Enriching Our Worlds

The world is full of wonders. All we have to do is explore, see and feel with all our heart and senses wide open. Continously we will discover something “new.” This is a very exciting experience. It enriches our personal worlds with beautiful forms tastes and colours and makes us re-experience the amazing novelty of life a child is mesmerized by.
Children often invent sort of a game of discovery and turn into a competition what might involve questions like: Who is the first one to find out about mysteries such as how does that bird look like which brings the babies?
Children are very curious and very desirous to know. They are happy as well as proud when their parents praise them for finding out things that are new because unknown before to the child’s world. Sure the child is made to believe to have been the first one to find out….

Scientists like children are very much driven by their sense of curiosity and the need to explore. The scientists’ zest for action being sometimes simply to have their names immortalized. My biology teacher at school proudly used to tell his pupils about this bug in Venezuela who bears his name, proofing the truth of the story by a very small line printed in a sizeable book. This made us children smile.

This week newspapers reported on two “new” species which got “discovered” in Indonesia. One being a giant rat which is about five times the size of a typical city rat. The other a pygmy possum which could be one of the smallest marsupials in the world.
In June 2006 scientists discovered a chameleon snake able to change its colours in the rainforest on the island of Borneo. Probably the animal, one of nature’s best kept secrets, had been long known to local indigenous groups and was only hidden to western science.

Evidently there is a lot out there not everybody has found out about yet. However this precious knowledge and biodiversity is critically endangered the world over by illegal logging and pollution.
Dumbfounded by the immensity of creation it is up to us to get active and fight to protect the Garden of Eden which is our planet- not only a story in a book. Paradise can be all around us.