Ray Semlitsch (1951-2015): Remembering a Mentor & Science Hero

Last week, Ray Semlitsch died and so many of us lost a beloved mentor and adviser. Though his family loved him more and knew him best, he was a really important person to so many of us and we loved him dearly. Rest in peace, Ray.   

Ray Semlitsch was a friend of frogs and salamanders and humans, and to many a mentor, a colleague, and a Jedi Master.  The Psalmist wrote “I will lift up my eyes to the hills, / from where will my help come? / My help comes from the Lord, / who made heaven and earth.” The hills and forests and wetlands may well ask the same of us “From where will my help come?”  And the answer has been, at least in part, “It comes from Ray.”

Wes Jackson of The Land Institute has said “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”  Ray wasn’t going to get it all done in one lifetime, because he did think big.  The old Semlitsch lab may remember Ray saying at a lab meeting that he was a “chainsaw ecologist” and that if you wanted to really know what was happening to amphibians when the forests were cleared, you had to experimentally clear the forest with randomly assigned treatments.  I remember thinking (in my youth) “Nice idea. Totally crazy.”  But he took what seemed like a crazy idea and over time found collaborators and funding, and really became a chainsaw ecologist asking questions with a slew of students and colleagues at a scale few others have attempted and providing answers that will better protect the wildlife he dedicated his career and life to. Ray could turn outlandish ideas into reality and he was full of ideas.

Ray’s students and colleagues are part of the legacy of his career--he showed us how to be open to the ideas that seem impossible, how to provide solid experiments (with true replicates!) and how to analyze data that will be useful to policy-makers, to help preserve and protect more of the natural world in the face of a growing human population and climate change.  I have been trying to remind myself to be thankful for the time Ray did have on earth and that he was so freaking efficient with it. He has inspired a generation of students and it’s hard to put into words what Ray means to us.

Ray was a gifted scientist, but we remember him because he was so much more than that—he feels like family. He had a statistically significant, positive effect on our lives. Ray was welcoming and generous.  When you walk into the Semlitsch lab, you have to pass right by Ray’s office where he was most often working at his desk with his door open in a standard attire of khaki pants and button down shirt with little stripes on it. He’d exclaim “Travis!” or “Allison!” (or whoever you were) as you passed by like he was so thrilled to see you even though you may have walked through the door of the lab every day for weeks or years. I’m not sure why he was so happy to see us, but it made you feel like you belonged. 

Although Ray liked things a certain way (there are stories of him advising students on how to mow the lawn around the cattle tanks—first circling clockwise, next time counterclockwise), that was advice--he did not try to control his students or the important stuff—he let us find our own way of doing things—everything was a collaboration.  Some of the students were and are superstars and some of us didn’t really know quite what we were doing or where we were headed—but either way, he could work with that and he took you as you were.  He was not exasperated by questions that may have seemed naïve or simplistic or completely trivial. I remember calling him in an unexplainable panic to ask if I should staple or paper clip materials for a job application—and he just cheerfully and definitively answered “Staple!” without making me feel like he was busy figuring out how to cut down forests for science.

The poet Mary Oliver writes “When death comes / like the hungry bear in autumn / when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse/ to buy me, and snaps his purse shut…I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering; what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?” 

Ray was in all things curious—new statistical analyses or new techniques, they didn’t faze him—he was young in spirit and mind.  As he passes from this life to the next, I can only imagine him taking that curiosity with him.  None of us knows when our time is up.  Ray’s time feels cut short, but he used his time wisely:  he conducted many studies and wrote many papers (more than 241 by Travis Ryan’s count); he was generous and kind to his students and colleagues; he loved his family dearly; he was respected and loved by many; and Ray was not lost, but found, as you could read at the bottom of each email he sent.  When I think of him I cannot help but smile. 

When I picture Ray, I imagine him keeping the path to that great wetland in the sky clear for each of us, and when our time comes and we see him again—he will be standing there, either in waders or khakis and striped button down shirt, I’m not sure which—he will call us each by name as enthusiastically as he did when anyone walked in the lab and we will know we’ve come to the right place.   

Singing to the Choir

Miami University's Men's Glee Club
(Which included one of our Conservation Biology students!)

