Rats in the garbage of the Western World
I was a teenage indie rock fan. I grew up in Chapel Hill, back when it was the next big thing, sneaking into clubs and hearing some amazingly good, and some amazingly atrocious, music. I make this admission confessionally, for I’m now to all extent and purpose a young urban professional, a yuppie. Somehow I went from an indie rock kind to a professional ecologist, and I’ve been searching recently for what exactly the connection between the two is.
There was a surprising intensity to life in Chapel Hill, a self-conscious intensity, an idea that a good show and good friends could “crucify the insincere tonight.” My group of friends was rather kindly called by an outside the Philosophy Boys, although while we read that stuff we didn’t know shit about what it meant. We loved Hal Hartley films and their brutal honesty, and Kundera’s novels for their scatological cynicism. There was a pervasive do-it-yourself aesthetic, albeit with a limited scope. It was a radical idea pre-WWW that great music could be made apart from the mainstream world, in this little cultural bubble. We had a studied disdain for appearances, and nominally believed that the clothing meant nothing, the looks meant nothing, the music everything. Anti-consumerism was dominant, and anything popular and mainstream was immediately suspect. However, there was also frankly a lot of nihilism, a sense that most of the adult world was corrupt. I suppose all teenagers feel that, but we took it ideologically a bit farther. One of our favorite songs sang “We are the rats in the garbage of the Western World, so let’s dance.”
I realize now, looking back on my life, that ecology has a lot in common with the indie rock world. We often talk earnestly, if perhaps sometime naively, about a small group of people changing the world. The scientific endeavor is in many ways also do-it-yourself, staffed by people who are by necessity self-driven; as we say in the field, publish or perish. We believe that everyone can add a brick to the great edifice of science, and we all individually hope to do something more, to write something truly great. We too disdain appearances, trusting a man with muddy boots more than a man in a nice suit. I was recently teased by a group of ecologists for looking too dressed up for tucking in my shirt. If anything, ecologists are more anti-consumerist than indie rockers, for consumption is often seen at the root of many ecological problems.
However, there’s something much slower about the scientific mindset. Graduate school, and writing for peer-reviewed publication, is like boot camp for the mind, training it. “Life’s not a horserace, it’s a marathon.” Rather than searching for pinpricks of intensity, we look forward to a lifetime of work. This has made me seem, I fear, rather boring to the outside world, when intellectual and spiritually I am more alive than I have ever been.
Ecologists, at least some of us, have a certain quiet optimism. As a political struggle, we have several, notably for clean water and air. Others we have of course lost. But there is an optimism that with work moderate progress is possible. There’s nothing radical or sexy about us as ecological engineers. I still think of another song though: “We could be heroes, just for one day…”
