‘Gravity’, and My Walk Down Memory Lane of Spiritual Journey

A still from ‘Gravity’. (Photo from Youtube)

When a colleague told me two weeks ago that I should watch “Gravity”, I might have snobbishly asked whether it’s about astronomy or “geeky space stuff”.

He responded by rolling his eyes and making an exasperated exclamation of a sort. In my defense, I said, “Well, I would proudly announce that I am an astronomy lover, but, I’m really not into geeky space stuff.”

True. I’ve always been enchanted with stars, have always been fascinated with ethereal shapes of galaxies, and the coloring of the mystical nebulas.

Their otherworldly beauty has always captivated me since I truly took notice of the stars for the first time, which was when I was 14. That time my elder sister asked me to accompany her sit at the backyard of our house at night. Together we watched the stars while singing songs that have the word “star” or “stars” in them.

While doing so, I was suddenly overwhelmed with this inexplicable yearning to somehow reach out for one of those stars, to hold it tight and somehow burn with it. Yes, that was a rather ridiculous urge. But that was how I felt.

And that was how I fell in love with stars, how I began my fascination with the world beyond the Earth. The outer space. The universe.

Quoting Bruno Mars, to me “swimming in (that other) world is something spiritual…”

So yes, I consider that to be very different with those space freaks’ (oh well, you may argue this) fascination with geeky space movies such as Star Wars or all of those science fiction alien films.

Although I always think the infinite size of the universe offers enormous potentials for other lives outside the Earth, it is not the notion of those possible other lives that have fueled my interest in astronomy.

Once again, it is the beauty of the stars. Any astronomy aficionado would I guess understand this. No wonder they wrote that sentence on the tomb of that astronomer: “We love the stars too much to fear for the darkness of the night”. To which I completely agree.

Anyway, so I finally watched ‘Gravity’, and I can say that I LOVE the movie!! It’s not about those geeky alien stuff, and despite the too Hollywoody space accidents after space accidents (just too much, really. I don’t think NASA and their Russian, Chinese and Japan counterparts, etc, would let two international space stations destroyed so easily, whatever may cause it), I can say that it is one of the best movies I’ve watched so far!

Granted the movie could have taken a more philosophical direction rather than stop at being a mere action film, but man, how I LOVE all the outer space settings! Although again I have to add: Alfonso Cuaron should have zoomed in on those swirling galaxies or mystical nebulas rather than continually zeroed in on the blue giant ball of the Earth and the Sun, and made the rest of the universe a mere background for the entire part of the story. Really quite disappointing in that aspect for astronomy lovers like me.

I might also have been too emotionally affected with the story, thus my silent weeping several times while watching the movie in the cinema almost two weeks ago.

Well, I have a reason for this. It’s because –believe it or not– I wrote a terribly similar story 10 years ago!

Granted my story was about a Russian mission, not a NASA one, and two main characters in my story were Russians, not Americans.

But it was a similar female and male astronaut pair. The female was similarly a scientist. Katrina Tereshkova in my “Mars 10” (yup, it was a Mars-bound manned mission, also set in the future) was an astrobiologist, while Dr. Ryan Stone in “Gravity” was a medical doctor (I did wonder what a medical doctor was doing in the outer space, the same questioned apparently asked by US astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he criticized the movie. Although I‘m not sure either if he would approve my astrobiologist choice).

The male characters are similarly the pilots.

And their dispositions… God, I was freaked out with the uncanny resemblance: Dr. Stone is as aloof and gloomy as my Katrina, while my Nikolai was as playful (though not as flirty) as Matt Kowalski.

And they were similarly outside their space shuttles, fixing stuff, when things gone wrong. While “Gravity” smartly blamed all the incidents to high-speed space debris and the Kessler Syndrome, I might have absurdly blamed the first accident in “Mars 10” on a solar flare (yeah, I wrote that story when I was 20 and I’m still not sure now whether a solar flare can really be a good cause for a space mission gone wrong).

Dr. Stone’s musing of the silence of the space, her non-existent life on Earth are also very similar to Katrina’s.

But the similarities really stopped after the first accident because where Gravity continued as a full action movie, my “Mars 10” took off for a philosophical journey.

