The cosmopolitan ecologist

I went for a long walk today, through the Spring woods of Massachusetts, and I thought a lot about what got me into the field of ecology. I loved the concept of Nature, as something external to humanity, more primeval and primal somehow. I bought into the general public’s belief in the “balance of nature”, that natural ecosystems are relatively stable until perturbed by humanity. And so I entered graduate school at Duke University, to study the science of forest ecosystems. Four years later, I left Duke with nature having been thoroughly disenchanted for me. This is not simply because of the emphasis on a mechanistic understanding of the system, which would have been true for any natural science. Rather, it’s the growing realization among ecologists that our higher-level concepts, like a “forest,” are just a contingent process of evolution and disturbance- things very much could have been otherwise.

So, I’ve been left with a factually correct, but rather barren, concept of a “forest” that interferes with my experience of walking through a real forest. I’ve been looking to other fields recently to see how they deal with this sort of disenchantment. Historians deal with a similar quandary, for history is very contingent- as once was said, “history is just one damn thing after another”! And yet the history of a people or a nation is often crucially, emotionally, important to people. There’s something of this attitude in the work of natural historians, who study the development of the nature of a specific place as a result of what specifically happened there. Sadly, the broad knowledge needed to be a good natural historian is slowly disappearing.