Category: opinion

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Finding something new

It seems that, with this post, I have inadvertently blogged a three-part series on why field work matters. In part 1 I wrote about the value of getting out, rather than being stuck behind a desk. In part 2 I wrote about the idea of place and how regular field work in one discrete location is important in terms of both understanding a system and for developing a conservation mindset. In this final (I think) part, I would like to write about the importance of novel experiences in the field.

In July I accompanied Dr. Aynsley Thielman, a postdoctoral associate in my lab, on her first visit to some high elevation, coastal field sites. Our particular task was to spend a couple of days intensively surveying the arthropod fauna in various habitats, and we were set to access the sites by helicopter. I’ve flown in helicopters on a number of occasions prior to this, but only for general reconnaissance purposes. This was the first time that I was going to be dropped off in a remote location. While the pilot was planning to stay with us, the reality in these mountainous situations is rapid shifts in weather and visibility. That meant that the pilot would give us very little notice before starting up the machine and leaving if he thought there was a safety risk. That, in turn, meant that besides efficient packing of field gear, we had to be prepared to potentially survive a night or two on the mountain before we could be flown down again. This was an interesting challenge, and one that I had never encountered before as most of the work that I have ever done is in locations accessible by well-traversed logging roads. I was, to be honest, a bit nervous leading up to the trip.

Those nerves dissipated rapidly, however, as soon as we were in the chopper and flying over the phenomenal landscapes of British Columbia’s central coastal mountains. And if just getting there was great, being there was doubly great. It’s hard to fully express in words how beautiful this place is. On the first day, we were beset by banks of clouds that meant that our pilot had to keep us moving quite quickly from site to site. But even so, the sight of clouds all around, the wind-stunted trees, the heather meadows, and the strange soil crusts kept us continually fascinated. The second day was as warm and sunny-beautiful a day as you can imagine – a complete reversal from the first day – and we were able to spend many hours in two discrete sites, looking under rocks for spiders, poking in the heather, sweeping trees, and waiting near flowers for pollinators.

By the end of two days of glorious collecting, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go back to my desk. I was certainly jealous of Aynsley and the summer students who were going to be going up there several more times over the course of the summer.

This was a unique experience in my career as a biologist. Most of my field work experience has been in the, relatively speaking, lower elevation forests of the interior of British Columbia. On the mountain, on the other hand, I was taller than most of the trees at one of the sites; and the “canopy” at the other site was the heather and wildflowers. And we were dealing with a whole host of arthropods, and none of them were bark beetles (although I do need to get in closer to inspect the boles of some of those trees next time I’m up there). I found that being in a unique field site – one that is beyond my normal travels – helped to prod my brain towards fresh thinking. It is easy, I think, to lose some degree of that freshness when doing the same thing repeatedly in the same type of situation. An entirely new ecosystem, a different mode of transportation, and the challenges that go with this kind of field work stimulate the mind or, perhaps, rouse it from potential lethargy.

It might also be worth noting that some of the noted naturalists of bygone eras – think Darwin on the Beagle or Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, for instance – spent some part of their careers in fairly continuous motion to new and vastly different areas. I could never hope to accomplish what either of these preeminent scientists did in terms of turning the study of biology upside down. But I think it would be fair to say that getting out of what they were used to on the British Isles to new contexts allowed them to see patterns that they may have never noticed if they had stayed put. In Darwin’s case, the experience took some time to set in, but was instrumental in the development of the idea. In Wallace’s case, the idea came to him in the context of his experience. In either case one might argue that experiencing a unique field situation can help to make a scientist alert to new ideas. And this may be an outcome of the mind being stimulated toward fresh thinking.

Finally, new experiences like this can serve to remind us about the bigger picture. It is easy to get complacent about the “known” when we travel to our regular sites that we think that we understand so well. But how much do we really know, even of those sites? Spending time in a place that is unique to you – and where almost everything that you see is new – is a good reminder of how little we actually know. It should stimulate a researcher to return to their regular field locations with fresh eyes and a new realization about how much we still have to learn.

I know that it has done that for me. And I can’t wait to get back.

