Flight Behavior: Science in the Arts

Monarch butterfly at Fernald Preserve in Harrison, OH where they are part of a program that marks butterflies to help study their migration patterns and basic life history--a topic that dominated Kingsolver's 2012 book, Flight Behavior.

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a fictional story about the migration of the monarch butterflies that suddenly goes awry, leaving butterflies overwintering dangerously north of their traditional spot in Mexico due to changes in the climate.  Kingsolver does what we hope a program we are developing at Miami University will do:  cross-pollination between the sciences and art to result in science-infused art that conveys some science along with being a valid piece of art.  Kingsolver has the luxury of collaborating with herself since she is trained and has worked as a scientist and she also has a talent for writing.  (Ah, collaborating with yourself—the introvert’s ideal; the NSF’s antithesis.)  The book is interesting and worth a read for sure, but it also reveals the challenges of this science-arts cross-pollination: does a scientific message get in the way of the art?

I spent last summer with a group of talented MU students from science and the arts. The group I worked with, “the pesticide group,” involved a poet working with scientists in my lab. It took us quite a while to figure out what the message was—it wasn’t just an academic exercise, because I wasn’t sure what the message should be, which I found astounding given that I had been working with pesticides for the last 20 years!  The message from the poet was expected to be “pesticides are bad,” if we boil it down. We spent a lot of time thinking about and deliberating a more nuanced message—something closer to the science, but that was worth communicating to the public.  Pesticides, certainly, can be bad, but they are also useful—whether “natural” or synthetic.  Ants in the kitchen? Do you learn to live together or pick up some ant traps at the store?  Personally, I go for the ant traps and we have certainly used more natural methods as well, but the ant traps are pretty standard around here.  And, of course, pesticide use is certainly a major part of our agricultural practices, for better or worse or somewhere in-between.  So what messages or insights do we draw from our lab’s research that can be translated into poetry?  Can the art transform the science to a new audience?  (Stay tuned for that reveal!)

I do wonder how the normal public responds to Kingsolver books.  I know a lot of my science friends love her books.  Her messages tend to be right on target for science communication, but should art have such a blatant message or should it be more nuanced and complicated?  If the message is more direct, does it end up singing to the choir or reach new audiences and open their mind?  Or is a direct message sufficient for the people who fall in the middle of an issue?  I have family members that I know wouldn’t be convinced by a novel and would find Kingsolver’s message irritating, getting her marked off their reading lists—given that they’ve rejected objective data and scientific expertise, a novel with such a direct message seems unlikely to leave much of a mark. Perhaps though for the people who have not thought about it, it makes them think about it in a new way—the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced people’s opinions on slavery. Inviting people to think about something in a new way and welcoming them to a new conversation --that perhaps is a noble goal and a valuable outcome.

In any case, the monarchs are on my radar and I have a few conservation biology students next spring who will also find them on their radar too (although not specifically this book).  I would love to hear your thoughts on Kingsolver’s books:  she gets the science right, but does that hinder the artistic effort? 

A Science Hero: Nalini Nadkarni, Between Earth and Sky

I recently finished Nalini Nadkarni’s book, Between Earth and Sky (2008), which is a long thoughtful meditation on trees:  the role they play in ecosystems, and in the lives of humans directly and indirectly.  She illustrates how trees permeate every aspect of our lives.  Forest canopies are her cup of tea and she tells you about them with the flare of a sugar maple in fall.

I met her when she was Miami U’s Hefner Lecturer a decade or so ago, and her visit has always stuck with me because of the amazing science outreach efforts she’s initiated while continuing to be an active researcher—from treetop Barbie, which her lab designed and sold, to prisoners growing moss, to interactions with artists and musicians and dancers.  She has taken dancers to her field site in Costa Rica where they learned about the forests and, naturally, turned that information into dance.  From data to dance!  She says of the performance with members of the Monteverde Community in attendance: “The Costa Ricans were excited to see “their” cloud forest animals and plants portrayed in an abstract but still discernible way…I also recognized the power of artists to communicate how they feel about their subjects to an audience.  Although ecologists and environmental scientists possess a tremendous amount of information about particular animals, plants, and interactions, our training dictates that we leave our emotions out of the telling…In the small auditorium in Monteverde, people seemed far more inspired than I had ever seen them at a scientist’s lecture or conservationist workshop.  Nevertheless, I knew that my “science-y” input into the dance had added something.” 

Nature has everything you could hope for, plus mosquitoes. Yet we are increasingly removed from nature even while the magnitude of our impact increases exponentially.  And we scientists will turn it all into a lecture, when really a dance seems more appropriate. Although she goes to the masses in TED talks and seminars, it also seems that she brings the masses with her… maybe that is too slow with 7 billion plus of us, but it has a huge appeal: One person who can get fired up about epiphytes, how many more people will s/he impact in the rest of her/his life?  Nadkarni seems at the cutting edge of what any research scientist is doing, so we must keep an eye on her.  She can see the forest for the trees, and each tree she can call out by name.  

