Southern Pine Beetle in New Jersey: NY Times

spbnj

In Book Club we have been talking about whether scientists still refer to the balance of nature, and equilibrium kinds of conditions. So for the purposes of NCFP, I think it’s interesting to pursue this mystery with stories in real time. Thanks to Dan Botkin for sending this NY Times article:

Notice that “scientists say it is a striking example of how.. are disturbing the balance of nature”. But no actual scientist is mentioned saying this.

In an infestation that scientists say is almost certainly a consequence of global warming, the southern pine beetle is spreading through New Jersey’s famous Pinelands.

It tried to do so many times in the past, but bitterly cold winters would always kill it off. Now, scientists say, the winters are no longer cold enough. The tiny insect, firmly entrenched, has already killed tens of thousands of acres of pines, and it is marching northward.

Scientists say it is a striking example of the way seemingly small climatic changes are disturbing the balance of nature. They see these changes as a warning of the costly impact that is likely to come with continued high emissions of greenhouse gases.

The disturbances are also raising profound questions about how to respond. Old battles about whether to leave nature alone or to manage it are being rejoined as landscapes come under stress.

The New Jersey situation resembles, on a smaller scale, the outbreak of mountain pine beetles that has ravaged tens of millions of acres of forest across the Western United States and Canada. That devastation, too, has been attributed to global warming — specifically, the disappearance of the bitterly cold winter nights that once kept the beetles in check.

But the same bark beetle outbreaks have been seen in the past and we have been told in Colorado (by scientists) that bark beetles and fires are “natural disturbances.” Also, fire suppression must have a role or there wouldn’t be so much prime old lodgepole habitat. Perhaps it’s the location and magnitude that are different, but that’s a bit of a finer point.

Now there is an identified scientist, who says…

Dr. Ayres, one of the nation’s top beetle experts, has studied New Jersey closely for several years and has published research saying the rising temperatures have made the invasion possible. “I think the scientific inference is about as good as it gets,” Dr. Ayres said. “This is a big deal, and it’s going to forever change the way forests have to be managed in New Jersey.”

Ah.. here is the overstocked argument; my italics on “unnatural.”

Long ago, fires would have helped keep the forest more open, but they have been suppressed across much of the country for a century to protect life and property. That has left many forests in an overgrown, unnatural condition.

Experience in the South has shown that such “overstocked stands,” as foresters call them, are especially vulnerable to beetle attack because the trees are too stressed fighting one another for light, water and nutrients. Control of the pine beetle has been achieved there by thinning the woods, leaving the remaining trees stronger.

Mr. Williams, who is critical of New Jersey’s government, advocates a similar approach, involving controlled burns and selective tree-cutting. Mr. Smith, whose college degrees include one in environmental science, pushed through a bill that would have encouraged the state to manage its forests more aggressively. But several environmental groups were suspicious that large-scale logging would ensue.

“We saw this legislation as an excuse to come in under the guise of ‘stewardship’ to open up our forests for commercial operations,” said Jeff Tittel, the director of the state’s Sierra Club chapter.

I like the Guv’s attitude:

To allay such fears, the senator included a requirement that any state forest plan receive certification from an outside body, the Forest Stewardship Council, which is trusted by many environmental groups.

That approach has been followed successfully in other states, including Maryland. But Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the bill, saying he could not allow the state to “abdicate its responsibility to serve as the state’s environmental steward to a named third party.”

Below is my bolding:

Dr. Ayres said that if climatic warming continues, nothing would stop them from eventually heading up the coast. That means forest management is likely to become critical in many places where it has been neglected for decades.

“It’s hard for some people to accept — ‘What, you have to cut down trees to save the forest?’ ” Dr. Ayres said. “Yes, that’s exactly right. The alternative is losing the forest for saving the trees.”

Well, I would only argue that the only thing stopping them would be hosts.. which are relatively fewer to the north.

