not more impossible than understanding what one person means by listening to him expressing through language. At least it is a big step revealing the vast senses and capacity to feel and think for the non-human.

Storytelling is another powerful tool to bring adults and children alike to the non-human world. Relevance to personal experience is the key. For adults the mangrove life resonates with them easily when compared to the hardships in their middle age, trying to weather their career moves while burdened by family responsibilities. For children such hardship doesn’t appeal. Rather, they see themselves in the “baby” viviparous plantlets and are never bored finding homes for insects and small mammals, as they are a big part of their not so extensive lived experiences. These stories bridge theory / concept and the real world, and often lead to more attentive attitude and a slower pace of walking, both are necessary for observation and deeper knowledge.

A shifted view on subject / object, observer / observed, ideal / multiplicity is not only the goal of our ecoliteracy program but also changes our role as educator. The children are brought to the site where multiple relationalities can be explored and situated knowledge produced. But there is no one curriculum that each child will receive identically. Some children are excited by the “magic wand” narrative because of her Disney Elsa fantasy planted by “Let it Go” and beautiful princess dress. Others are adequately trained on ticking off tasks that we have to give them a search list to get them start look around. Some can talk Fabre’s Book of Insects stories for hours while ignore the florescent green caterpillar one yard away from his feet. Some quickly pushes the tidal movement discussion to celestial mechanics - of course his parents are both university professors. Despite the same environment they are in and the same coaches they are facing, they all come in with different genetical and genealogical “internal structures”, absorbing different stimuli and “perturbations”, and make contributions to the dynamics of the day.

In the same way human being become one of the many actants with agency in the world, we are only one node in the web, while the other actants – the weather, the place, the trees, the crabs, the kids and their parents – are all part of a phenomenon which no one single entity has total control.