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson

Miami U’s Summer Read Program was Freedom Summer, selected this year in part because the training for young college students to go to Mississippi to help African American’s register to vote in 1964 took place at the Western College for Women in Oxford, OH (which became part of Miami University in 1974) and because this year is the 50^th anniversary of Freedom Summer.  And because “the past is never the past” according to both Faulkner and history.  Because of rain and weather, our convocation and book discussion groups were cancelled this morning, so I thought I’d let out some of my enthusiasm for this wonderful book out on my blog.

 Old as I seem to be when I see the new crop of students coming in, many of whom were born in 1996 (ahem), the events of this book were still slightly before my time.  However, by the time I arrived in the early 70s, these events were shockingly recent history and I was rather stunned reading this account—my SC education did not lead me to the history of civil rights even though it was going to shape the world I was growing up in.  I was astounded by the violence, hatred, and small heartedness of the white southern culture depicted in this book—although most were not murders or violent, so many turned a blind eye to the cruelty and mistreatment of African Americans, it is a poignant reminder of what can happen when we are not our brother’s and sister’s keepers. It’s a lesson humans do not seem to easily learn.

As disturbing as the oppression was in MS in 1964, the young college student volunteers who took their ideals to the road to help the disenfranchised and the disenfranchised who knew the risks of reprisal much more clearly who hosted the volunteers, they were very inspiring. And tough.  And tenacious.  It’s everything you hope (and then are slightly terrified by if you are the parents) in your fellow humans and the next generation—that we will take risks to make the world a better place and to help our fellow human beings, so that in turn, there is someone to help us when there is need. 

One of the memorable quotes in the book for me was Bob Moses’ thoughtful comment “We’re not here to bring politics into our morality, but to bring morality into our politics” after they had brought the stories of the African Americans in MS who were effectively and often violently kept from registering to vote—a basic right of our citizenry!  “All we want is a chance to be a part of America,” Fannie Lou Hamer said.  Ugh.  Yes, of course. We are an America that is built on compromise, but there are some compromises that are hard to make or that aren’t real compromises to begin with—the kind of compromise the Freedom Democrats were being asked to take.

  

This book has me thinking about race in our society today, how a phenotype can make such a big difference to people’s lives when all it is is a little genetic variation in skin color that influences the amount of melanin in your skin thought to protect skin from ultraviolet radiation. Seems like we make mountains out of mole hills. The book also makes it very clear how shining light on something and increasing awareness can really change the world.  The publicity that MS received made both black and white folks aware that the views they had were not necessarily shared around the world or throughout the US, and that changed all of them. Awareness. We do not all have to agree with each other (although we do have to protect one another’s basic human rights), but being aware of the wider world can make us all wiser.  The southern experience of Freedom Summer made the young volunteers wiser, if more cynical about the political process and human nature; it made the disenfranchised aware that the view held in Mississippi was not held everywhere and that people cared and were willing to take risks; and it made the enfranchised aware of the abuse of power and that the times were changing.

Although science is perhaps in some ways, completely different, I can see parallels on the ability of knowledge of nature to change the world. Science is a process of seeking to find the light of knowledge. And the natural world is becoming increasingly disenfranchised—I hope we are all brave enough to work together on this issue, which could arguably be our Mississippi.

I hope you read this book if you haven’t.  It is wonderful. (And I loved so much more in this book that I've mentioned here...like the power of song!)

Wandering Around the Block: Thoughts on Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home

While I was taking my morning walk, I wondered if I shouldn’t be writing a book about it, given the literary trend these days. Walk the Appalachian Trail?  Write a book.  Walk the Pacific Crest Trail? Write a different book. Take a couple of weeks to walk from your home in Vermont to your home across Lake Champlain in NY?  Well, naturally write a book and this is what Bill McKibben did while contemplating the land-use in a countryside he knows very well.  There is something about walking, especially for large amounts of time alone that lends itself to revelation and deep thoughts.  Jesus, Gandhi, and Thoreau all had some pretty radical ideas—and they are well known for their dusty feet, which is perhaps no coincidence.

One of McKibben’s thoughts that struck me was about blurring the line between areas dominated by humans and other organisms of the earth. His book is full of examples of people in VT and NY experimenting with sustainable ways to raise food and wine, to generate an income from the land while not sucking it dry or homogenizing it to the point that is useful to neither human nor beast. Blurring the line.  It’s what we try to do when we plant native flower gardens or xeriscaping in areas where traditional lawns are in complete opposition to the local ecology.  Blurring the line between natural areas and human-dominated landscapes may be a compromise where nobody has a complete victory, but in a world of more than 7 billion people, perhaps it is going to be the realistic solution, embracing the patchwork with patches that have minimal ecological costs while still providing natural services to all organisms. 