So we have an article in which the quoted scientist is pragmatic about “things used to be different, now they have changed and we have to deal with it.” But we have only the writer’s claim that

scientists say it is a striking example of the way seemingly small climatic changes are disturbing the balance of nature. They see these changes as a warning of the costly impact that is likely to come with continued high emissions of greenhouse gases.

Still, old pine trees will still die, with or without the pine beetle. And if we can’t burn them to get rid of the tree corpses, they will hang around and ultimately fall over and decay, quicker in hot climates than in the Rockies. Is that what the people of New Jersey want from their forests?

And the Sierra Club guy seems a bit ideological. Local sourcing of things is good but making money from dead trees is bad, because it’s “commercial.” I thought the Sierra Club’s antipathy for selling dead trees was just for federal lands, but maybe not?

Assemblages, Ecosystems and Change: Chapter 4, Virtual Book Club

One of the topics addressed in Chapter 4 is Margaret Davis’ pollen work (pages 80-82 in the hardcopy edition). We people who study trees are familiar with the ideas of how different species came back from their refugia during glaciation, and how different assemblages of species have occurred through time. Many different groups of plants and animals have existed in different combinations on any particular piece of land through time. Changes can be due to changes in soil (e.g., Mt. St. Helens), changes in human activities (e.g., Appalachian “market-induced succession”) or invasive species (e.g., Chestnut blight) and changes are always going on (e.g., climate, development, etc.).

When I worked for the Forest Service, people would talk about how “ecosystems have evolved” and I would ask “what is the mechanism for an “ecosystem” to evolve?” If I had one critique with the ideas in Dan’s book, it is that he did not go far enough in talking about the Emperor’s missing clothes. Just reifying an “ecosystem” places natural phenomena within a human idea context and makes it possible to say all kinds of fuzzy things about an “ecosystem”. I think people use it as shorthand for more complex ideas, but the problem is that it lacks specificity and clarity.

I just ran across one this morning, that policies need to address “fire’s role in forest ecosystems.” My first question would be “fire’s role as to what aspect of plants, animals, water, soil and air?” Fire’s role, like climate or anything else, is not a constant. I like this quote from the book:
P 85. ..

we find that nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure or proportion but change at every scale of time and space. The old idea of a static landscape, like a single musical chord sounded foresver, must be abandoned, for such a landscape never existed except in our imagination. Nature undisturbed by human influence seems more like a symphony whose harmonies arise from variation and change over many scales of time and space, changing with individual births and deaths, local disruptions and recoveries, larger-scale responses to climate from one glacial age to another, and to the slower alterations of soils and yet larger variations between glacial ages.

If you have been a reader and writer of Forest Service regulations lately, the “form, structure or proportion” will call back to your memory perhaps “ecosystem composition, structure and function”:

2012 Planning Rule: Alternative A would require plan components to provide for the maintenance or restoration of the structure, function, composition, and connectivity of healthy and resilient aquatic ecosystems and watersheds in the plan area.

2001 and Colorado Roadless Rule: Tree cutting, sale, or removal is needed to maintain or restore the characteristics of ecosystem composition, structure and processes.

These statements, in regulation, imply that certain characteristics should be “maintained or restored”; that is, maintained as they are today, or restored to what they used to be (yes, I realize that some in the FS is talking that “restoration” doesn’t mean that, it really means “resilience to change”, but English is English, and if you mean that you should put in in regulation, IMHO.)

Now, scientists reviewed all these regulations and did not say “hey, that doesn’t take into account current scientific thought, because there is no one unchanging way that composition structure and function is “supposed to be” and that “needs to be” maintained or restored.” I think in Dan’s book, he is again asking the question “if science tells us that everything is changing, why do scientists (including ecologists, I assume) review and accept regulations and other policies that seem to say the opposite?”

I have three hypotheses. One is that the ecosystem idea has fuzzed everyone’s thinking. The second is that so much science is based on these ideas that scientists can’t imagine a world without them. Third is that scientists don’t study the “appeal to nature” idea in philosophy nor the history of its use (see Wikipedia here), so they don’t see that using it has conceptual problems way beyond the scientific community.

