The cosmopolitan ecologist

I’m on a Virgin America plane, streaking west across the mountains of West Virginia. The mountains run in long, straight lines, spines protruding from the body of the Earth. The river valleys are clustered with roads and house, whose roofs shine brilliant in the summer sun.

For a landscape ecologist, this is an exciting vista. We spend our professional lives studying how landscape patterns- topography, rainfall, soils- have shaped ecological processes and human land-use. Yet rarely do we actually see the patterns with our own eyes. For the first Europeans creating this field, in a time without satellite images or aerial photographs, it must have been an act of faith, to believe that landscape patterns you could only dimly discern were scientifically important.

Now, of course, so much information is online that contemporary landscape ecologists see images and maps constantly. We have come to expect it. I was downright upset last night that it took me 10 minutes to find a free copy of the USGS topographic map for Santa Cruz Island, my ultimate destination today. Landscape ecologists and geographers now spend far more time communing with electrons from a monitor than they do walking the contours of the land.

That’s not to say all things are charted. Large parts of the developing world are not fully mapped, or contain significant data holes. Indeed, the seductive beauty of what is on the Internet can often blind us to the large gaps in our knowledge. Still, the fact that I can sit here, at 34,000 feet, and have a live Google Map feed of where I am, while listening to music by the Thievery Corporation, is rather incredible if you stop to think about it.

Posted by ecologist at 03:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The other idea I woke up and had an idea and thought to myself, that would be cool. This is not something that I know how to do at all professionally, and I’m just posting the idea hoping one of the big scholarly search engines like Web of Science or Google Scholar implements the idea.
 
So, the idea is this:
 
Most scientists like myself spend lots of time searching the science literature. The best search engine out there is Web of Science, which has a steep subscription fee to even search, although there are others that are free (Google Scholar, for example). Just because you can see a list of papers whose abstracts/titles/keywords contain a certain search string, doesn't mean, of course, that you have subscription rights to actually read the full-text version of the paper (that depends on whether your institution has a subscription for the relevant journal). Anyway, one of the annoying tasks scientists have to do is do a geographical search. If I was in Star Trek, I would just say something like "show me a list of all ecology papers that were conducted in Maryland". You can't really do that, so you search some text string like "ecology AND Maryland", which kinda works, although it finds all articles that talk about something in Maryland (a perhaps unavoidable problem, given how scientific papers don't have good geographical metadata). So, one annoying thing about having to do this kind of text seach is that of course there are lots of geographical place names that are *in* Maryland: Montgomery County, Bethesda, Rock Creek Park, etc. So, I just wonder why one of these search engines don't write a little code to use Google Maps so that the place names in the map were searched in Google Scholar (or whatever) so that you could click on the place name and find a list of all the papers that cite that place name. Most place names would have no citations, but I guarantee you that by clicking around scientists would find interesting studies near their study area that they didn't know existed.

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I’m on a plane from National Airport to Chattanooga, along with probably half the ecologists of the District of Columbia. We’re on our way to the Society for Conservation Biology meeting, where scientists who study the natural world get together to share our results. There is a cruel irony that we’re flying to a meeting about saving what’s left of wild nature, given that the plane is now spewing out loads of carbon dioxide and worsening global warming. Still, these meetings are enormously important for the exchange of ideas that flows more freely during a face-to-face interaction. Perhaps more important, these meetings give us hope.

William Faulker once famously said, at the height of the cold war, “I decline to accept the end of man.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote, and perhaps Faulkner’s whole speech captures some of the hope that drives conservation biologists to keep working. “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” This sentence describes a fear that all conservationists have, that something worthwhile in the world is being lost as we develop. A (perhaps naïve) hope permeates these meetings that something can be done. While many conservation battles are lost, every year we win a few. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” In a conference that is occasionally pessimistic, I always try to keep Faulkner’s hope alive.