I have spent the last few years thinking about ways we science-types can successfully reach out to non-science types to get them interested and concerned about the biodiversity crisis.  We’re at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event and we’re missing it because we’re scrolling through our emails and tweeting about our bargain find on unnecessary plastic objects.  How do you capture people’s attention in a meaningful way?  Bill McKibben’s talk and my conservation biology class’s response to his talk has me thinking though about the value of singing to the choir.  I have often worried that all we mostly do in science outreach is sing to the choir.  But, the choir likes music, whether making it or listening to it.  Before most of these students went to Bill McKibben’s talk, none of them needed convincing that climate change was their reality.  They had the basic information.  What they didn’t have, necessarily, was the steps to a solution to a problem so large and overwhelming, or the inspiration to take those steps.  But, at McKibben's talk they received a little of both from a yodeler high on the mountaintop. The choir can use a little inspiration once in a while—and perhaps for people working on and thinking about the fate of biodiversity in the Anthropocene, we forget that we desperately need a little singing (or yodeling). 

My choir (my class…no one would let me in a real choir and for good reason) was inspired by McKibben founding 350.org with 7 undergrads and himself where each student took on one continent to find people committed to reducing carbon dioxide to 350 ppm. One undergrad for one continent!  And it was sufficient!  They were interested to hear about the divestment movement (like Ashley) and how students and “grown-ups” have gone to jail over their protests demanding for energy change (like Caroline). They were moved by pictures of people around the world with their signs for 350 (like Amanda). When Bill McKibben talks, the crowds he draws may in large part be from the choir, but still, I've gotta say, even though we didn't know we were longing for them, we loved the tunes. 

The End of Nature: Doing it Our Way

Art by RAQUEL MARÍN

One of the interesting parallels that come up again and again with climate change in faculty discussions about the Anthropocene is the comparison with slavery.  I have wondered about the power of fiction to help people see into an experience outside of their own to inspire change—the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired many people to become abolitionists.  I have been hoping for a novel to solve the problem of the public’s apathy toward climate change (which is perhaps less realistic than an award-winning movie—but I prefer a good book!). One of the statements by a colleague in English (I believe) was that slavery was on its way out anyway, because fossil fuels were on the way in, allowing people to replace human energy with oil and machinery.  The silver lining of fossil fuels I guess. Of course, the end of slavery wasn’t the result of just one thing—a book, a change in ethic, changes in laws, up-risings, states leaving the union, a president with a way with words. It was a lot of forces coming together, and it will perhaps be the same in dealing with climate change (not ideal!).

McKibben makes an interesting observation in the way we humans deal with impending necessary change by trying to maintain the status quo despite the sense it may make—this is true in institutions like universities and governments as well as households.  He says:

“…after the crisis of the Civil War slavery was no longer an acceptable method for white Americans to exercise dominion over black Americans.  But rather than convert to new notions of universal fellowship and equality white Americans invented segregation, rigging up Jim Crow laws to ensure that much of the old relationship would persist in a new guise.  And it is of critical importance to realize that now, just as the old methods of dominating the world have become unworkable, a new set of tools is emerging that may allow us to continue that domination by different, expanded, and even more destructive means—that is, we may very well find a way to keep from choking on our cake, only to gag on the icing later.” (Page 128, The End of Nature)

He was talking about our apparent belief that the use of genetic engineering and biotechnology is our solution of getting us out of our climate troubles.  And, it may be part of the solution, but it does not necessarily keep wild nature wild.  Rather, it furthers us down a path of a world altered to human convenience, which is often not to the convenience for the rest of biodiversity.  Our separateness from nature, he says was not “an inevitable divorce, and…consciously or unconsciously many of us realize it was a mistake” (Page 73).  He says elsewhere that we need to consider (and take) a humbler path and I’m intrigued by this humble path, although I like my conveniences as much as the next person.  I have been reading books of Janisse Ray and she has found a humbler path that keeps her connected to the earth and local community while minimizing her consumer impact.  It is a start and seems like a better way to live. So, maybe genetic engineering and biotechnology is our Climate Crow equivalent to Jim Crow, I’m not sure. 

My students said they were surprised when Bill McKibben wrote that he and his wife wanted children, but that they weren’t sure if it was right given that the problem of growing population contributes to the biodiversity loss and climate change.  (They now have one child.)  And I was surprised that they were surprised by this!  How could such considerations not cross their minds?  It’s not that I would advocate the number of children a person should have (well, I might, but not in class), but limiting the number of children one has does seem to follow from what we have talked about this semester starting with human population as the driver for all the conservation issues we are covering.  So, their response suggests that McKibben was right, that we are not going to want to change and that the humbler path will have limited appeal for most—even the students of conservation biology.