The human-dominated world is complicated, even in its (relative) biological simplicity.  We fight wars over the resource of land--the riches we hope to gain from it and the nests we hope to build there—and the natural resources we need to survive or simply want. Yet, in doing so, we destroy, at least in the short-term, what we fight for.

The contemplative long walk (or even short walk for that matter) may offer a potential solution to the disconnection of people from their ecosystem and a chance to see the value of the natural world in which we have evolved. A chance to value what we may now have—in Ohio that was historically forest—over what someone may envision:  a new neighborhood, a strip mall, another Walmart. One of the striking things about returning to my childhood home outside of Charleston, SC is the conversion of the pine forests (many of them, granted, are pine plantations) and swamps into a landscape that leaves little trace of a natural ecosystem.  It is perhaps only if we all walk within or beside these forests and hear the call of birds from branch to branch during the day or the persistent calls of frogs at night that we individually realize what will be lost. Realizing what will be lost—that is key to having any desire to prevent loss. 

Maybe we could find a better way if there were more of us putting one foot in front of the other across the landscape, living in the shelter of its trees and besides its rivers, if only for a few days.  Maybe it is a thing so rare in the 21^st century that to do so necessitates writing a book. 

Transforming Nature: Diversity in Nature and on the Farm

Harris-Miller Organic Farm

Most of us could agree that protecting “biodiversity” is, in the words of Martha Stewart, a good thing. Life in its various forms, translations, and reincarnation has human and economic uses, as well as innate value and right to continue persisting on our beloved planet earth.  One of the take home messages for me this summer as our Transforming Nature Group has visited farms is that diversity is also the secret to a farming success.

The Bull (Photo by Richard Moore)

Young Whippersnappers (Photo by Richard Moore)

Last week we visited the Harris-Miller Organic Farm located down the road in Camden, OH—I thought the Millers ran an organic beef farm exclusively, but they consider their beef secondary to their grains. Although their fields and crops feed their free-ranging Angus cattle, their oats, soybeans, spelt (had never heard of such), winter wheat, hay, and feed corn are the bread and butter of their operation. The farms we visited who are making it and who look like they will continue to make it are diversified in the types of crops they are growing and they also have cattle. Economic success at the Butterfield Farm also may be related to the fact that they run a hotel and have a snow plowing business.  The Millers are retired with pensions, so do not desperately need an income off the farm, which sounds like it breaks even or makes a little money in general. Their farm was started by Sibyl’s dad, Bob Harris, who was a chemist whose specialty was related to plutonium. Sibyl thought organic farming was a way that her dad made peace with his work as a chemist; both fields may have fulfilled his intellectual interests, but even if farming had been his true love, it is easy to imagine that it would be difficult to give up a stable salary to throw one’s self (and family) completely into the vagaries of farming.

Winter Wheat at the Harris-Miller Organic Farm

It is more than a little concerning that the farmers we have met suggested that farming is not a field where you can expect to make money, even though it requires a huge amount of work, effort, skill, and planning.  The farmers we spoke with (Kristi Hutchinson at 5 Oak Organics, Bryan Butterfield at Butterfield’s Farm, and Bill & Sibyl Miller at The Harris-Miller Organic Farm) indicated that they had a love and passion for farming and/or a strong commitment to providing a certain quality of food (in case of the Millers and Kristi Hutchinson, organically and humanely grown food). They also all had a history with farming and a strong connection to their farming heritage.  It’s hard to imagine someone going into farming without that connection – there seems to be a low correlation between amount of effort invested and the potential economic return.  Industrial farming may have driven the prices of food lower, but the tradeoff is that it will get harder and harder for small family farms to persist or survive solely on their farming efforts. 

Oats with a little added diversity at the Harris-Miller Organic Farm
(Photo by Richard Moore)

But, for the meantime, some of the farms are making it.  The Harris-Miller farm was a beautiful 160 acre farm with a diversity of crops, lovely fields, and more forests than we saw on any other property—and that was nice to see.  Forest and unmown property will provide habitat for wildlife and will help filter runoff of nutrients (say from cow patties) before it hits the streams, which are traveling through the watershed into Acton Lake in this case.  It’s a farm worth supporting and a reminder that we can all take a cue from nature and nurture diversity produced by both natural and artificial selection.

Fields at the Harris-Miller Organic Farm

Transforming Nature: A Nuclear Option to Duck and Recover

A few of our group stepping back into the 1950s to learn how to "duck and cover" from a turtle.