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Place and rhythm

In “The Dry Salvages,” part of his Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot wrote the following*:

     I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

A large part of my field work over the past summer was taken up by weekly trips to a river near Prince George for work on a project with Dr. Daniel Erasmus and an intrepid NSERC summer student, Claire. On each trip we visited a number of locations along the length of the river and sampled mayfly nymphs and adults, along with whatever else came up in our sampling efforts. Once a week from May until August, rain or shine, two or three of us would set out from UNBC and would spend the day on the river. I was fortunate to be in on most of those trips, and my regular visits to the river’s “strong brown god” reminded me of the importance of not just getting out to do field work, but also getting out to the same location on a regular basis.

My regular trips meant I was able to watch and experience-via-chest-waders the seasonal ebb and flow of the river. We saw the exploding emergence and seeming imploding disappearance of one fascinating insect species after another. Some weeks we would find a few larvae or nymphs on the vegetation. In following weeks we’d find more. And then even more suddenly than they had appeared on the reeds, they were gone. Asters were not blooming, and then they were blooming, and then they were setting seed. Some days were spent mingling with the scent of wild roses on the bank while we worked, and other days the roses were gone. We could watch the bumblebees focus on one flower species, and then another, and then another as the summer progressed. We were greeted many weeks at one site by a loud family of ravens and sometimes a bald eagle as well. Northern pike minnows spawned at our feet while we sampled a site on one afternoon. Some days were blazing hot, on others we shivered in our rain gear.

And the whole time I got to know the river in a way that I could not have if I had only spent a day or two there. Over the course of the summer, the winding course of the river became a place to me. That is, the river is a geographical location that I now know in a way that makes it more than another spot on a map. And even more than that, it has become a spot that I care about in more than just an abstract way.

I have had other “places” like this in my life, as have we all. A stretch of the Bow River right in downtown Calgary that I have fished and walked along more times than I can count. A hillside called McHugh Bluff, across the street from the house that I grew up in in Calgary and where I spent much of my childhood wandering and hunting magpies with a slingshot (for those concerned, I was always unsuccessful, which is either a testament to my aim or to the intelligence of corvids). A nondescript site on the side of a mountain outside of Lytton, British Columbia where I spent many of my Ph.D. spring field seasons trapping Douglas-fir beetles.

The thing that each of these places have in common is the fact that I have not only spent some time in them, but I have spent large amounts of time there, across a season or seasons, being actively engaged in the landscape. I have been to many, many locations in my life. I have only had the time to develop a small number of places.

In his essay, “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner writes about placed and displaced individuals:

To the placed person (the displaced person) seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and inch deep. As a species, he is non-territorial, he lacks a stamping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellagra of the soul.

And this takes us back to the snippet from the Eliot poem. Eliot identifies the way that we often interact with nature. That is, we either find it “useful… as a conveyor of commerce” or we cloister ourselves into cities, become “worshippers of the machine.” Then, cloistered in concrete, we not only forget about the river, but we also “unhonour” and “unpropitiate” it and all that it represents.

But Eliot subtly also seems to provide a remedy for the growth of detachment in the several lines that follow. Specifically:

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

That is, the river’s seasonal rhythm continues to call, even after it has been tamed by bridges. Those who are consumed with technology and modernity in general have the opportunity to listen, or to ignore. Biologists and other naturalists have a unique opportunity to be listeners, to move with the river’s rhythm, and then to carry that rhythm back to those who have not yet responded to it. This, of course, requires that we take the time for regular contemplation of the river, the forest, the soil, the pinned or pressed specimens, and the wise written words of those who have studied these things in times past.

So take some time out of your day or week to hear the rhythm that is calling. And then, once you have listened to it, make the effort to relate it to those who have not yet found the time or inclination to do so. Only then, one place at time, will others also deeply understand the need for conservation of the places that they come love.

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*Yes, I’m aware that the “river god” in Eliot’s Four Quartets has larger implications relating to what is knowable and what is unknowable. But I believe that this passage also works in this context. Opinions may vary.

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Getting out

For various reasons, over this past summer I have had the opportunity to get out into the field much more than usual – rivaling the amount of time that I was in the field during my Ph.D. studies. While I generally do ensure that I go out several times in any given summer, the frequency and intensity of the field work this summer was beyond what I’ve been used to since I have become a faculty member.