We do not like to change and that is worrying. But, regardless, the times, they are a changin’.  Ask Bob, or Bill.  

Bill McKibben at Miami University: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

Bill McKibben looks like he’s been to activist training camp to me—or like he could be running the training camp himself.  Jedi material, even.  But, apparently, he has surprised himself.  Maybe he surprised a lot of people.  He is a self-proclaimed introvert and I suppose society doesn’t expect its introverts to move into center stage, make a fuss, and go to jail for justice.  (Rosa Parks might though.  Or Gandhi.)  But he seems like a likely activist to me.  An ideal activist who was moved by the reality of the data to take a position and build a movement that, with the thoughtfulness of an introvert, could undermine the money that is trying to buy out the potential for reasonable solutions. He is pragmatic and perspicacious. And he gave a great talk with great pictures of environmentalists all around the world. Here’s one from Ghana (from 350.org’s Flicker page):

My students and I have been reading his book from 1989, which is completely relevant 25 years later (although this fact is not ideal)—The End of Nature.  My young, hopeful students were looking despondent and sounding depressed in their blogs.  I felt a pressing need to take their pulses (which I refrained from).  His talk, however, offered the energy and optimism they look for.  Actions that we could all take to be part of the 350.org movement to spread the word that we need to divest from fossil fuels to minimize the damage to the future planet, actions big and small.  Near the end of his book, McKibben says “There is no future in loving nature.” Well, damn it.  Too late.  And it was too late for him, so he did what a person who loves does—he began looking for solutions, and initiating them, even with the knowledge that they may not work.  In The Cloister Walk (1996), Kathleen Norris says that “Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an expensive fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act matters; that those who know the exact price of things, as Judas did, often don’t know the true cost or value of anything.”  Bill McKibben knows too.  I hope that all of us who are committed to change will make the symbolic acts that have personal and global implications.  It may matter a great deal, so that at the end of the nature we’ve known in the last umpteen thousand years (as a species…I’m not that old), we will be able to begin the humbler path McKibben talks about, where we learn to live within nature’s bounds. 

McKibben said that “The only power to combat money is a people movement…to build a currency of people.”  Money can’t beat a bunch of committed people when there are enough of them.  At least, here’s hoping.  

The End of Nature (What the Heck--We’re Still Here)

My class & I have been reading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) in anticipation of McKibben’s visit to Miami U on April 8^th.  The book is 16 years old at this point, but like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), it is still disturbingly current.  (There is even a dead bird on the cover McKibben’s book, which harkens back to Carson with her roadsides “silent, deserted by all living things”—especially the calls of birds.)  The End of Nature is rather more depressing, however, than Silent Spring—perhaps because we know that many of the most (obviously) egregious pollution problems are at least adequately dealt with, while our response to climate change appears to be not equal to the magnitude of the challenge.  Within 10 years of Silent Spring, you had the Clean Air Act (1963), formation of the EPA (1970), a rewriting of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1972), and the Clean Water Act (1972).  Within 16 Years of The End of Nature, the first book dedicated to the topic of climate change for general audiences, we have…inaction and denial, as well as some movement and momentum for change.  Perhaps by writing this book, he thought we would be motivated to change and address the problem—the way the public outcry in 1962 led to regulatory action.  (Oh well!)

His premise is that “nature” is dead because humans have altered the earth to the point that things that used to be beyond our control are within our ability to manipulate.  It is an interesting idea that I am trying to inhabit a bit.  Although I wrestle with this too.  If we are to consider ourselves as members of the community (Leopold), then is it really in our ability to end nature?  Forests generate change and create weather. (Although, of course, “good” weather.) Elephants change nature.  Sure, the current changes in greenhouse gases are resulting in giant changes, global changes—we are a natural species capable of creating holes in the ozone layer.  We create rather large problems that reveal our short-sighted idiocy at times.  But does nature end?  Odds are in favor of nature persisting, albeit in some altered form—and perhaps drastically altered—despite us.  Most species alter the environment.  But still, I think I get what he’s saying.  Humans are filling the atmospheric tank with gases that will alter the course of the planet for centuries to millennia and that is fundamentally problematic to life as we’ve known it and to life as we’ve liked it. 

He uses a rhetoric of fear, and I wonder how effectively that works on the short-sighted (most of us) humans.  But, honestly, a rhetoric of optimism grounded in reality does seem a more challenging path to take.  I buy the science, but I am playing close attention to how effective his approach is in capturing the imagination of people in a way that ultimately alters behaviors.  Only a few of the students have started writing about this book in their blogs, but so far, they seem down on what they view as a pessimistic message in general (see here).  

Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart.  We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”  --Janisse Ray

One of the joys of being at a liberal art institution and actually interacting with the humanists as a scientist, is that you discover writers who are writing the exact book you have been dying to read, but that you have failed to find. Janisse Ray is one of those discoveries. She visited Miami U a few weeks ago and talked about “Being Human in Wild Times” – she gave a wonderful talk and reading, so I ordered her book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999)--her first book and the first of hers that I have read, but it will not be the last.  She weaves a tale of her human family with that of the natural world in southern Georgia where the long-leaf pine forests once dominated. She makes you feel the loss of the diversity that was harbored in the long-leaf forest. With less than 3% of the long-leaf pine ecosystems persisting today, there has also been a decline in the species associated with this habitat:  Bachman’s Sparrow, the gopher tortoise (and all the species that goes along with it), the indigo snakes, red cockaded woodpeckers, wiregrass. 

Ray links the poverty in the land to the poverty of the people, who in many ways suffer more once the habitat is destroyed.  In many cases, people were destroying what they didn’t understand and didn’t know.  She says:

“Passing through my homeland it was easy to see that Crackers, although fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t had the means, the education, or the ease to care particularly about its natural communities.  Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself has been the victim of social dilemmas—racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty.  It was overtilled; eroded; cut; littered; polluted; treated as a commodity, sometimes the only one, and not as a living thing.  Most people worried about getting by, and when getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we ignored it.” 

But this book is not just an environmental lesson and a reminder of how the condition of the people affects the condition of the land, it is a story of how place shapes families and communities and connects multiple generations.  It is a story of discovering the ecology of an ecosystem that her family (and many others) has altered and loved--it is about a relationship with the land, one that needs repair and awareness and connection.   

I have long been interested in how nature and the science of conservation biology can be translated to more general audiences with a message that is inspiring instead of devastating, emotionally authentic instead of contrived, and enlightening rather than didactic.  Janisse Ray translates the data of habitat destruction into a story that is both personal and scientifically astute without the reader left feeling that they are being emotionally manipulated to a specific end.  Thank you, Janisse Ray for translating the data in such an engaging and moving way.  Janisse Ray said at her talk to pick up her books at the library.  I was happy to have a copy of my own, because there were many sections worth starring and underlining! So, you might want to get your very own copy--and we will all say a small prayer that long-leaf pines were not felled to publish this book (ah, actually, published on recycled paper).  

Flip-Flops in Winter with Leopold

These are not Aldo Leopold's feet.  To my knowledge, Leopold never wore flip-flops.

It is getting to be political season again and there is talk of the flip-floppers, the wafflers, the crowd pleasers who will switch their opinions as it suits them.  Although I understand the concern—it is nice to feel that we can trust what someone says is based in truth—flip-flopping can be the logical outcome of new information or greater awareness.  (Oh how I wish some people that I know and love would flop on some issues.)  In science, we should always be able to flip or flop if the evidence overwhelming says we should do so.  So the talk of flip-floppers always makes me as uncomfortable as actual flip-flops (what a questionable piece of footwear). 

Our Conservation Biology class is finishing A Sand County Almanac – I have read it a few times now and I must say it does get better with each read as I get older and, naturally, wiser.  I listened to an interesting video of one of Aldo Leopold’s former students who read some of the essays and told Leopold that they sounded a bit preachy and that he needed to explain how he came to his conclusions.  In essence, I think, the student was saying, reveal your flip-flops.  In “Thinking Like A Mountain” Leopold does this.  I have come to think of this passage as his road to Damascus as where in the bible Saul comes to a dramatic realization that he’s after the very people whose side he should be on and in a blinding revelation he flip-flops and becomes Paul.  Leopold’s revelation may have not been quite as swift and dramatic, but his trigger happy finger had been more than ready to shoot at any wolf his eye saw, a practice encouraged and condoned as part of their pervasive predator-control.  He says:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” (P 130) 

There’s even a light in Leopold’s story—perhaps we should have renamed Aldo at this point.  (Waldo?)  It was years before he formally changed his position on predator control, but something shifted for him here.  He flipped.  In light of new observation and additional evidence, he changed his position.  We are lucky he did so—otherwise, we might not have this book and we might be less likely to admit our own mistakes and be ready to reverse course and hope that in the end we can make up for our past sins.