In first-year philosophy we chewed over the theory that humans were most interested in watching water, fire, and sky. The idea always irked me. What about a dune of tussock rippling in the wind? Seagull fights? Bumblebees in tomato flowers?
Recently, I read an essay by American poet and minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, called ‘Nature’. He writes about the power of observing nature; how doing so can transform, for a moment, the human experience. He watches it all and he is entranced: the stars, the woods, a river, sunlight, seashells, pinecones, winter.
“Crossing a bare common,” he writes, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
Emerson wrote that essay two centuries ago. It endures.
It felt almost fearsomely big, exultant, to stand with my family on a boat ramp on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula this spring and watch bioluminescence light up the night-time sea. Glowing waves peeled across the horizon, smashed against the rocks. Great sudsy swirls of electric blue washed over our gumboots. Glowboots, we call them now.
A lot of conservation work is about watching. Protracted, deliberate noticing. The scientific term is monitoring, but I suspect that sometimes, when what you’re monitoring is decline, it can feel like bearing witness.
In our cover story we meet an expert and instinctive observer. Jody Weir is a marine biologist with the Department of Conservation and monitors the fur seal colony at Kaikōura. The past few seasons have been rough. But her dedicated watching is getting results: her findings are firing up funding and scientific attention, helping us better understand the fur seals as well as the threats they’re facing.
When members of the public see what Weir is seeing—starving pups, especially—they are often bewildered that she doesn’t just feed them up. That’s not a long-term solution. Weir argues that the best we can do, for those pups, is continue to pay attention. Our story, funded in part by reader donations (a first for New Zealand Geographic) is published in that spirit.
There are lighter ways of watching the world, of course. You can just walk out into it and… look.
Writer and illustrator Giselle Clarkson, who works on our Just So column each issue, is all about coaxing young people to notice the living wonders pottering around right under their noses. Funny-looking snail shells (see page 8). Ant trails. The shape of a sparrow’s wing. How it’s different from the wing of a goose. Her latest book focuses on birds, but her particular way of winkling out wonder in the mundane—and holding it up so the rest of us can see it, too—is there even when she’s illustrating recipe books or old Joy Cowley stories.
I have learned over the past few years that watching the world like Clarkson does can balance the weight of that other, more grim kind of observation. And the truly wonderful thing is that it gets better all the time. Plant nerds talk about “green blindness”—they mean the time before, when you thought a tree was just a tree and not a tōtara covered in mosses and liverworts and lichens and epiphytes, when you didn’t know to look up as the sun hits the canopy and spangles the spiderwebs, when you would have missed the pūriri moth on the trunk, and not paused, often, just to watch.