Again, I have not allowed comments here on NCFP; f you are inclined you can comment on the Virtual Book Club blog here.

Virtual Book Club: Return from Elk Season

All, thank you for your ongoing comments and discussion while I’ve been off. Due to other commitments I did not get “back” as early as I originally intended and won’t have time to get into posting more thoughts until my last paper for my class is done on Nov. 11.

I do like the gentler and more reflective pace of the Book Club. I like that it allows us time to find related papers, books and articles to bring into the discussion. Nevertheless, I do feel a need to complete a plan, so we will be done with the book before February when the work for my next class will heat up.

So here is a schedule that I plan to adhere to to get through the book.

Nov. 11 Chapter 4 Oaks in New Jersey
Nov. 18 5. Mountain Lions and Mule Deer
Nov. 25 6. Earth as a Fellow Creature
Dec. 2 7. In Mill Hollow
Dec. 9 8. The Forest in the Computer
Dec. 16 9. Within the Moose’s Stomach
Dec. 23 10. Fire in the Forest
Dec. 30 11. Salmon in Wild Rivers and Grizzlies in Yellowstone
Jan. 6 12. The Winds of Mauna Loa
Jan. 13 13. Life on a Climate-Changing Planet
Jan. 20 14. The Moon in the Nautilus Shell
Jan. 27 15. Postscript: A Guide to Action

If you want to go ahead and author a post for any of these weeks, please send to me and I will hang onto it. Otherwise, I will post something to discuss each week.

Some of the ideas that, for example, Guy brought up are broader than any individual chapter and those are fine to send to me to post and discuss anytime. I just want to have a plan so everyone can see where we’re going and when we might get there.

Again, here’s a link to Virtual Book Club discussion and if you want to post, please email me at terraveritas at gmail.com.

If you want to comment on this post you need to go to Virtual Book Club site to do so.

One critique of Botkin’s book

Probably posting this in the wrong place, but the only place where I could figure out how to post it.  I did buy Dan Botkin’s book (Moon in nautilus etc), got the kindle version which was cheapest, and am still deciding whether it was a good purchase or not. Anything that makes me think has some value, I guess. My three main problems with the book are 1) Very wordy, he goes on endlessly elaborating on isolated examples (wolves on the island as one instance), they are anecdotally interesting but his use of them to derive grander principles seems contrived. “Cherry-picking” is the term that comes to mind; 2) He repeatedly states the obvious and well-known (e.g., change rather than permanent steady-state is the ecological norm), sets up straw men to compare himself with (e.g., the idea that most ecology is based on, and ecologists believe, that nature is a steady state phenomenon, which is patently false, similarly his trivial and inaccurate exposition of the logistic equation in population biology, which he then proceeds to knock down), thereby proclaiming himself a “renegade naturalist”; 3) endless self-promotion (I guess that’s really just a variation on #2). When I read him, I’m reminded of Walter Mondale’s comment on Gary Hart’s self-proclaimed “big ideas”:  Where’s the beef?  One example that’s about as vegan as an idea can get, not in his book but on his website (modestly titled “Daniel B. Botkin: Solving Environmental Problems by Understanding How Nature Works”), where he provides “The Rules of Ecology” (so far there’s only one), which includes statement such as “The evolutionary goal is simply to stay around.” If you think just a little bit about that statement, you hopefully realize either that it’s flat-out wrong, or else he’s using the term “goal” metaphorically, much as Dawkins did when he talked about “genes maximizing their representation in the gene pool.” Again, this is metaphor, which is not explanation, and it would be helpful if Botkin would explain and acknowledge that, rather than throwing it out as part of “Botkin Rule of Ecology #1”.

Wondering if maybe I was alone in my discomfort with this book, I did locate one review (coincidentally in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Ecology and Evolution) which takes on Botkin’s book, both the good and bad aspects, much more eloquently than I could: http://sev.lternet.edu/~jnekola/nekola%20pdf/TREE-28-506-507.pdf

fossil

 

Note from Sharon: I left this here but also posted at the Book Club site. Here is the link to the post there. I turned off the comments here but you can post there.