One of the oddest things about being a faculty member, in fact, is the general trend that I’ve noticed (and keep in mind that for personal experience N=1) toward more desk work and less boots-on-the-ground work over the years of my employment. Some of the trend is necessary – when managing a number of graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral associates, the general red tape of research takes time and effort to cut through. Some of it is probably a time-management factor of letting some lower-priority items fill summer field work time. And there have been periods where research activities were more overtly lab-based than field-based. But, whatever the reasons, it’s hard to argue that for a biologist, less time in the field is a good thing.

Regular field work is a tonic against DOTS – Distilled Organism in a Tube Syndrome. With the shift of genomics, metabolomics, and other “-omics” methodologies toward easier and cheaper access by many research labs, field work can often mean a quick collecting trip or two – potentially done by someone else under contract – followed by rapid reduction of the study organism to some sort of solute in a water-filled tube. While this has been great for speeding along scientific discovery, it has had the side effect of reducing the amount of contact that investigators have with their organism(s) in nature. In fact, it is possible for many research projects to run off of the samples or data collected in years prior. For instance, in my lab I could simply have graduate students determine the function any number of mountain pine beetle enzymes in a long series of projects using material stored in our freezers. The students would never have to even see a forest or a live (or dead) insect. Those results would be useful and informative, but they would lack the connection to the larger system and would, potentially, be less than relevant in terms of the insect’s full ecological function

Of course, not every research lab “distills” creatures down to a tube of DNA, but it is still possible in other methodological contexts (e.g. DOPS – Dry Organism on a Pin Syndrome) to begin to lose sight of the natural history of the organism. And when that happens, the likelihood of pursuing irrelevance increases.

Regular field work takes you to the periphery of your study system. It is normal to focus on one or a few organisms, hypotheses, and/or systems. Scientists need a substantial level of focus to be successful. But what are the things that are happening around the edges of the system? What other organisms or environmental factors affect my study system? What is my organism doing during times of the season when I may not be normally collecting? These sorts of questions can only be answered by scouting around the edges of your system. And scouting the edges can only be done by taking the time to observe the natural context of your organism in the field.

Regular field work centers your thoughts and allows you to really observe your study system. My Ph.D. work was on the effect that volatile compounds from nonhost trees have on foraging bark beetles. The initial idea for the work came when my supervisor (prior to me working with him) was taking a break from field work and eating lunch in a stand of aspens surrounded by a mountain pine beetle infestation. All of the lodgepole pines surrounding the aspen stand had been mass attacked by beetles. The few lucky pines growing within the aspen stands were untouched. That initial observation was only possible because he was taking the time to contemplate what was going on around him. While such eureka moments cannot be planned per se, they occur best when the opportunity for them has been planned by intentionally spending time in the field. In other words, insight arrives seemingly unscheduled in centered moments. But some planning and scheduling is required to allow for those moments in the first place.

Summer is almost over now, and I am very glad to have been out as much as I have this year. I’m looking forward to a winter of preparing for another field season in 2015. I hope all of you have also had great seasons, wherever your research has taken you, and are already starting to plan for a new year ahead.

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Should I pursue this major?

A few days ago one of the academic advisors here at my institution sent me a letter in which a student asked about the utility of a biology B.Sc. I mulled it over in my head for a few days and then responded with (edited a bit to preserve anonymity and for better clarity) the letter below.

In this day of increasing media hyperbole – or dare I call them “attacks” – regarding the value of a postsecondary education, I can understand this student’s worry. For instance, here’s a very recent piece from a big regional/national network that begins with the description:

According to a new study from Statistics Canada, there are some areas of study that you should avoid if you want to get good value out of your education.

This, unfortunately, is what we hear more and more these days. Unlike the pablum normally served to us from the media, I would never argue that someone should not pursue their passion. If their passion is in carpentry, then trade school is the way to go. If they happen to like building cutting-edge technology in their garage, then they should go for it; it turns out that can work out pretty well. And if they really like biology or history or literature or physics, a good place to learn more about those things happens to be a university. When it comes down to it, it’s all about passion. If something is not your passion, then you should not cave in to pressure to pursue it. If it is your passion, then find the best place to explore it further whether it’s technical school, university, or your garage.