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    I never expected to read this book. But my mom left a copy of Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear at my house, and I found myself reading it. The book is an odd mix of fiction and pseudo-scientific argument.
    As a fiction piece, it’s actually okay. For reasons that are irrelevant to the plot, evil villains are trying to shear a big iceberg off into the ocean, create a flash flood in a canyon, and make a tidal wave hit LA. The good guys are of course trying to stop them, and manage to stop them just in time. Crichton’s a good writer, and this book is fun to read. For a Crichton book, though, it is one of his worst, and nowhere near as entertaining as Andromeda Strain. Mostly this is because his rhetorical goal for the novel continually gets in the way of the plot.
    The central argument of the book seems to be: “It’s not clear global warming is caused by people, and even if it is it’s not clear how bad it’ll be, therefore we should do nothing.” The evil villain of the book is a cabal of environmental groups determined to scare the populace to maintain funding for the military-industrial complex in the post- Cold War world. Global warming is thus fundamentally a hoax perpetrated by tens of thousands of people, in Crichton’s view. Even better, they all manage to keep the hoax secret. Apart from errors of fact, of which there are several, the book also makes several serious errors in its reasoning.
    First is the widespread use of anecdotal reasoning. For instance (and yes, I see the irony here), Crichton makes a big deal about how the warmest year on record in the US was 1934. Whether of not this is true depends on how you calculate average temperature, but it doesn’t really matter- 1934 was really warm. But, fifteen out of the 25 warmest yeats since records started being kept in 1895 have occurred after 1981. Globally, the trend toward warmness is even stronger. Particular anecdotes are irrelevant; in a large enough body of data or a large enough collection of papers you can find a factoid to support almost anything.
    Second is the intentional misrepresentation of scientific uncertainty by Crichton. For example, he talks about how global circulation models are uncertain about how increases in temperature will affect cloud cover and hence albedo. This is true, there is uncertainty on this point, but it doesn’t necessarily follow logically that everything about the model is wrong. When I estimate that a townhouse in Cambridge costs $350,000 to $500,000, I have some uncertainty in my estimate, but that does not imply the true value if zero. When the IPCC says the net radiative forcing of human activities on climate is +0.6 to +2.4 W/m2, there is some uncertainty in that estimate, but that does not imply the true value is zero.
    Finally, Crichton has misunderstood how science works. The process of peer review is a blind review of the facts cited in a paper, exactly the opposite of how Crichton portrays it. There is intense competition in science, with multiple groups analyzing the same data, exactly what Crichton calls for. Sadly, Crichton’s book of fiction was not peer reviewed, nor did he face any competition from competing scientific interpretations of the literature about global warming, which allowed this travesty of a rant to be published.

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It’s finally cold in Cambridge, and I can get out my big sweaters and start preparing for winter. I love autumn up here, for its gorgeous crisp days. The sky has finally lost its summer haze, and I can look east along Somerville Avenue and see downtown Boston in all its glory. I haven’t written much in these pages the last several weeks, simply because I’ve been so busy at work, and now I feel as if I’ve tragically wasted the last bit of summer.

The red maples in town have finally fully changed, becoming a fiery flame of color. Things have been strangely stalled during our Indian summer. Since I’m on the subject, I should clear up one common misconception. It is simply not true that the red color was always there in the leaves, hidden behind the green of the chlorophyll. For some reason textbooks still teach this, but it’s been known for some time that the red anthocyanin pigments are actively produced in the fall, although why the plant does this is not known. In contrast, the yellow pigment of some leaves, which are caused by caretonoids, really were there all the time under the green.

I wish nature were simpler, but it’s not. As one of my professors said: “Nature reveals few of her secrets to the ignorant and none to the lazy.”

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I wrote these lines longhand, in an old tattered journal, as I do most of my blog pieces. It’s a hopelessly anachronistic practice, and rather inefficient: I still have to type my piece into the computer, of course. I suppose I stick to writing longhand because it slows my brain down, makes me think through each word. Besides, there’s something pleasant about the slowness- most sensual things are slow. Bright Eyes once compared writing on a typewriter to painting in a cave, which I suppose means I’m fingerprinting in a cave.