Botkin Chapter 3: The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale

Sharon is busy with schoolwork this week and has asked me to pinch-hit on the Botkin book discussion blog. PLEASE make all comments at the book blog location once this has been posted here by using the link in the upper right hand corner under the Botkin book icon. If you haven’t visited the site yet, the best place to start — and to introduce yourself — is: http://virtualbookclubforestpolicy.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/virtual-book-club-moon-and-the-nautilus-shell-i-introductions/

Rather than provide a summary of Chapter 3, as I did with Chapter 2, I am reprinting a recent post by Dr. Ralph Maughan, an expert on wolves and a strong proponent of their reintroduction in former habitats: http://idahoptv.org/outdoors/shows/wolvesinidaho/maughan.cfm. The reason for doing this is that Maughan is commenting on the very focus of Botkin’s 3rd chapter, which starts with the story of his (Botkin’s) experiences researching the predator/prey relationships between moose and wolves on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior near the Canadian border that is over 200 square miles in size and contains 45 lakes of its own. What has made the island particularly interesting for this type of study is that it has never been heavily influenced by people; moose first arrived there from the mainland only about 100 years ago; and wolves didn’t arrive (except for a failed National Park Service attempt to establish them with zoo animals in the late 1940s) until the lake froze over more than 50 years later — after the moose had a half-century to build their population without a major predator to inhibit their reproduction.

As with Chapter 2, Botkin uses this story and others — sandhill cranes, Canadian lynx and microbes — to examine the “balance of nature” as it has been defined mathematically and as actually observed, to examine the differences between the two. Both writers cite the work of long-time Isle Royale researcher and wildlife ecologist, Rolf Peterson, but they seem to come to different conclusions as to why that work is important: http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2013/09/26/should-the-declining-inbred-wolves-of-isle-royale-n-p-be-augmented/

I would like to thank Dr. Maughan for permitting me to repost his work here. Of the 72 comments on this topic on his blog, a significant number were my own in sometimes heated response to many of his regular commenters. Tree and Matthew will understand. It was my second visit there, and both times I seemed to stir up the natives with my thoughts and opinions — mostly because of the old “anonymous commenter” discussion. I think JZ first sent me there and after I went and got a similar reaction, he said he was just joking. Maybe it was Derek, but you will see the result if you read the comments, too.

I will leave it up to actual readers to determine their own thoughts on these two perspectives, but I’ll repeat Botkin’s analogy of “resilient stability” in regards to the “balance on nature” argument by his comparison of a person with a drink building a house of cards on a train: the house of cards will collapse with a bump or large vibration, but the drink will only slosh around before it returns to its former level. One is a fragile balancing act, and one is resilient. For me at least, that provides a clear metaphor for this discussion. Now for Maughan’s post:

Should the declining inbred wolves of Isle Royale N.P. be augmented?

Should there be genetic rescue (outside wolves brought in)-

For many years the wolves and moose of Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior have shown that wolves do not wipe out their prey. When wolves become abundant enough that the disappearance of prey seems probable, the wolves die back.

On the other hand, when wolves have declined to few in number, the moose population expands and begins to decimate its prey — the moose-edible vegetation of the island.

This rough balance has existed ever since wolves colonized the island one hard winter. In 1949 a pair of wolves walked over to the island on the frozen lake. The pair found an island overrun with moose. The moose themselves had migrated to the island 40 years earlier.

The wolf population expanded, of course, and brought the moose number in check (and more). Then the wolves began to starve off and the cycle began.

The moose prefer aspen, and they do well eating it. However, they mostly wiped that out before the wolves came.  Ever since, they have relied primarily on the less nutritious balsam fir and lichens.

Both the moose and the wolves are also subject to inbreeding. It is especially a problem for the wolves, all of which descended from the original pair. So, in addition to the cyclic malnutrition when the moose population drops too low, the wolves have been seen to suffer from increasing genetic defects. One of these is poor reproduction even when there is enough food.