And in my story, it was Katrina who got disconnected and lost in space, not Nikolai as in the case with Kowalski in “Gravity”.

It was during her floating in the middle of no other living being, in the middle of stars, galaxies and other space objects that used to fascinate her so much, in the middle of a supposedly absolute silence that Katrina realized how she didn’t like loneliness that much. That for the first time in her life she felt completely, and helplessly alone (which was very true in that story), that she now wished she could meet people that she used to avoid and take for granted while on Earth because of her dislikeness with people in general (talking about past psychological trauma).

And also, the chance to be completely alone with her thoughts –once she got over the shock and great tremor — without outside interferences, allowed her to re-contemplate her stance on the origin of the universe.

She was decidedly an atheist. God to her was simply a fragment of common people (non-scientists)’ imagination. But really seeing all those space objects for the first time (as they were so near now), surrounded by their overwhelming otherworldly beauty, while being aware of the laws that kept those objects where they were while traveling orderly in each of their own orbits, she began questioning her old belief.

In the end she decided that there must be an intelligent being behind the systematic, life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe. And that the being must also have had a penchant for arts because of those artistic compositions of the colors (especially those of nebulas), which gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “heavenly beauty”. Obviously the being had far superior intelligence than those of all mankind combined into one.

‘God’ or not is just a matter of naming. But there is obviously an intelligent being (one or more is another subject to debate, or is simply a thing that we have to accept we‘ll never know; at least not in this life) who created all of those.

The beautiful rosette nebula. (Photo courtesy of nasa.gov)

Oh well, in the end “Mars 10” is just one of those typically “cheesy” stories of one’s spiritual journey commonly criticized by agnostics or atheists who happen to stumble upon such literary pieces.

The difference with most of other spiritual journey stories probably lies only in the strong science theme — in this case astronomy, and in the amount of literature research that I had to do to make the story not too scientifically incorrect, given that I wasn’t even an astronomy student to begin with (I studied Pharmacy). Luckily, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), where I did my undergraduate study, happens to be the only institution in Indonesia offering an astronomy program, so I could easily access all those astronomy and space exploration textbooks in the central library (yeah, I hardly touched Pharmacy textbooks if not for homework or exams).

And “Mars 10” was based on my own spiritual journey.

I was born Muslim, and like many other Indonesians born to Muslim families, I religiously performed the Islamic rituals, including the five daily prayers and the Ramadhan fasting, but merely out of tradition for the most part.

As I developed my fascination with science, though, and got acquainted with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution at high school, I began to fundamentally question my religious belief.

I decided God did not exist not long after I entered university, because I just couldn’t fathom why people often fight on behalf of religions and why Muslims especially are often the epitome of poor, backward societies split in bloody civil wars and why Indonesia, a Muslim majority country, is such a corrupt nation. I thought, if God truly existed, why would He allow all those things to happen? Why would He let His believers suffer and become subject of mockeries everywhere? If He truly existed, and Islam truly came from Him, I thought that this should not be the case.

So for some time, I became an atheist. I still wore my hijab then (had been wearing it since I was 18), but that was partly because I already got accustomed to it and mostly because I thought, “Oh well, if I made a wrong conclusion, and God appears to actually exist, Islam appears to be true, and Heaven and Hell are truly there; at least I would have collected enough religious merits for the afterlife.” Yup, I also still did my five-time-a-day mandatory prayers on that thought; albeit it felt getting more pointless every time.

It was in astronomy I truly found God for the first time. As aforementioned, I read many astronomy books, and I also attended some discussion forums on the topic. I would always remember how that one astronomy lecturer explained so fluently how the Big Bang Theory, currently considered the strongest theory that might explain the origin of the universe, only confirmed the presence of a Creator.

You might want to take a look at my post “Do Science and Religions Have to be Always Contradicted?” if you wish to know more of my view on this subject.

So, when I found Him, everything that I’ve seen, read, heard and experienced afterward never again cast any doubt on my belief that God exists. I might not always understand His actions or lack thereof, and have still often been saddened with the way many of my fellow religious people, especially Muslims, behave. But I could never go back to that era when I consciously didn’t believe in God. Just because you cannot explain things, it doesn’t mean that they’re not there, especially when all facts that prove they’re there are glaring at you.