One more quick aside: I am bumping into more and more of these queries lately. I suspect it has something to do with a much more difficult economy than has been the case even a few years ago. As something resembling an archetypal GenX-er, I suppose that I have had some experience in this area, as I too graduated into a recession. I’d bet that many of you have thoughts in that regard as well.

Rather than go on any further here, I’d like to present my edited and redacted version of the letter below. Your comments are welcome, of course.

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Dear __________,

One of our academic advisors referred your question about whether or not you should pursue the biology B.Sc. major at UNBC to me. Thank you for asking, and I hope that I can be of some help.

Your question is not one that is completely easy to answer. If you are looking for a specific job – and if you know what that job is – then you should find a university degree or technical school certificate program that will lead you directly there. If you are not certain of where you see yourself in five or ten years (and who among us really has that kind of certainty anyhow?) then please keep on reading.

All degrees at universities – biology, chemistry, history, english, etc. – amount to what you make of them. Some university degrees – education, engineering, social work, nursing, etc. – will lead you almost directly to what might be regarded as one general job type. If you take a nursing degree, you end up being qualified to become a nurse. If you take an education degree, you end up being qualified to become a teacher. But, as you note in your question, if you take a biology or a history degree, your qualifications are not seemingly as clear.

So, it depends on what you want. Some degrees don’t lead to a specific career, but also give you lots of flexibility in life. Some degrees lead to – generally – a specific career, but you are mainly locked into that when you are done. No one is ever completely locked in, of course. But certain degrees prime you for quite specific careers.

In other words, the outcome of some degrees is riskier than for others. Perhaps it is appropriate to say that some degrees are more entrepreneurial than others in the sense of entrepreneurial risk.

Biology, of course, is in the no-necessarily-specified-outcome category for the most part. Yes, there are jobs for biologists after their degree. These range from environmental consulting to lab research to academic teaching and research (if you continue on with graduate school) to medicine (if you continue on in medical school) to grade-school teaching (if you complete a education certificate or graduate degree after your biology degree). But none of these is in any way “certain.” Each of them depends on how well you do in your biology degree and how much you embrace and enjoy the subject matter. Each of them also depends on the sort of job opportunities out there at the time that you graduate, and that is not something that anyone can predict (although some will try to convince you that they can).

In my own personal experience, my undergraduate degree was in zoology (animal biology) because I really loved biology and animals in general. I became fascinated with invertebrates and found insects to be particularly cool. I took the opportunities that were presented to me at my undergraduate institution to do lab research, even though it was not on animals. I really and truly enjoyed pretty much every course that I took because they all were showing me new things about the world. I also walked into courses that I thought that I might dislike with an attitude of trying to focus on finding aspects that were interesting to me. Since most of the information in the courses that I took was new, it was not hard to find really cool things about each and every course. For me, it was all about my attitude. Then, as now, I tried to always maintain an attitude of wonder. As a result – because I was engaged in the wonder of it all – my marks when I completed my B.Sc. were very high and I had all sorts of potential options to explore. So the attitude of wonderment served me well back then, and I think that it continues to serve me well today as it opens new doors in research, teaching, and general life.

Because I had developed such a life-long love for biology, and then found out that I also enjoyed the thrill of original research, I decided to go to graduate school. Even during my Ph.D. studies I was not 100% sure what I would “become.” I suspected at the time that perhaps I’d work toward becoming a professor, but I was fully aware that that is not the easiest profession to get into. So I knew that my work in graduate school might not take me to that end point – it did, and I am lucky and thankful that it did, but there were never any guarantees. However I knew that my efforts would prepare me for an interesting career one way or the other, and in the meantime I really, really enjoyed what I was doing.

It’s tempting to look at career opportunities in broad categories – nurse, firefighter, architect, physician, bank manager, accountant. These all exist, of course. But the reality is that most careers – even those on that list – don’t fit as neatly into those categories as guidance counsellors and others will tell you. Many people make very interesting careers for themselves in areas that you likely are not even considering.

