The drive from the Rice campus back to my apartment, though short, was a swift jolt back into my daily life. As soon as I sat down in my car, the entire trip seemed like a dream. But what anchors all of the amazing experiences that I had on this trip are the lessons that I learned.
This class helped me to realize one of the goals that almost everyone writes in their college admissions essay and almost no one considers once matriculated–becoming a citizen of the world. To be honest, I considered this more of a catchy fluff phrase than a true sentiment before this trip. But as we interacted with the animals, environment, residents, and researchers in Tanzania, I began to understand it.
The African savanna biome as we know it cannot exist without the charismatic megafauna that make it so iconic. It cannot exist without the local people–pastoralists and farmers. It could not exist as it does in the present without an extensive history of evolution, adaptation, and climate and planetary changes. It is understanding the interrelation of all these aspects of the African savanna biome that I believe helped me to become a global citizen.
Going to Tarangire, Ngorongoro Crater, and Serengeti imparted me with a reverence for protected, unbroken natural areas. Not only seeing fauna, but also witnessing fauna interact–from flamingo matings to a lion eating a freshly killed Cape buffalo–helped me visualize worlds beyond the urbanized one that I am so familiar with.
Visiting lake Obalbal and conducting scat transects around an abandoned boma showed me how untrue a myth of “pure” nature is, and gave me a new model for a productive coexistence between humans and animals. It allowed me to see an environment shaped both by humans and by animals, and to blur the divide between them.
Surveying and excavating in Olduvai Gorge provided context for everything that we had seen. Even when we didn’t directly witness geology or climate impacting wildlife in the field, we were able to look into paleoenvironments and see how long trends of environmental change, like aridification, transformed habitats and the species present in them.
All of these experiences developed my understanding of how the environment influences ecological communities–population fluctuations, migrations, evolutionary adaptations, etc.–but also of how ecological communities influence the environment. Animals like elephants promote turnover of long-lived flora like trees and help seeds germinate in their digestive tract, while browsers like giraffes, duikers, and kudu maintain grassland and prevent woodland takeover. Grazers, too, play a role in creating grazing pastures and preventing fires. Animals in the savanna have adapted to their environments, but they also adapt their environments.
One of my greatest ecological and paleoanthropological takeaways from this course is a lessened sense of division between humans and other animals. Learning about and witnessing evidence of hominid evolution in Olduvai Gorge reinforced my understanding of humans as part of our environment, rather than separate from it. The reality of humanity now is that we are quite separated from our origins, but learning about hominids evolving, acting as both predator and prey, participating in food webs and participating in ecological systems as more than apex destructors was eye-opening for me.
The course itself was a mixture of expected and unexpected, though completely novel. I wasn’t anticipating the relative luxury of our first few days, nor was I expecting the extremely fast-pace. The second half of the course was more in line with what I expected lifestyle-wise, but I had no way of knowing what awaited me content-wise. Overall, the course was grueling, but in a good way? It was no easy feat to keep up, but every day was incredibly rewarding. Despite sleep deprivation, occasionally unideal travel conditions, dust burials, and more, I learned an unbelievable amount about myself as a student and person. It’s easy to be engaged and ready to learn when your classroom is the Serengeti or Olduvai Gorge, and your professors are Dr. Solomon and Dr. Dominguez Rodrigo 🙂
It’s difficult to pick, but my favorite parts of the trip included seeing a wildebeest for the first time, driving up the rim of Ngorongoro crater, watching the sunrise and sunset every day, collecting bones and teeth, and looking through the entertaining/horrific/educational trail camera photos (also the people and places and literally everything). Despite the numerous setbacks we encountered (see also: cars breaking down, flat tires, 12 hour flights, maybe bribing a government official), experiencing them with my fellow classmates and professors made them more amusing than devastating. So, I’m left with only a few least favorites about the course: the freezing cold Olduvai camp showers, perpetually missing 6:30 am breakfasts, not packing more than one pair of warm layers, remembering to take malaria pills, and unrelenting illness.
And, finally, a list of my three most important course takeaways (in no particular order):
- Don’t pet the animals.
- sub-takeaway–never approach a giraffe attempting to be licked. They will kick you. Bring giraffe treats next time, and wait for them to come to you.
- As creepy as teeth are, they can tell you an incredible amount about their owners and the environment that they lived in.
- Humans have not only the potential to have, but also a history of having, a positive, productive relationship with the rest of the natural world.
LOL (lots of love),
Rose
goodbye all! i’ll miss you!!