This curious conservatism of mine is mirrored by a methodological conservatism that all scientists share. We all believe that there are objective facts that describe a world that really exists, and that careful study of that world can teach us them. There is a hodgepodge of techniques called the scientific method that are useful rules of thumb for defining “careful study,” but the methods we use do change slowly over time. Interestingly, scientists tend to distrust skillful rhetoric- what matters is the truth content of a particular scientific theory. To be a scientist, in the ideal sense, is to be willing to abandon a theory if the evidence suggests it is necessary. Theories come and go, but the belief in an objective world and the scientific method continues.

It struck me recently that much current political debate in the US has just the opposite sort of conservatism. Certain important theories are held to always be true. Witness, for example, some conservatives’ insistence that the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. Similarly, some liberals continue to insist that democracy is necessary for economic growth (the empirical evidence suggests that the contrary is true). No amount of facts will convince people to abandon these sorts of theories. This sort of thing has always been around society. Still, it seems to have gotten measurable worse recently: witness a Bush administration officials statement that “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” and the popularity of the satirical word “truthiness.” Through it all we scientists dream of a return to rationality, to some basic Enlightenment ideals. We are modernists, through and through, and find ourselves uncomfortably old-fashioned for being modern.

Posted by ecologist at 09:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, as part of some odd intellectual kick I’ve been on, I’ve been reading a fair bit in the literature of philosophy of science. I thought I’d share a few thoughts with my readers, even though I’m admittedly not an expert in such topics. Indeed, dense philosophy papers consistently make my head hurt, confirming my earlier impression that I’m just not smart enough to be a philosopher. Still, here are two casual observations.

First, it’s extremely odd to read people theorizing about stuff that I do everyday. It’s a bit like a celibate monk writing an essay on what sex feels like. They may very well know the mechanics of the act, but their description of the experience of the act, what it’s like to do it, is apt to be totally off.

There’s also a rather severe focus on examples from physics in the philosophy of science literature. Physicists might pompously claim this to be truth that they are the only true scientific endeavor. As someone who spends the bulk of his time researching the natural environment, I would strenuously disagree! On the contrary, I might jokingly argue that physics is the only science simple enough to be philosophical about, in that its theories have fairly clear-cut interpretations. I have no idea, for example, how the concept of “sustainable development” could ever be that concretely defined. The sad part of the physics-centric approach of philosophers of science is that it ignores most other sciences. In particular, it doesn’t shed much light on the fields of science most in need of methodological clarification, like political science or economics or ecology.

Posted by ecologist at 07:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just attended an excellent symposium on ecosystem services that WWF and The Natural Capitol Project convened. It was a thought-provoking discussion of one of the emerging concepts of modern conservation: natural ecosystems provide services humanity needs, like clean drinking water, carbon sequestration, and spiritual inspiration. My own research fits nicely in this category, for I seek to understand how rapid urban growth affects a few ecosystem services. Recognition of ecosystem services as a key object of study has also clarified the root cause of many environmental problems: most ecosystem services are entirely external to the market. In other words, things like clean drinking water are usually considered as a free resource, without monetary value.

The specific theme of this symposium was payment for ecosystem services, which goes by the cute name PES. This is really being pushed by environmental groups right now, and with good reason. We’re simply happy to bring these ecosystem services into the market system, where they presumably will be more likely to be considered by decision-makers. For once, our actions are backed by economists, who see this as a special case of Pigovian bargaining, which says that if the total transfer payment is equal to the value of the ecosystem service, then an efficient market will be realized.