I guess what I’m saying is this: when you head into your post-secondary education, take the time to explore the thing or things that interest you. Cultivate an attitude of wonderment. Talk to your professors. Talk to people you know who have careers that interest you and who seem to generally find interest in their daily work. Be willing to be flexible now, and throughout life. Work very hard. Be sure to find ways to enjoy each and every class that you take. And realize that there is no way that you can predict right now where the economy will be in four or five years and where your interests may lead you by then.

All the best in your decision, and feel free to email me with any other questions you may have.

Sincerely,
Dezene Huber

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So there you have it. I’d be interested to hear your ideas on improving this letter.

What are your experiences?

What is the value of a non-professional university degree?

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Attached

A week or so ago I finished reading an article in the February 2014 issue of National Geographic entitled “Yukon: Canada’s Wild West” (written by Tom Clynes with amazing photography by Paul Nicklen). I have been to the Yukon all of one time in my life, and that just for a couple of days in the spring. Even that tiny taste of such a wonderland left me wanting more.

(If you have not read the article and viewed the photographs already, stop reading this and go and do that.)

But there is something going on beyond all of that beauty. The Yukon is in the midst of a new gold rush that is beginning to rival any other large-scale industrial activity going on in Canada at the moment. Most people, however, don’t seem to have a clue that it’s going on – and that even goes for people here in BC where the Yukon is our next door neighbor. My guess is that many Canadians – generally clustered along our southern border – forget that our north even exists.

It’s time for us to take more notice.

Here are a few of the highlights (or should I say low lights?) from the article:

  • Current legislation permits any adult to stake a claim almost anywhere in the territory.
  • Some royalty payments to the government were set way back in 1906 and haven’t been changed in any substantive way since. The article quotes Lewis Rifkind of the Yukon Conservation Society who says: “…we’re still regulating (mining) with laws written when that bearded guy on our license plates was crouching in a creek, shaking a pan.”
  • The Faro Mine Complex, an now-defunct open pit lead-zinc mine – will take over a hundred years to clean up and will cost taxpayers ~$700 million dollars.
  • The currently protected and virtually pristine Peel watershed is now under threat of development.

If you care about conservation, any of those points is worrisome enough. But nothing in the article was as worrisome as this quote attributed to Mr. Shawn Ryan, one of the most successful contemporary Yukon prospectors:

“I tell people not to get too attached to all this beauty. We just might want to mine it.”

While this is, to me at least, a shocking statement, I’d first like to thank Mr. Ryan for his honesty. Second, I’d like to point out that there is a great deal of wisdom (though wrongheaded) in that statement.

Specifically this: Mr. Ryan is absolutely correct in his realization that people who become attached to a place will be the first to question the proposed exploitation of that place.

This hit home to me even more this past weekend with the annual hoopla surrounding Earth Hour. Of course I recognize that this is just a symbol to remind people of their impact on the world around them. That is fine and good. But the big problem that I see with events like Earth Hour is that there is no real effort made to get people to find attachment to the world around them. How many people actually know where/how their electricity is generated or what specific impact that process has? And how many of those who know that actually contemplate it very often?

The unfortunate reality is that without an attachment to place, many environmental concerns are going to be at best esoteric and at worst not even considered. In complete honesty I worry that I’m really not much better than anyone else in that respect. I’m currently typing on a computer for which I have no clue where the component parts came from (perhaps some of the metals were mined in the Yukon? They were certainly mined somewhere.). I am drinking tea that claims to be ethically sourced, but what does that really mean? I ate yogurt for lunch, and the oil-derived plastic container that it came in is staring at me on my desk hoping to be at least recycled.

Those admissions are coming from someone who considers himself to be pretty attached to the environment around him and beyond. What about the person who does not have the opportunity to spend time in a natural setting or to even read a magazine like National Geographic?

Take a moment to read Mr. Ryan’s unintended wisdom again:

“I tell people not to get too attached to all this beauty. We just might want to mine it.”

Now contemplate your attachment to your place and how it impacts your decisions. Then think about creative ways to begin to stimulate that in others around you.