The cosmopolitan ecologist

I write these words from the Café Rustica, a delightful neighborhood coffeeshop where all the employees know my name, and the tables spill out onto the sidewalk during the precious months of the Boston summer. I come here often to sit at a corner table, with a view out the bay windows onto Beacon Street, and think and write random thoughts in my journal. For me, this is one of the most sublime joys in the world, to have time to ponder and muse and just stare out the window and let my thoughts gestate. I realize that for some this meditative space would seem insufferably boring and clichéd, but I’ve always had this sort of brooding, introspective streak. In high school I was fortunate to have a couple friends of the same temperament, and it seemed totally normal at the time to talk about existential philosophy and beat poetry, those subjects so friendly to teenage angst. We are all scattered across the country now, doing various things, but I think we all kept our belief in the importance of an intellectual life, in our own way.

By an intellectual life, I mean nothing more than the “examined life” of Thoreau, the sense that there is wisdom and pleasure to be found by reading and thought and discussion. In America today, this conception of the intellectual is viewed as hopelessly idealistic and elitist, and perhaps it is, for it is certainly out of step with a culture that spends inordinate amounts of time gossiping about Brittany Spears’ baby. I can’t say that our belief in an intellectual life has always lead us to make wise career choices, and indeed I know it has lead me to make choices that have not lead me to the most stable or profitable career I could have chosen. We’ve all stayed away from the corporate world, as not having enough mental space for original thought, although recently I’ve begun to reconsider this position. Even in the academic world, where we’ve all ended up in one capacity or another, this conception of the intellectual is unwelcome, for academia is thoroughly (and perhaps appropriately) focused on the outcome of thought, and not its pleasures. While it may just be my stubbornness, I still believe in an intellectual life, and cultivate it as one of the most important things in my life, although by now means the only or most important thing.

Somehow I found my way into science, and now I do science research for a living. I love science, the sense that by a careful examination of empirical evidence something thorough and lasting may be learned, a sense lacking from more abstract philosophical pursuits. I love ecology, my chosen discipline, and deeply believe it can help with some of the profound environmental challenges facing our society. I’m happy with my career, and optimistic I can do some decent work. But there’s still a tension within me, between the safe work of scientists, what Thomas Kuhn called puzzle-solving, and new, difficult work that might help guide our society through its environmental predicament. My generation of young ecologists, who are just now receiving their degrees, deeply want to work on the latter, at least some of the time, and not leave it until “after you have tenure,” as one senior ecologist notably advised me.

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It’s the end of another field season, the time when all my undergraduate helpers leave and my office falls silent during the cold winter. As usual, I feel bittersweet about the transition. I have loved my time outside, in the beautiful New England woods, and I’ve loved the process of mentoring my students. However, I cannot wait to have a few uninterrupted weeks in my office to focus on some of the more cerebral aspects of academic scholarship.

I thought I would try to concentrate the wisdom I’ve found during my field campaigns, as modest as they have been, for I feel field work has some lessons that apply year-round:
1. Whatever happens, whatever goes wrong, keep heading steadily toward your goal. In field work, something is always going wrong- it rains, the equipment breaks, someone twists an ankle- but you just have to make do.
2. Learn your research protocol by heart, and then keep doing it the same way by force of habit. Inevitably, moments occur when a shortcut to the research protocol appears possible. There shortcuts are almost always mistakes.
3. Motivate your employees for the reasons why the protocol is what it is. This empowers them to let you, the boss, know when you’re doing something boneheaded.

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I feel broken sometimes, like I’m missing something vital that everyone else sees, like there’s an atmosphere that everyone else can breathe. There’s a disconnect between me and many of my friends and countrymen: frankly, I just can’t get that much excitement about the acquisition of more material objects, more stuff. There was a time when I was proud of this, when I was a brash teenager, as a mark of difference. Now I just feel like an astronaut on a foreign planet.

It’s not that I can’t enjoy material experiences deeply. I love going to a café for an espresso, lounging, talking, writing in my journal. I love going to a good restaurant and tasting something I’ve never tasted before. And I love traveling, seeing a different piece of earth (or an old one from a new viewpoint), and heaven knows I’ve spent more on such trips that maybe I should have. So I ain’t no saint. Indeed, some might cynically say I just have a rather elitist set of material wants compared with other Americans. And maybe that’s true. The problem is that for many of the things in the world that I want I don’t really lust after them all that strongly: I don’t mind if my clothes have holes in the them, or are from Filene’s Basement; I don’t mind having a car whose side is covered with dents; I don’t really mind living in a smallish 1-bedroom apartment with my wife.

And so as I’ve entered the adult world, where we all are supposed to strive for a continually expanding set of “necessary” material goods, I feel estranged. In comparison with this radiant, bright world, without shadow, I seem bitter or just silly. A friend has suggested that I’m this obstinate because I came from a decently well-off family, and so have never developed that innerving fear of poverty. Perhaps this is true, although I’m not sure why this fact should imply that the other path is more primary.