Interestingly, this theory does not specify who pays. To economists, this is “merely” an equity concern, as one person at the symposium put it. In many international treaties, environmentalists have fought hard to ensure that it is polluters who pay for the cleanup of what they pollute. However, in many of the other emerging markets in ecosystem services that were all the buzz at the symposium, like water, conservationists seem to have dropped this demand. I think this is a bit dangerous, although perhaps appropriate in the case of water, and conservation groups should articulate a clear rationale for who pays for ecosystem services. Our goal must be an efficient and equitable system, to the extent that is politically feasible.

Posted by ecologist at 05:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

David Hume once famously observed that the theory that “all swans are black” would be disproven by the observation of a single black swan. Nicholas Taleb has popularized the use of the term “black swan” to describe the often unexpected events that violate or modify our existing theories. I’ve been thinking about what black swans mean for ecological research, and some of my thoughts scare me. Ecologists are increasingly promising to forecast the effects of global change on species. The problem is that the models used for these forecasts are quite uncertain, and definitely not of the precision of those in physics or chemistry. Moreover, even if the models do turn out to be correct, ecologists are attempting to forecast well outside the range of the data that were used in construct the model. In essence, ecologists are being asked to predict the response of a novel unreplicated experiment- always a bad situation for a scientist to be in! The “black swans” of global change will inevitably occur, and perhaps all ecologists can hope to do is firmly state that they will occur and perhaps estimate their potential order of magnitude. How big could the black swan be?

Posted by ecologist at 01:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Being a scientist involves more than just a studious appreciation and study of facts, and requires the scientist to hold mutually incompatible ideals simultaneously in his mind. This manifests itself most clearly in the fight between conservatism and radicalism in scientific careers. Scientists are fundamentally conservative in our methodology, to an extent not generally understood by the public. We build happily on the foundation of past theories, and have a deep respect for methods of research that are proven to win results. Facts matter deeply, they cannot be willed away, and any attempts by politicians to do so on issues such as climate change strike most scientists as nonsensical. And yet in scientific culture there is a deep rejection of any kind of dogma, a radical willingness to destroy even our foundations if they prove faulty. Indeed, the radical scientist, creating new theories and ideas, is beloved and envied by scientists. I have realized more and more that the great scientists have a sort of arrogance in their manner, a confidence that “I can do this!”

There is also a paradox about the character of scientific work, so passionate and so full of suffering. The suffering, of course, is not of the brutal kind that so many poor and enslaved peoples of the world face, but grudging, plodding work day after day. This is even idealized by the scientific community: Thomas Edison once said that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and a former professor of mine quipped that “Nature gives up few of her secrets to the ignorant, and none to the lazy.” And yet good scientist do this suffering with passionate love; Think of the mad scientist with his creation, or Archimedes naked in the streets shouting “Eureka”.

All these paradoxes were summed up best by a scientist I know at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies that used religious terms: Each person should live as if they constantly have a piece of paper in hand saying “For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return,” and in the other hand a piece of paper that says “Ye shall be gods, knowing good and evil.”

Posted by ecologist at 09:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 08:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It is rare that I read a book and find myself mumbling under my breath in anger, but such was my response to reading Simon Morris’ Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The central thesis of the book is that life was unlikely to have evolved on planets other than earth, but that here the evolution of us, or something like us, was very likely.

Morris begins his argument by accepting the standard Drake equation (here simplified somewhat- see this site for the full equation), that the number of planets with life on them somewhere in the galaxy, Nl, is a estimate by the product of the total number of planets, Np, and the proportion of the planets that are habitable, Fl: Nl=Np Fl. Now, many things have to occur for a planet to be habitable (it has to have the right distance from a star, has to be neither too big nor too small, etc.), and Morris rightly argues that Fl is very small. From this, without quantifying how small Fl is or how big Np is, he leaps to the conclusion that the most likely value of Nl is 1- that is, there’s just Earth!

