Dumpster diving has never been my cup of tea.
But when it comes to science, it turns out that you can convince me to tackle all sorts of less-than-glamorous tasks, including creeping around the back alleys of elegant small towns with a net and some plastic tubing.
What does an oceanographer do, anyway? Pet sharks all day?”
I’ll always remember the haughty tone of those words, delivered in my first week of graduate school at MIT, by one of my classmates in the biology Ph.D. program. Alone, they might be funny, or at least ironic: My best friend actually does pet sharks, if by “pet” you mean “harpoon with high-tech tags to track the world’s biggest fish as they cruise through the world’s oceans.” But after more comments about how I wasn’t a “real biologist” and that ecology wasn’t a valid science, I quickly realized I was fighting an uphill battle for respect.
When I was little, I really wanted to go to Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s northern shoreline. Not because I wanted to see pristine coastline or frolicking wildlife, but because I wanted to see the place that could destroy all that.
In the shifting baselines of our perceptions, we rarely ask what’s been paved over by roads and shopping malls. Where our uncles once competed to catch the biggest fish, we never think to drop a line. Where our grandparents once came to the stark edge of civilization, we now zoom by arching overpasses. But we have to call these views into question. We have to ask ourselves what things used to be like and how they have changed. That’s the only way that we’ll be able to keep some track of reality, the only way we’ll tether ourselves to the ground on which we’ve built.
After a full day in and out of airplanes and airports, there’s really nothing like stepping out of the terminal and taking your first breath… Continue Reading »
It’s actually agriculture that applies 80 percent of the 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides used in the U.S. each year, quelling insect outbreaks, smothering weeds and ensuring un-nibbled produce. Of course, when we nibble that produce — or eat animals who’ve nibbled it — any residues and leftover toxins transfer to us. How did we become so chemically dependent?
Graduate student life comes with awesome perks: flexible schedules, fun-loving coworkers and amazing travel opportunities. But the green-eyed monster occasionally peers over my shoulder.
Last week, the United Nations added 18 sites around the globe to its list of biosphere reserves, bringing the total number of sites so designated under its Man and the Biosphere Program to 581.