And in the Quran (especially if you believe it to have come from God), He actually tells mankind to seek for evidence of His presence in the universe. So, really, there should be no blind belief. Allow me to quote two of the ayat for you, namely Surah Al ‘Imran 190-191:

“Behold, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding, namely those who celebrate the praises of Allah standing, sitting or lying down on their sides, and contemplate (the wonders of) creation in the heavens and the earth…”

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How an Indonesian Peatland Project Is Offering a New Way to Curb Forest Fires

Farmers close a water gate after riding their sampan through a ditch next to a rubber plantation in Jabiren village, Pulang Pisau district on Sept. 26, 2013. (JG Photo/Erwida Maulia)

 

Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan. The residents of Jabiren faced a nervous wait in October last year as fires raged in the peatlands around their village.

“Fire stormed this area — including that land across from here,” said Muhrizal Sarwani, the head of the Agricultural Land Resources Agency (BBSLDP), pointing at an abandoned field across a nearby ditch. “All other places were affected by the fire, except for this site.”

While other tranches of land in the area — peat, mostly —  were degraded by a particularly uncompromising fire in 2005 that laid waste to the forest covering, this five-hectare plot is still standing. Now, the government and environmentalists believe that the lessons learned here can be put to work at lessening the impact of one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems — Indonesia’s ticking carbon time bomb.

The Sustainable Peatland Management project began in 2010 across five different pilot sites in the archipelago after it was proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture and had its funding approved by the Indonesian Climate Change trust Fund (ICCTF). Jabiren was one of the locations chosen — the Central Kalimantan arm of the project is scheduled to run until 2014.

“[Peatlands] here have been degraded for quite a long time, and have repeatedly fallen victim to fires,” Muhrizal said during a visit to the project site in Jabiren last Thursday.

He puts the success of this project, so far, down to three focuses that depart from the status quo— raising the level of the water table, the use of peat ameliorants and inter-cropping.

Fahmuddin Agus, a soil expert with the BBSLDP, places a particular emphasis on addressing the level of water below the ground.

“We need to keep the water table at a level as shallow as possible,” Fahmuddin said. “If it’s too deep, more soil will burn when fire strikes.”

Project staff installed a water gate on an edge of the ditch encircling the site to keep the water table at a depth of between 50 and 85 centimeters, Muhrizal said. The Jabiren peat layer is around six meters deep.

In addition to fertilizers commonly used as nutrients for plants, the project used peat ameliorants to reduce acidity — peat frequently registers around 3pH. A level of at least 5.5pH is required for plants to grow.

While the healthy water table and use of ameliorants are largely invisible to the untrained eye, the third factor that sets this project apart is easier to spot. In contrast to the usual mono-cultural assembly lines, the rubber plantation columns here are punctuated by rows of pineapple trees.

In addition to making the land more productive, intercropping makes the land less flammable.

“Planting the pineapples also means weeding the rubber plantation, which minimizes competition for water and nutrients between rubber trees and weeds,” Fahmuddin said. “But it also minimizes the ‘fire bridge’ where weed grows between rubber trees, as often happened in the conventional system.”

Planting pineapples between rubber trees denies water and nutrients to more flammable plants that would otherwise fill the space. (JG Photo/Erwida Maulia)

 

Probable cause

While the branches of Indonesia’s peat problem are now well established, the roots were planted in a previous era.

The New Order regime rolled out the One Million–Hectare Peatland program in 1996 with the aim of converting peatland in Central Kalimantan into paddy fields by draining the ground.

The project fell apart as the government failed to apply the correct technology to allow rice — or any other plant for that matter — to grow on the land. It succeeded only in cutting down forests and draining the soil. The result was vast tracts of wasteland.

The loss of water and the growth of shrub made the lands highly susceptible to fire. Large fires have, indeed, struck the degraded peatlands numerous times since the failed conversion attempt. The blazes in Jabiren in 2005 and 2012 were not without a cause.

Developing peatlands for agricultural use has the added benefit that those who steward the land tend to look after it.

Fahmuddin cites an example on another side of the village, where the ICCTF project is being replicated across 100 hectares of lands run by 42 farmers, who frequently patrol the area.

“Whenever they see fire, they quickly put it out,” he said.