The Transforming Nature Group traveled to a place transformed, The Fernald Preserve, formerly the Feed Materials Production Center, a US Department of Energy uranium processing plant in southwest Ohio which was acquired in the 1950s and continued operating until production stopped in 1989. And from that point on, it was from warheads to wonder. The cleanup began in 1991 and by 2008 Fernald Preserve was opened to the public. And on Friday June 6^th, we were the public.  What we found there was nature. Even if the site is still contaminated with uranium, radium, technetium, thorium, and inorganic compounds—it is considered restored and it certainly looks restored.  A five-lined skink greeted us at the Visitor’s Center and we entered to learn the history of this place. 

What struck me most as we walked through their history museum was the silver lining in the nuclear cloud—that a site that was part of the Cold War’s plan for nuclear proliferation is now a place set aside for nature. An effort with potential to destroy life and nature (although arguably the nuclear efforts were an attempt to preserve life—oh, insane humanity!), has now returned nature to be more of itself that it has probably been in hundreds of years when farming dominated the area. Like the old 50s advertisement reminding you to “Duck & Cover” like a turtle should you see a flash of light (from a nuclear bomb!), Fernald is a reminder that nature can duck & recover.

Fernald Preserve Five-lined Skink Greeter

Butterfly Weed

Cup Plant

View from the bird blind--Ah, wetlands!

Even better, a vernal pool. 

Not the Ice Cream Man.

Curious People Needed.

The Nature Transformers.

Transforming Nature: “Food is the Most Important Thing” –Bryan Butterfield

Earlier this week our group visited Butterfield’s Farm Market, which is a ~600 acre farm that supports two full-time farming families (although they farm at least twice that amount by renting nearby land). Bryan Butterfield is one of those farmers who in addition to farming owns and operates a farm market on Hwy 73 where he sells food grown on his farm and local food (which he considers to be about 100 mile radius from Oxford—if he can get there and back in a day), as well as a corn maze in the fall, flowers, Christmas trees in Nov/Dec, and various other food and wares.

There were several striking comments made by Bryan Butterfield as he told us about his farm and answered our questions, answers which stood out in part because of our visit to 5 Oak Organics.  He said he had a real passion for farming (much like Kristi from 5 Oaks)—he said he loved it and that you had to love it because when you add up the hours, you do not get the hourly wage reward (although he estimated his hourly wage to be $2/hour, which is more than the $0.75 Kristi had calculated). (The farmers are probably not converting any of the students to the farming life…it sounds like hard, if rewarding, work...maybe you have to be born into it.) He also seemed to like that everything rides on his ability to plan and execute the whole process of growing, harvesting, and selling the food—frankly, that part would stress me out, but he seems ultra-efficient in his planning and preparations, fully calculating the costs and weighing the options.  He also had a very pragmatic approach to everything he did where everything had a purpose—no random pot-bellied pigs here. Although farmers are vulnerable to the ways of weather, there is insurance that buffers to some extent the risk to complete loss. The Butterfields also appear to be diverse in their approach, which also helps buffer the risks: they are growing several varieties of corn or soybeans, they have the market, corn maze, and they also have cattle which will eat the excess crops and which they sell when they reach 500 lbs.

Although I’ve visited Butterfield’s Market for years and it’s a favorite stop of our families when they visit, I never had a chance to talk extensively with any of the Butterfields about their farming practices, although I made some assumptions about those practices, especially pesticide-use, which were not necessarily accurate. Interestingly, they seem to respond to the market, using no to little pesticides on the vegetables that they are growing for their market and using pesticides that they think are least risky to the environment. I assumed they were using atrazine on their corn, however it sounds like they’re avoiding it because of their perceived risks and its likelihood of getting into groundwater; he also suggested that the farmers have been discouraged from using atrazine, which is interesting and which was not my impression at all after my visit to EPA. (He is using Roundup early in the season, which has also been associated with risks but it is less mobile and breaks down more quickly than atrazine.) Additionally, he’s not growing GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops, in large part because enough people ask him if his corn is GMO that he decided not to grow it. GMO food has become something of a black and white issue to some, although there are definitely pros and cons of this practice. (From a public communication angle, it’s interesting to see that “GMOs are bad” has infiltrated the local conscience, however.) Interestingly, Butterfield does not advertise his sensible use of pesticides or that his corn is not GMO. However, if you care, then you can ask and asking apparently may influence his management. A great reason to know and talk to your local farmer about the issues you care about.

Most of us are not anticipating the times ahead for food, but since it’s his livelihood, Bryan Butterfield is and he said that although the last few years ahead have been good it was going to get tough again for farmers over the next few years—in part because of the costs of the usual suspects, fuel and fertilizer, but also because land is getting more scarce and that is something we should all be thinking about, because as he said, food *is* the most important thing. Although a year without food is a golden chance to find out about the afterlife, I think most of us are happy to find out more about the life of the living. A visit to Butterfields did give me renewed faith in the small farmers growing our food, that they are thinking about the long-term sustainability of the land, as well as the way to keep food growing in an efficient process that minimizes the costs and environmental risks. The Butterfields seem up to challenge.