Morris then moves to the process of organic evolution under natural selection, and cogently describes the process as a path of evolution occurring through a space of possible evolutionary trajectories. The author stress how convergences in traits during natural selection, like the repeated emergence of binocular vision, imply that this “space” may be smaller than previously thought. From this sensible observation, he leaps to the conclusion that this “space” is so bounded that intelligent life is bound to develop, and indeed is destined to look a lot like us humans- binocular camera eyes, big head, probably bipedal, the whole shebang!
As a scientific work, the book is lacking, for its series of fascinating anecdotes do not justify its grand conclusions. However, as a philosophical piece it is fascinating. Morris’ central goal is to reinsert teleology into the universe. Ultimately, he wants to feel that the existence of humanity is not just a cosmic accident, a contingency, but has some sort of inevitability to it. In contrast, I find the contemplation of the contingent nature of the universe somewhat bracing and invigorating By personality, I am closer to the late Stephen Gould, who continually stressed that if one ran back the clock of life and reran evolution, things would turn out very different. As the scientific evidence isn’t adequate to separate out which viewpoint is accurate, the issue becomes a Rorschach test. For some people, as Milan Kundera once said, enjoy viewing life thus: Es muss sein! For others, life could just as well be otherwise (Es konnte auch anders sein).

Posted by ecologist at 08:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s something profound in humans that craves certainty, which leads to a tendency to want to view everything in binary terms. We love “yes/no”, “black/white”, “good/evil”, and detest “maybe”, “grey”, or “decent.” This has obvious political ramifications that I won’t touch on here, except to note that George Lakoff has written extensively on this topic, and has suggested that the big difference between Republicans and Democrats is their relative tendency toward binary thinking.

I wanted to point out instead that science has this tendency too! For example, many of the first analyses of remote sensing imagery classified the world into discrete land-cover classes. In my sub-field of ecology, the study of edge effects on forest ecosystems, there’s been much ink shed on trying to define the depth-of-edge influence, the distance from the edge at which all edge effects stop. Even in the study of global warming, there was originally a tendency for early atmospheric models to simply contrast the present atmosphere with a doubled-C02 world.

This binary simplicity is a necessary first step in the scientific endeavor, but it causes many problems. Mostly, the binary viewpoint obscures more subtle dynamics going on in a system, and becomes a barrier to real understanding. The solution, in almost all cases, is to admit some continuum between the two extremes. So, for example, with land-cover mapping the current buzzword is “sub-pixel classification,” which is basically just an acknowledgement that each pixel has different cover types within it, existing in various proportions. In the case of edge effects, much current research models the intensity of edge effects as a function of distance to an edge, with functions generally taking some exponential-decay shape. In global warming studies, most atmospheric models now ramp up CO2 levels under a realistic emission scenario. In all cases the continuum approach has given new analytical clarity, at the price of an abstract viewpoint farther removed from the world of everyday experience.

Posted by ecologist at 08:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been hustling recently to get a manuscript done, dealing with all the minutiae a lead author on a large study has to deal with: calls to coauthors, endless rounds of ‘final’ edits, the political calculations of which journal to submit to, etc. Now that it’s all done, my spirit feels broken, and I’m having trouble throwing myself into the other dozen things I should be doing. Was it always thus for scientists? Was life always a set of wind sprints, from one paper to the next?

I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I shan’t revisit all that that, lest the reader think I’m just whining. But I want to comment on one particular facet of this conspiracy to keep the whole world facet. A teeny facet really, but one that seems so basic it still puzzles me. My cell phone rings repeatedly, and its shrill default tone pierces the air. An email arrives in my inbox, and the computer hums a tone that sounds so self-important, you’d think God himself had emailed me. I’m no technophobe, and I love the functionality that all these new gadgets bring to our life. Still, I have to say, the design of these products is just bad, inhuman, in that their default notification sounds demand immediate attention. People have a real need for a less grating interface, one more at peace with human instincts.

