Friday, 3 May 2002

OLYMPIA, Wash.

I’m about to get on a plane to head to Boston, where I’ll attend a meeting at the University of Massachusetts on global climate change and biodiversity. I’ve been invited to give a talk on research, recently published in the journal Oecologia, concerning experimental work we’ve done in Costa Rica on the effects of climate change on the cloudforest canopy communities in montane tropical forests.

It’s a tough job, but …

The UMass meeting will include both policy-makers and scientists, which should be an interesting combination. It is rare (although, happily, growing more common) that those who do research on ecological and environmental issues speak directly to political decision-makers. We’ll see if we can find a common language during the meeting — and, more important, after the meeting, when we return to our respective institutions and activities.

Thinking about this brings to mind another meeting I recently attended, this one in the mountain community of Monteverde, Costa Rica, where I’ve worked for over 20 years on canopy ecology. The community has attracted both artists and biologists, mainly because of the natural beauty of the montane forests and because of the peaceful lifestyle — historically agrarian, but now more reliant on ecotourism. It is a wonderful place, founded in the early 1950s by a group of North American Quakers who sought a war-free country and found Costa Rica to be a place they could settle and raise their families with no fear of the draft. (Costa Rica abolished its army in the 1940s.)

On one of my recent visits, I had a conversation with Sybil Gilmar, who has begun to organize the independent artists who live in Monteverde. These artists work on projects ranging from pen-and-ink drawings of strangler fig trees to acrylic landscape paintings to jewelry made of seeds to beautiful bowls made of local wood. Over the years, Sybil and I have had many discussions about the similarities between art and ecology. Together, we had the idea of creating a small symposium in which we would bring together an equal number of artists and ecologists, and then pair them off to teach each other how they see, what they learn, and why they create what they create (or study what they study). The symposium was two years in the planning, and we ran it on a shoestring budget. We had no idea what would ensue, but we were sure that it would be something interesting.

An artist and ecologist compare notes in Monteverde.

Just last week, I returned from the symposium, and felt that it was a wonderful experiment in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural learning and teaching. We all went out to spend a day in “the Bullpen,” a marvelous pasture where John Campbell, the long-time Quaker farmer who owns it, left intact large trees of multiple species to provide shade for his cows and delight to his spirit. Each artist taught a skill or pointed out a perspective to an ecologist, and each ecologist taught an artist a technique for taking data or making measurements. These exercises helped to de-mystify the two disciplines. The meeting left me with a lot of food for thought — how I might apply the experience to other situations, either in teaching or research.

It has only been in the last few years of my career that I have ventured from the narrow halls of traditional academic studies in forest ecology to explore the intersections of different disciplines. I have gained the courage to do so by being at an institution such as Evergreen, which actively encourages interdisciplinary teaching and learning. I’ve also been blessed with a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, which has given me the flexibility and time to explore these non-traditional realms. Although traditional academia tends to reinforce — and even narrow — one’s perspective, I have learned that there is great value in opening my mind and the minds of my students and colleagues via the kinds of collaborative thinking that led to the Monteverde Art/Science symposium, or to the upcoming scientist/policy-maker meeting in Boston.

There are risks in this approach, risks that may be imagined or may be real. I’m not sure yet. What I do know is that I get great intellectual pleasure from the overlap of fields that are usually considered distant from one another. I also know that the power of artists, economists, and those involved in spiritual thinking — in addition to the knowledge about living systems that ecologists possess — must all be brought to bear on matters of conservation. There is too much at stake to bring anything less to the table; we need and love these trees, and must strive to protect them in any way we can.