Down to just 8 wolves, they seem doomed without outside genes from new wolves. There have been up to 50 wolves at a time on the island, although many scientists think a stable number is about 25. It should be noted that there have always been wide fluctuations around this “mean.” The eight wolves seem to have gained a brief reprieve with the birth of 2 or 3 pups in 2013 after several years with none. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how the unaugmented population can survive much longer. It is less and less likely that the lake will freeze and wolves from Minnesota, Michigan or Wisconsin find their way to the island.

The wolves and their relationship to the moose and the vegetation have been studied since 1958. Dr. Rolf Peterson, in particular, is the person most closely associated with the studies. He would like to see some genetic rescue. Dr. Dave Mech, however, who is another avid student of the island’s wolves is reported to want to first let natural events play out.

With the wolf population so low, we would now expect the moose population to be expanding. It is. However, it is increasingly suffering from tick infestation. This is a problem for moose in general during winters, but Isle Royale has seen warmer winters as the climate changes. This makes the effects of the bloodsucking  arachnids more severe.

Rolf Peterson recently sent out the following letter.

The National Park Service is interested to receive your input on the pending decision regarding the future management of wolves on Isle Royale.  Please send your input to the following email address:

[email protected] (note the “underscore” between ISRO and Wildlife)

The Park Service is considering three options:  (1) do nothing, even if wolves go extinct; (2) allow wolves to go extinct (if that is what they do), and then introduce a new wolf population; or (3) conserve Isle Royale wolves with an action known as genetic rescue by bringing some wolves to the island to mitigate inbreeding.

While expressing your view, consider providing as much detail on the reasons for your preference, as the Park Service believes the reasons for your view are as important as your view.  If you have any questions on the process or anything relating to providing input, please do not hesitate to ask me.

Virtual Book Club Assignment: Chapter 1

Since Botkin did a great job in the introduction of summarizing the whole book, I thought we could go chapter by chapter through the book, and end up with the introduction to see if we missed anything.

So here are some tickler questions:

1) Is there something you strongly agree/disagree with?

2) Is there something that surprised you?

3) Does one of Dan’s stories remind you of a story of your own?

Moon and the Nautilus Shell VBC II. The Ecosystem Idea and O’Neill’s Critique

oneill

As I read it, the key question in Botkin’s book is found on page xii on my Kindle..

“Whatever the scientist’s knowledge of the dynamic, changing properties of nature, the formal representations of these remove such considerations in most cases…whether or not environmental scientists know about geological time and evolutionary biology, their policies ignore them. It is strange, ironic and contradictory.”

My feeling is that the locus of these contradictions may lie in the competitive forces among scientific disciplines and ideas, competing for power and funding. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I shared an office with the Hubbard Brookians..they had a way of looking at the world measuring N P and K and applying systems thinking. But there were others around who simply observed or did experiments in manipulating organisms. At the time, these were all equally legitimate approaches to studying Nature- in our minds, if not those of the Big Funding Agencies, such as NSF. Since I had taken History of Science, I understood their (the BFA’s) peculiar attraction to the Mathematical and Abstract; and understood that the rest of us were little more than flower collectors in the hierarchy of Science. And that was OK with us, because our science was more of an interplay or conversation with Nature.. in population genetics we looked for mathematical equilibria but never found them. Ideas, measure, more ideas, more measurement, that was our conversation with Nature. We used math to explore ideas, but we did not have external ideas that we tested Nature against.

To clarify, I do use the term “ecosystem”; if we had talked about “prairies” in the past , the “prairie ecosystem” is handy because it denotes all the critters, plant, animal, insects, fungus, bacteria, viruses, water, soil- all of which we had studied before. We had studied them and their interactions with the environment, but at the time we might call ourselves “wildlife or fish biologists” “plant physiologists” “soil scientists” “entomologists” or “silviculturists”(applied vegetation ecologists). We even had a course at Yale called “genecology” but what else would creatures adapt to other than the environment? My point is that we were all studying things and their relation to the environment, which would make us all “ecologists,” I guess. Except that our language was not about equilibria, attractors, functions, etc. These are all abstractions that came from systems theory. It’s legitimate, I think to question how helpful these abstractions have been and continue to be.