To me, money has always seemed like a necessary evil, something you have to ransom your time to obtain. Thus spending money for me is often downright painful, as it just makes me ransom more time away, and often that bargain doesn’t seem worth it. And I know that this makes me a cheapskate, I admit it, I won’t argue with the world anymore about it. But I want everyone who reads this to know that that’s who I am. Perhaps I feel ashamed now of it, but I am what I am. If I only could find the words to communicate how strongly this is inbred within me, how glorious it feels to break away from the spell of it and try to purchase my own soul instead of some thing…

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I’ve been writing lots of columns recently, an outpouring of words that’s been glorious procrastination for me. There’s been one column though that I’ve been scared to write, scared to admit I have such thoughts, scared of what all the feminists friends of mine might say, scared of becoming too personal in these pages and losing my professional distance. I’ve been working through a confusing jumble of thoughts about my job and career recently, and I’m just now realizing how much an odd version of masculinity haunts my thoughts. I finished my Ph.D. in Ecology this past spring, and I left Duke fresh-faced and idealistic and generally optimistic about my future. I also left Duke madly in love with my fiancée, and determined to not be one of those bicoastal academic couples.

So it was a rude shock to go through to process of jointly searching for jobs, overcoming what academics cutely call “the two-body problem.” In the end my fiancée got a job at Harvard, which trumped all my offers- it’s Harvard, for heaven’s sake! - and so I followed her up here. While I was able to swing quite a cool 1-year post-doc out at Harvard Forest, I have to admit that some part of me, some male part of me, was ashamed to be following anyone professionally. I think men judge each other almost exclusively by our careers, at least all too often. I know it was hard to have colleagues and friends joke about me riding someone else’s coattails, when I’d always considered myself a decent scholar in my own right.

All of which isn’t to say I’m not happy with my current post- I am. The ecologists I’ve gotten to work with here have a deep understanding of history and how it shapes ecology, and perhaps because of that focus my institution has a patience that is rare among ecological institutions, methodically stalking knowledge. Now that my stretch here is ending, I’m beginning to realize how good this place has been for my intellectual growth, how lucky I am to be a citizen of this great country with a roof over my head and some health insurance. “You don’t know you got till it’s gone,” I guess…

I lie awake at night sometimes. When I was younger I never thought I would do this, I thought insomnia and fear were something for sitcom characters, and yet now I lie awake, thinking, “what now?” I have a burning desire to unravel some more of nature’s mysteries, as an ecologist, and to find a small role for myself moving the world toward that illusive goal of sustainable development and global justice. And yet I have a deep desire for love, for not letting my drive for a career lead me miles apart from my lover. Equally, I don’t want to be that kind of person, hustling and bustling and cutting corners in my emotional life, “measuring life out with coffee spoons.” And all these unknowns lead me back to broader unknowns. Where is the moral place for an ecologist that wants to do good? How ironic that after four years of graduate school I know less than when I started about the big questions.

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It’s snowing outside, fresh virgin piles of white that are quickly covering my windowsill, so there seems something incongruous about reading a book on global warming, Bill McKibben's excellent The End of Nature. I got motivated to read it because it comes up in policy debates in Massachusetts, and is oddly enough used to justify extensive forest management regimes- after all, if Nature’s dead, what’s wrong with wise human control? I had a hunch that this couldn’t really be what McKibben meant, and so I picked up a copy of the book from Harvard’s labyrinthine Widener library.

McKibben argues that climate change and other global environmental dilemmas are so severe as to, once and for all, destroy the concept of nature, wildness, out “there,” separate from human intervention and desires. He’s at his most eloquent when he talks about the psychological transition that accompanies this new reality, the loss of something special and sacred in our lives. As an environmentalist, there’s something immensely appealing about this argument, something I’ve felt in my own heart. However, as a scientist there’s something I find troubling about it too.

And, as I sit here pondering the snowflakes, I think I’ve figured out what it is, or at least given a name to my puzzlement: existentialism. McKibben’s argument is similar, at least, to that cartoon version of existentialism that we non-philosophers get taught. The existentialists critiqued the modern worldview, and science in particular, for removing the enchantment of the world, and giving us something less in return. McKibben feels similarly that the death of Nature, like the death of God, has made the world spiritually depauperate. As a sort of response to the failure of the modern worldview, existentialism posits the idea of authenticity, a fuzzy concept that I must admit to never having fully understood. McKibben’s idea of regaining a sense of the sacredness of the trees and forests even while acknowledging and grieving for the death of Nature seems to me similar, and similarly paradoxical.

Both of these trains of thought are a bit odd to a scientist, maybe even threatening, for at their core they are hostile to science’s materialistic roots. They both also seem utterly irrelevant to the real struggles for environmental justice (not to mention social justice!) going on in both the developed and (especially) the developing world.

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For once, I want to write about something that's timely, given that it's Valentine's day: love. I just spent the better part of a weekend with my fiancee finalizing wedding plans, so it's a topic fresh on my mind. Specifically, we were talking about what marriage really means nowadays, when there are far fewer institutional reasons for getting married. Thankfully, the days are gone when there was a huge stigma on living with your lover before marriage. I'm not sure I'd ever want to have a child out of wedlock, as that stigma remains, but apart from that there are few solid, tangible things pushing us to tie the knot. Instead when we talk about marriage it's much more about an idea, the urge for something more committed and spiritual and deep than a relationship that's just for fun. These are scary words to say for my generation, born "after God," as Douglas Coupland once said. But that depth, that weight, is something we as a couple want to try for.

