Why Ecology matters to me
It is weird meeting a version of oneself from twenty years ago. I found this in a stack of papers. Nearly twenty years ago, Marc White, Senior Ecologist then at Riveredge Nature Center, asked us in his Ecology class to write why ecology mattered to us. This is what I wrote, in January 2005.
There was a lengthy and quirky combination of life history moments that made me an environmentalist before I knew that was different than being an ecologist. Common sense had something to do with it. My mother wanting me to read A Sand County Almanac. My parents spending their weekends accelerating oldfield succession to forest, when none of us would have known those words. Starlit family walks. The visit to nearby woods for the first trilliums of spring. Lifted on dad’s shoulders to see robin eggs. Crying when the neighbor kids chopped off the young willow trees we’d planted, for no particular reason than destruction. Working at the recycling center with the 4-H club on Saturdays when I had thought I’d rather be lazy and read novels. Growing up and moving to northern California where trilliums don’t grow, but exotic eucalyptus dangerously accelerates fires. Letting Dan’s stronger sense of environment and observation skills influence me. Discovering kindred souls to be compelled by, like Lorrie Otto for just one. A mind opening to allow me to notice life-changing moments — those moments when your perspective and ideas shift like an earthquake.
Still, I didn’t know much about how things worked — living things, together. But now I was wondering pretty often. And observing more effectively, helped accidentally by a macro lens on my camera. And I was also becoming an activist, but with a sense of unease that although I felt the spirit of environmental issues, I couldn’t convince anyone on logical or scientific grounds. Sometime, probably during Andy Larsen’s Ecology class the first time around, I started to understand that there was ecology, and that it was a sensible and revealing framework for understanding and exploring how things work. Ecology is to environmentalism like history is to democracy, maybe. There’s a college class called “the ecological basis of environmental issues”; I appreciate the title. It helps to have a way to grasp how things work in order to know what’s important.
Interestingly, and compellingly, it seems rare to be an ecologist without being an environmentalist — and to me this makes a case for why ecology specially matters. The more you understand, the more you get how much it matters — in an intrinsic sense, the trees and the turtles, but also in a human sense… an appreciation that care for the environment, and most especially the work and process of understanding and caring for it, is something that changes souls. The gradual process, with other people, of coming to understand the deep connectedness, mutuality, balance, cooperation, strength and fragility, in the parts and wholes of life on earth… and then the systems thinking required to understand what is needed from us… and then the work to illuminate, tend and repair the ecology, thinking hundreds of years and many generations ahead. I work for the environment for the trees and the turtles, but also to work for people and for peace. A city official objecting to water quality initiatives once explained why they were opposed: “fish don’t pay taxes”. Those of us who have a voice that the fish apparently don’t, must speak and work for the earth.