But don’t believe me. Check out this 2001 piece.. Is It Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept? (With full military honors, of course) by Robert V. O’Neill. The ideas he raised in 2001 are as current as the “ecosystem integrity” requirement in the 2012 Planning Rule.

The term ecosystem was coined by Tansley in 1935. But as Botkin (1990) points out, the underlying concept goes back at least to Marsh (1864). Nature was viewed as relatively constant in the face of change and repaired
itself when disrupted, returning to its previous balanced state. Clements (1905, 1916) and Elton (1930) offered plant and animal succession as basic processes that permitted relative constancy by repairing damage.
Forbes (1925) described the northern lake as a microcosm, a relatively closed, self-regulating system, an archetypic ecosystem.

Science emerged from the Second World War with a new paradigm, Systems Analysis (e.g., Bode 1945), which seemed uniquely suited for this ‘‘balance of nature’’ concept, and fit well with earlier work on the stability of interacting populations (Nicholson and Bailey 1935). Systems Analysis dealt with complex systems as interconnected components with feedback
loops (Hutchinson 1948) that stabilized the system at a relatively constant equilibrium point. Systems Analysis can be seen underlying E. P. Odum’s (1953) definition of the ecosystem as a ‘‘. . . natural unit that
includes living and nonliving parts interacting to pro duce a stable system in which the exchange of materials between the living and nonliving parts follows circular paths . . . .’’

The machine analogy, inherent in Systems Analysis, became a central paradigm for many ecologists (Odum 1971, Holling 1973, Waide and Webster 1976). The paradigm offered a practical approach to the enormous
complexity of natural systems (Teal 1962, Van Dyne 1969). The paradigm helped harness the power of the computer in ecosystem models (Olson 1963). The paradigm permitted a holistic view of system properties
such as nutrient cycling (Webster et al. 1974). The familiarity of the machine analogy facilitated the communication of ecological concepts to the public.
If the ecosystem concept has held such a central place in ecology and been so productive of new ideas, why call it into question? The simple fact is that the ecosystem is not an a posteriori, empirical observation
about nature. The ecosystem concept is a paradigm (sensu Kuhn 1962), an a priori intellectual structure, a specific way of looking at nature. The paradigm emphasizes and focuses on some properties of nature, while ignoring and de-emphasizing others. After a half century of application, the paradigm is showing some rust. Limitations in the concept are becoming more apparent and leading to a vigorous backlash toward ecosystem concepts in particular, and ecology in general.

One more story. When I was working for the FS in R&D we did a review of one of the Research Stations. One of the administrators there was a big aficionado of systems thinking. One of the scientists had done this fascinating study (to me) of how fish move around in streams and discovered something very useful that hadn’t been known before. I thought it was great work. This administrator, though, felt that “organismal biology is passe, it’s all about systems, now.” In arguing that this scientist should be better appreciated, I stated “you can’t understand systems without understanding their components” to which he replied “oh, yes you can.. it’s about flows among boxes and you don’t need to understand what’s in them.”

So you may say “this guy was off the wall, and not in the mainstream.” Well, that could be true. Still the reason I’m telling the story is that to point out that people can cross the line from systems being 1) one way of conceiving of how nature works, to 2) the best way of conceiving how nature works, to 3) how nature works. And somewhere along that line, the empiricism that “science” claims as its basis for legitimacy gets left behind.

To comment, please go to the Virtual Book Club site here.

Virtual Book Club- Moon and the Nautilus Shell-I-Introductions

camp-fire-1

WE HAVE MOVED THIS DISCUSSION TO A NEW BLOG
HERE

To be honest, I’ve never been in a book club before. So this is an adventure. I thought we should start by introducing ourselves and telling our stories or, at least, some stories. One of the great things about Dan’s book is the stories he tells, and what a great story-teller he is. When you tell stories, say Dan’s triggers yours and yours triggers someone else’s and so on. This is a different kind of thing, and much more right-brained, than what we usually do on the blog. Not that we won’t challenge Dan’s knowledge claims, nor each other’s, through this process. But today let’s take a break from all that and listen to each other’s stories.

