I took a Perth kid to the Queensland rainforest. Was I doing something wrong?

My son’s first word was bird.

He has always loved animals. All children do, I know, but to me it seems he loves them more. Yet throughout his first four years on Earth I’ve been troubled by it.

Us in Lamington National Park, part of the ancient Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area. Credit: Stuart Moraday

By the cute animal motifs on seemingly every piece of clothing and equipment he’s ever had, not to mention his animal toy collection.

Most of it made of plastic, the byproduct of fossil fuel burning. And as he has grown into a preschooler with quite staggering knowledge of Amazon rainforest animal species, I am acutely conscious that he sees virtually no real animals in his ordinary life, apart from other people’s pet dogs. It all feels wrong.

And many argue that environmental law rewrites, currently occurring in our state and federal governments, will make things worse for other species, not better.

I was haunted by such thoughts as we took our son on our trip to the World Heritage Listed rainforest hinterland of the Gold Coast. But my little boy, used to the dry bush of the west and captivated by the idea of rainforest in Australia, just interrogated me on what animals we might see.

Was nature tourism a positive thing ... or unethical in a world on the brink?

I carefully tried to manage his expectations … but I need not have.

As we pulled up at night to our campsite an owl stood calmly in our headlights. Possums scattered before us as we walked to and from our tent.

As we hiked in the following days, fat dark glossy skinks longer than my forearm lazed across the narrow paths, and pademelons like tiny kangaroos bounded alertly alongside us. We gazed across a valley of trees as far as our eyes could see, fading to a green blur: one of the world’s largest remaining forests of one of its oldest conifers, the hoop pine.

We learnt to differentiate the calls of catbirds and whipbirds and greeted a tiny snake that lay coiled centimetres from where we trod. My son patiently stalked brush turkeys around the campsite to capture them, blurrily, on my digital camera. I had to keep explaining that he was not in Brazil.

Still, I found it hard at first to escape a feeling of grief and conflict that my son remained innocent of our country’s accelerating extinctions and that he was perhaps seeing a world as abundant as it would ever be again. Was nature tourism a positive thing, I worried, or unethical in a world on the brink?

After several days my worry about the world quietened, even though nothing in the world itself had changed. Credit: Stuart Moraday

I returned to Rebecca Giggs’ 2020 book Fathoms, a multi-award-winning work from an author based between Perth and London, examining the world’s interconnected ocean ecosystems, economies, conservation movements and pollution crises.

Giggs covers the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning sociobiologist Edward Osborne Wilson who coined the term ‘biophilia’ for an innate affinity that, he argued, inclined people to value nature and ecosystems by igniting a sense of wonder and awe at nature, beginning, I note, in babyhood.

Wilson hypothesised that as a person spent more time in nature, the more they sensed its limitless mysteries and this motivated them to protect it not just for its own sake, but to safeguard our own sense of awe and wonder.

It can be argued that we need awe.

Australian multi-New York Times-bestselling author Sarah Wilson, now living in Paris, is serialising her new book as an online publication, an as-yet untitled work about “living humanely and fully amid collapsing systems,” for her half-million subscribers.

In it, she covers the work of University of California Professor Dacher Keltner as a world expert on the psychology of awe, writing that his research shows awe is mostly aroused by witnessing one of two things: vastness, as in nature, or human kindness. Also that it triggers the release of oxytocin, the hormone that promotes love and trust; and that about a quarter of awe experiences are “flavoured with feeling threatened”.

Wilson writes that awe and the facing of death leads to a sense of our own insignificance, leading to humility and, ultimately, a feeling of relief.

What we lose when we lose animals is a way to imagine the world as larger than we experience it, writes Rebecca Giggs.Credit: Emma Young

In a world of increased climate anxiety I know I’m not the only parent desperate for relief.

After several days of hiking those rainforests, I noticed that relief: my worries quietened, my wellbeing increased, even knowing the world remained on the brink.

Giggs writes that the environment will continue to haunt us, but we can choose one of two ways.

One characterised by regret, inaction and emotional deadness, a belief that we are powerless.

Or the other by a stubborn attachment, envisioning the pain of losing what we still do have, believing that what we can still harm we can still help. That some creatures might yet flourish if we care for them, and that includes our own flourishing.

Such imaginings underpinned the whale conservation movement of the 1970s, she points out, and as far as action goes, she recommends individuals examine their own talents and resources, as our obligations to other species are found not in the wild, but in the “increments of ordinary life; in eating, shopping, commuting.”

Or even in our behaviour and choice of family holidays, I think.

“These are responsibilities to one another,” she writes.

“What we lose when we lose animals is a way to imagine the world as larger than we experience it.”

Wilson’s book, while still in development, is perhaps closer to suggesting it is too late for environmental movements to avoid some degree of systems collapse.

I do not have all the answers, but I do know that I began that trip feeling deadness and regret and left it full of the remaining wonder of the world.

Maybe more nature tourism, rather than less – if we can find the lowest-impact methods – cannot hurt.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.