My fiancee asked me something else this weekend that surprised me. She wondered if her foreign nationality had somehow made her more attractive when we started courting one another. The answer I think is, honestly, no. I was attracted to her because she was a beautiful, politically active, smart woman. Her cultural background was, if anything, only attractive in the sense that it guaranteed she'd have tolerance for other cultures and religions and peoples, something that's really important to me. All the rest of her foreignness- the exotic foods, the bizarre music, her beautiful eyes- was not so much orginally something that drew me to her as it was just something fun to learn about. If anything, I went into our engagement perhaps not fully understanding how deep some of the cultural divisions between us are, as I viewed such differences as mere window dressing  on our more fundamental selves. Over the past year we've plumbed the depths of that chasm as we've planned for our wedding, and I think we're a stronger couple for it. But I can't say I fell in love with the otherness- I fell in love with her, all of her, including the otherness.

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I first heard about the catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean while I was on vacation in Brittany, blissfully trying to ignore all news of the outside world. I was checking my email one evening, however, and read with amazement an email about an old family friend who’d been vacationing in the region. She’d been playing with her family on the beach when a stranger came and told her to run inland. During the sprint away from the beach, she became separated from her husband but had to keep running anyway, to make sure her children got far enough away from the water. In the end, thankfully, the whole family was all right- the husband had survived by clinging to a pier.

This first image, so bittersweet given the utter destruction in the region, made all the other images that followed more emotionally intense for me than they might have been otherwise. The initial story, about another American who I’d grown up seeing, allowed me to really visualize being in that place and time, and comprehend a little the dimensions of the human tragedy that occurred. I think one can see some of the same trend in the media coverage, which focused on Western tourists to an extent disproportionate to their numbers, as journalists tried to make a human connection between suffer and viewer. While some might view this cynically, as the Western countries only caring about their own, I am just grateful that for the most part journalists have succeeded in getting people emotionally involved in the story, as evidenced by the massive outpouring of aid to the region.

While I am heartened by this massive show of support among the peoples of the world, I must admit to feeling a little concerned about the response of Americans. Some 150,000 people lost their lives to the tsunami, a horrible natural disaster. Such an event requires a massive American aid effort. But at the same time, the occupation of Iraq by US troops continues, which, according to a recent medical study in the Lancet, has caused about 100,000 civilian causalities. Leaving aside for the moment the divisive question of whether the invasion of Iraq was a wise idea, we Americans are still forced to accept the conclusion that the actions of our government are the proximal cause of most of these deaths, either directly or indirectly. Ethics would then seem to require American citizens to donate substantial sums of money to aid agencies working in Iraq, since we bear some amount of culpability in those deaths. The fact that this isn’t happening- that tsunami aid from Americans is so dramatic, while American aid for the civilians in Iraq is rather stingy- isn’t so much a sign of a personal shortcoming of Americans, as it is a sign of a failure of our media. Most Americans, me included, have not felt a personal connection to an Iraqi civilian, much less shed a tear over an image of a dying child. It’s not that those images don’t exist- there are plenty in the Arabic press- but that they don’t fit the narrative of us as liberators, and were thus deliberately ignored by the US media. Perhaps it’s time for us all to start seeing some of those images of suffering, too?

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The following was written as an open letter to my nephew, to be delivered in 2019, when he will be 16. He was born with a congenital heart defect, and is currently undergoing surgery to fix his heart:

To my dear nephew,

I  write these lines as you are in the hospital, for the penultimate time, with yet another hole in your chest, and I am flying in a battered 737 to be at your bedside.  I realize now that if, God willing, you make it through all this, you won't really remember these hospital moments from your last months- the worried look on your sister's face, the cold smell of the hospital hallway, the quiet hum of the machinery.

So I want to give you a gift, a few thoughts for when you approach the cusp of manhood. I worry that from the distance of adolesence all these hosiptal days will have dissolved into some mythological family fog, and so I want to offer a few words of clarity:

1. Remember that your very existence is a miracle. This is true for everyone, but especially true for you. Be grateful for that miracle, and remember to pay your dues to the human race by being the best person you can. But don't ever feel guilty, like you didn't deserve to be lucky enough to live. Your survival was a gift from Fate to you, and no one else can touch it.
2. The world is a shallow and cold place sometimes- it always has been and it always will be. But there are moments, like your sickness my nephew, that make all that hustle fade from view, and a simple smile can appear golden and a hug from you can taste like chocolate. Remember not to forget such moments exist.
3. Remember that all the money in the world, all the technology, cannot make people happy. Love does. Our family has been blessed financially, and sometimes we forget that that money doesn't really buy us any happiness. And then someone like you comes along and reminds us. Remember that you cannot control love- it controls you.
4. Life is not a race. Everyone says this, but then we all go back to our hustle ASAP. Remember that we all think you are a blessing to our family, for letting us step out of the rat race, and into a little more spacious universe.

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