The replication project, beginning last year, is managed by the Central Kalimantan office of the Agricultural Technology Assessment Agency (BPTP), and is funded through Indonesia’s REDD+ scheme. Aside from the Jabiren site, ICCTF is running similar sustainable peatland management projects in four other locations in Indonesia — in Riau and Jambi (both are palm-oil projects), West Kalimantan (corn) and Papua (sago).

Quitting smoking

Fires and unproductive agriculture are important issues at a local level, but the issue of Indonesia’s peatlands also holds profound global significance.

Peatlands contain twice as much carbon stock as the entire forest biomass of the world (550 gigatons of carbon). Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based NGO focusing on wetland conservation and restoration, says Indonesia has the dubious honor of being responsible for the highest CO2 emissions from peatlands due to logging and drainage — amounting to around 900 megatons per year.

The country’s Ministry of Environment says peat fires contributed 25 percent of the country’s carbon emissions between 2000 and 2005, second only to deforestation.

Reducing emissions from peat and forest destruction is the highest priority on the government’s pledge to cut the country’s emissions by 26 percent by 2020. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a presidential regulation on this target in 2011.

A 2011 study by the Ministry of Agriculture says Indonesia has a total of 14.9 million hectares of peatlands spread across Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. More than three million of these lands are degraded because of logging, fires or failed attempts to convert them into farms.

Environmentalists have called for tough sanctions against those disturbing peatlands, including farmers who try to convert them into, now-ubiquitous, palm-oil plantations.

But the ICCTF and Ministry of Agriculture have agreed that the best way to protect peatlands is by engaging local farmers instead, by encouraging them to adopt more sustainable ways of managing the land.

“What can we do with the more than 3 million hectares of peat shrubs?” Fahmuddin said. “As most peat shrubs are under the influence of drainage, converting it to agriculture will almost certainly reduce carbon emissions from fires.”

He added that planting trees on degraded peatlands over the existing shrubs would also reduce emissions through CO2 uptake by “high-biomass” trees.

A new leaf?

A 2007 joint study by the World Bank, the British Department for International Development (DFID) and Pelangi Energi Abdi Citra Enviro (PEACE) — a local NGO — placed Indonesia as the world’s third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, although the Indonesian government’s own figure was less than half the size.

“When I saw the [project] proposal, I saw it included collecting data of emissions from peatlands,” chairwoman of the ICCTF secretariat, Syamsidar Thamrin. “This is very useful research because we may now learn the real situation: How much exactly are emissions released by Indonesian peatlands.”

The project monitors other key indicators — water table levels, carbon emissions, even the surrounding weather patterns.

“That is where we’ve got accurate conclusions, such as at which depth we need to maintain the water table and which treatments can reduce emissions,” Muhrizal said. “These are scientific data and facts, not just some random guesses.”

ICCTF says it expects other institutions, be they local or international, to replicate the sustainable peatland management in other areas.

Lastyo K. Lukito, director for environmental and social performance at the Millenium Challenge Account – Indonesia (MCAI), a body set up jointly by the Indonesian and US governments to support the two countries’ partnership, applauded the project for having proven that there was a way to make degraded peatlands economically beneficial to local farmers while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is not exactly a new thing; I’ve read about this kind of project before,” Lastyo said after visiting the site in Jabiren. “But we’d never seen the proof of its success before. And [the Jabiren project] is proof. This is something positive.”

Lastyo said MCAI would further study the project to examine the economic benefits before deciding whether to fund any replica project.

“There’s a very big possibility we can implement this in other regions by bringing in the results… and the findings of [the ICCTF project].”

Iwan Tricahyo Wibisono, forestry specialist at the Indonesian office of Wetlands International, said he welcomed the project because it “optimized” the condition of the degraded peatlands.

Iwan was unsure about the merit of the project in combating the bigger issue of greenhouse gas emissions, but expressed hope that this form of land management could be used to preclude the all-too-familiar site of clouds of smoke rising up from Indonesia’s forests.

“This sounds like a positive project to me,” said Iwan. “They’re optimizing the existing conditions, allowing farmers to benefit from that while introducing sustainable farming that can prevent fires. We’re supportive to things like this.”

The original article was published at the Jakarta Globe on Sept. 30, 2013.

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