As you probably noticed, we do lots of interdisciplinary research in this lab. A group of undergraduate students approached this question for a 4th year class, and made a website that approaches interdisciplinary research from, you guessed it, several different perspectives. One of the activities they did was interviewing a wide range of people with this question in mind. Two of those persons where Ingrid and myself. And I will leave it up to you to find those, embarrassing ?
… outside in the Arboretum, with our First Year Seminar class. The (only?) advantage of an early spring this year.
Although Ingrid would probably point out that our discussions, even in the Arboretum,
”… had been sitting on the land, instead of having roots within it.” (Laura Piersol, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2010, 15:198-209)But how to design a university course to have its roots within the land? It is easier to do this in the context of a field course, but with a Monday-Wednesday 8:30-10 am lecture slot?
What do these four, apparently very unconnected items, have in common?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/lake-vostok-drilled/
http://www.thecleanestline.com/2012/02/cerro-torre-deviations-from-reason.htmlStar wars: the clone wars
http://www.vpacademic.uoguelph.ca/fys/seminars/My life used to be easy.
I was a scientist, climber (a long time ago), father, and a teacher. And now suddenly these separate aspects of my life got sucked into a vortex, all thanks to reading some passages of Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” for the First Year Seminar course Ingrid and I have designed. These items literally came across my desk (RSS reader, watching TV with the kids, teaching a course) in a 2 day period.
Ingrid is featured in theAt Guelph! I repeat, Ingrid is featured in the At Guelph! It is not her whole story, of course, but it does provide key aspects of her story.
Karl recently cited this PNAS article in his blog post about the link between environment and society. I started reading it but could not get past the third sentence in the abstract; just those three sentences gave me plenty to think about.
Sentence 1: ”…the human condition is tightly linked to environmental condition.”
I absolutely agree! E.g. The Forsaken Garden by Nancy Ryley - I just started reading this book, about a CBC documentary filmmaker who got struck with “environmental illness” in the 70’s at the height of her career.
I am teaching a field course in Algonquin this summer, and I “stress”, i.e. grade, two components of field work during this course: a group science project, and an individual natural history project. So the distinction (and similarities) between qualitative and quantitative are on the forefront of mind. This if, of course, compounded by Ingrid who will bring the qualitative approach into the hypothetico-deductive, quantitative, bastion that Integrative Biology is, after years of being exposed to Tom Nudds’s beating the bush ;-)
Since I started reading a lot of long-form articles on the internet, I have been exposed to a lot of great ideas, and great writing. The latest is an article by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, The Darwin Show. He synthesized 14 (fourteen!) books that appeared around the celebration of his 200th birthday in 2009. In it, he explores a lot of interesting themes, and one of the main ones revolves around why this is such a big deal.
Ingrid and I had a discussion the other day about whether quantitative or qualitative data make a more lasting impression. As you might have guessed, I am more on the quantitative side, and Ingrid more on the qualitative side ;-) And me being me, I created a visual scenario about a result from Ingrid’s thesis (the importance of deep community in successful conservation) that was applied in 100 new conservation efforts (or replicate experiments, without controls, though).
If I could meet any person, dead or alive, real or fiction, I think one of my top choices would be Steve Irwin. I’d want to meet him out in the bush, maybe in Australia, maybe help him re-locate a croc. Afterwards, we might talk about conservation and peace and wilderness. Or, more accurately, he’d talk, and I’d just nod vigorously in agreement while reveling in his radiance.
Steve Irwin is famously known for his larger-than-life television series Crocodile Hunter.
Very occasionally, I will brave North American culture and go see a movie on a ridiculously big screen with a ridiculously big bag of popcorn. Last December, a friend convinced me to not only go see Avatar on the big screen, but to watch it in 3-D with her. I was blown away. Though I find the current 3-D craze to be, well, crazy, I have to admit that it brought a certain enchantment to the fantasy planet Pandora.