Why are stories important? This came across my email a while back from Ronna Detrick, who, I think, said it beautifully.

We live in a world of stories. Childhood fairytales shape our dreams and hopes. Family legends, imparted over kitchen table conversation, at reunions, and during road-trips, build our memory and craft our beliefs. Historical narratives inform our understanding of culture, politics, our larger world. Film, music, literature, and poetry mysteriously and continuously speak to our deepest heart – communicating truths we implicitly know and others we long to grasp.

Stories serve the way in which we are able to make sense of our world, our relationships, our behaviors, everything. They are how we speak of our circumstances, our deepest emotions, and our biggest questions; how we create and apply meaning. And they connect us to one another, bridging differences in language and perspective, time and place, past and future.

Most of us acknowledge that it’s less about a particular story and more about story, itself. It is the device, the vehicle, the means through which we express, listen, and even participate in our own life and others’. We admit (and even enjoy) that most stories, when told over and over again, not only shift and morph over time, but take on a life of their own.

“The fish gets a little bigger, the storm gets a little wilder, the love gets a little stronger, our bravery or disappointment gets a little exaggerated in the telling over time. There is creative tension in story. When we hear it, when we read it, when we speak it, when we write it, we filter words through our own experiences and our need for meaning. We shape the tale to reinforce our understanding of how life is. ~ “Christina Baldwin

This is what we love about them. This is why we tell them. This is why we live our lives within them. This is the power of story.

So, in the form of introduction, please say something about yourself and tell us one story about your relationship to the ideas of the balance of nature or systems ecology, and how they developed.

I’ll do a brief example:
I am a forester and plant geneticist/evolutionary biologist; I worked for the Forest Service for 32 years; I am running for Vice President of the Society of American Foresters; and I am a part-time theology student at Iliff.

When I was a freshman at Yale, I took two courses that were key to my future in forestry, and to my understanding of Nature. One was with Alison Richard, called “Primate Population Adaptations”. Another was “Man and the Environment” (no, I am not kidding; this was 1973 and we were one of the first classes after coeducation at Yale College). As I recall, Dr. Richard was the first, last and only female professor I had for the rest of my college career, which ended with a Ph.D. in Genetics in 1982. This experience (and reading gender studies of science) helped me understand the difference between the aspirations of “objective science” and the down and dirty reality of how it’s produced.

If your first framing of empirical, observational science is adaptation and evolution, as in the Primate class, the idea of a steady state is .. well..very odd. Evolution is change. Equilibrium is “not change” or change such that the results are still somehow “contained” in some abstract sense.

Probably the most important class I took in my college career was the next year at UCLA (I had run out of money so had to stay home and work full-time). It was called “History of American Science” and introduced me to the historical conceptions of science.. Like “applied science” was looked down upon because the upper classes focused on “basic” and could afford to study things without direct outcomes. Or the very real, continuing idea of Physics Envy. Having this class early, before most of my scientific training, helped me understand why different disciplines had more power and funding than others. I was able to watch funding for “science fads” flow and ebb across the forest science community and look at how the community and its different populations (disciplines) competed and evolved.

It is odd to me that history and philosophy of science are not required classes for trainee scientists. Also, remember that in those days “environmental science” was not separate. There was just “science,” and you applied it to whatever issue you had.

Much later one of my colleagues said to me “you’re not a conservation geneticist, you’re an exploitation geneticist!” because she disagreed with my ideas of What Should Be Done. But the key historical fact I’m trying to focus on here was that in the 70’s, there was just plain old genetics, silviculture, physiology, entomology, pathology, ecology, wildlife biology, range ecology, hydrology, fish biology, etc. At least that’s my memory.

Tell us a little about yourself, and what’s your story?