It’s good that one can at least customize all these features. Cell phone ring tones are perhaps the best example I can think of: their popularity comes not so much from the music, which is such a crappy quality as to be worthless, but from the control people can exert over the process. Given the huge financial success of the ring tone industry, why in the world aren’t technology designers employing more psychologists and musicians and artists from the get-go, so that the default settings on these machines, which are the ones mostly used by most consumers, are more harmonious?

Posted by ecologist at 08:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have been traveling recently through the green fields of Brittany, down the miles of curvy rural roads that crisscross northern France. The countryside is absolutely gorgeous, lush agricultural fields  bordered by little strips of oaks, which meld smoothly into old stone village centers. For an American, this pastoral landscape seems a little sad because there's so few forests, so few places that feel wild. It is almost entirely an anthropogenic landscape.

American landscape ecologists do not really like to study such landscapes, for the tradition in our field is to study the interplay of natural patterns and processes in national parks and other big chunks of habitat. Perhaps because of this, there's been a relatively slow acceptance of the clear ecological reality that- between land use change, global warming, atmospheric N deposition, and many other factors- there is no place that is really 'wild' in the sense of pristine. European landscape ecologists, in contrast, have always taken the agricultural fields and other anthropogenic land forms as their focus. They thus have little problem admitting the absence of the pristine. In fact, they sometimes sadly take this realization too far, and dismiss the whole concept of natural areas as worthy of protection.

Despite being firmly trained in this American school of landscape ecology, I am beginning to come over to the European point of view. Given the ecological reality of "the end of nature," American landscape ecologists need to move from studying passively landscapes toward active landscape planning, in consultation with urban planners, landscape architects, sociologists, and others. While the need for this transition has been apparent for a while to us, it has proven enormously difficult. Most ecologists got into this field because we loved that taste of wilderness, and so we are all psychologically afraid to let that concept go in any meaningful way. Perhaps the only way to convince most ecologists to go through this transition is to find a way to bring together the American love of wilderness with the European love of the anthropogenic. We would all do well to remember the great contribution of the 19th century generalists like Frederick Law Olmstead, who could embed something akin to wilderness in a human world.

Posted by ecologist at 07:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a dirty secret floating around the halls of academia today, which most researchers would like to pretend doesn’t exist, but that still haunts our field. The public’s vision of a scientist is of some disinterested nerd searching for truth for its own sake, motivated by an innate love of knowledge- philosophy in the original sense of the word. However, the reality is that most scientists, like most journalists, live in a brutal world of “publish or perish”, where the quest for pubs overrides any higher calling. When I talk with fellow colleagues, the conversation is sometimes about this or that exciting new finding, but more often about this or that cool publication, and how we can spin our results to tell a similarly sexy narrative. This is even more apparent among younger scientists, like me, who grew up viewing dissertations not as a complete corpus, but as a collection of research papers stapled together.

It’s not that competition is bad for science. On the contrary, competition between academics, often incredibly fierce competition, has driven many of the key discoveries of the modern era. The emphasis in the past, however, was on developing an overwhelming body of research backed by a clear theoretical framework- while there were wunderkinds who wrote one precocious paper and got famous, the most respected scientists got their reputation slowly and incrementally. The emphasis today is squarely on MPUs, “Minimum Publishable Units” that can be pushed quickly out the door, preferably to some high profile journal (there’s even a quantitative way to measure the Impact Factor of a journal now, which some people dutifully tally up). In science, like many parts of American society, the time horizon of planning has gotten shorter, and planning a research program 2 or 3 years out is now considered overly ambitious for anyone who isn’t running a federally-funded long-term research site. This short-term ambition affects research choices, and affects the very questions that scientists consider. My mentor, an ecologist at UNC, spent the better part of two decades collecting data from some 10,000 field locations before he published a single line on it, all to make sure that when he wrote a book on the topic it would be definitive. I can’t imagine collecting data for any time period longer than a summer and not publishing on it. I can’t help thinking that the world is better off for his approach than for mine, and my brethren of young scientists, hell bent on “making a name” for ourselves.

Posted by ecologist at 07:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)