Dr. Teska: A Beloved Mentor

Some guy ruining a great picture of Dr. Teska & me and two Sigmodon hispidus (cotton rats) in 1994.  

It has been over 22 years ago since I had a class at Furman University with my undergraduate mentor, Dr. William R. Teska—Bill Teska to many, but beloved Dr. Teska to me.  I have four folders in my file cabinet at work from the two classes I took with him, Ecology and Field Zoology.  Nearly everything else from that time has been parted with—I am not a big saver—but those classes and the professor were precious to me.  What is interesting to me, as I look through those folders, is all the information that was in my notes, about how much he taught us so long ago that I still use in my work and in my classes.  I was expecting to see notes where I wrote the funny sayings he had about doing things “for funsies” or how we should be “quick like a bunny” or advising us not “to stand around with our teeth in our mouths.” Or his famous advice that “you only go around once,” a mantra that I have reminded myself over the years when feeling particularly cautious.  But the folders are full of good, solid information—and what is lost in my notes is the magic that I remember him creating in telling about the Nile Perch or the distribution of ecosystems from global circulation patterns or the global amphibian crisis, back in 19 and 93 and 19 and 94. Turns out I didn’t need to write down the magic—that I have remembered.

His death at the end of June has been laying heavily on me.  I would hear from him maybe only once a year or so, but I placed great value in knowing that I would and that he was out there, now at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, continuing to teach and inspire undergraduates and develop innovative classes.  That he was there if I ever needed a bit of advice or thoughts on teaching.  That I would hear, eventually, of his tropical adventures leading students or discovering a new species of mammal in his summer research.  That he was an email away if I ever needed to tell someone I saw a Sigmodon hispidus, the adorable species of cotton rat that he studied for his graduate work at Savannah River Ecology Lab in Aiken, SC.  (“Any day you see a mammal is a good day to be alive.” Indeed. ) 

When I started college, I knew I wanted to be involved in conservation work, but I did not know how to get from the point of having a vague idea for future employment to having a career.  Dr. Teska provided a road map.  He helped me get an internship with the US Forest Service (where I also met my future husband) and then at Savannah River Ecology Lab where Dr. Teska had worked and where I had some of the best research experiences I could hope for (and where I also met my graduate advisor).  (Meeting both the future husband and graduate advisor were very good things.)  He may have been the faculty member that took me on my first class camping trip.  He helped me see that I could be a scientist—and that it could be wonderful (no lab coats or goggles necessary).  And, later, when I had a job here at Miami U, he sent me one of my very best students.  In faculty jobs, especially when universities are squeezing the life blood out of you, it is easy to forget that many of the students do not quite know how to make the leap from student to scientist.  I am so grateful that he took the time to help me find a path through the forest.  I hope I can always remember to be as generous to the students as he was to me; it is much easier not to be that generous, but he was generous and one should be as Dr. Teska was.

The world has lost a wonderful laugh—as well as a serious biologist and educator.  It is a laugh that I will remember until the day I die.  His lessons, all of them, I will cherish.  I will hope to be half the mammal he was.  Well, maybe we are both equally mammals, but perhaps you know what I mean.  He was the very best.  Rest in peace, Dr. Teska—until we meet again, at which point I will want the scoop over a nice camp fire and a bag of M&Ms, while the heavenly Sigmodon hispidus run through the grasses, free from worry of being caught in a Sherman (or worse, snap) trap. 

 

P.S. If you would like to help to rebuild a walkway at the OTS' La Selva Biological Station to be named after Dr. Teska--follow this link: https://www.gofundme.com/2ctf6jw. A great way to have him remembered in a place he loved.  

Ecology of Fear: Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Coates’ Between the World and Me

                I rarely read two books at once, but I have been doing so while rereading a book with my Conservation Biology class (A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold) and reading a new book with my book club (Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates). These really different books have started talking to each other and having a conversation of their own about the ecology of fear.  One of the most poignant moments to me in A Sand County Almanac is from “Thinking like a Mountain” where Leopold is having lunch on the mountain top when he and his companions see a wolf and her pups and they begin “pumping lead into the pack” (p 130).  They “reach the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes” (p 130).  This is his road to Damascus moment where his life changes and where he sees that the path he is on is headed in the wrong direction. And he converts—he changes, although state after state continues to eliminate the predator from its boundaries. While both the deer and human may have “a mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”  So many of the myths of our culture focus around predators and their danger, instead of focusing on or envisioning, say, their role and majesty in the ecosystem.  What we do, perhaps as a result, is tame the world around us by cutting forests and eliminating the animals that may do us harm in a short-term attempt for safety. 

                In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his son about the experiences that have shaped him and about his fears for his son—it is a personal response to the diversity of color and how it shapes and defines (and sometimes destroys) lives in America. He talks of negotiating the streets of Baltimore while walking to school—how it required constant assessment to get there safely and that one false move could result in getting shot or stabbed. He talks of parents so afraid and concerned for their youth that they disciplined them in ways that seemed cruel. He talks of a whole culture and city driven by fear of one another and of their individual futures. He talks about taming that fear so that his son can have a life that is not oppressed by or motivated by fear—he remembers “how [his son’s] eyes lit up like candles…That look was all that I lived for.”

Coates’ book is fascinating and disturbing and thought-provoking in so many respects (it is rich in ways that I am not discussing).  It also has me thinking about fear and Leopold on the mountain top. Do we think we can create a world without fear?  Fear is useful in many respects—it can guide us to safety, whether it is through a forest or a street.  It is when it begins to dominate our lives and our ability to function that it becomes problematic. The hunters eliminating the predators, they have not eliminated fear.  They have just created new problems.  In a sense, we have tamed the environment to an extent that there are no predators in our midst.  Except ourselves.  We are our own worst enemy—and as Coates’ points out, some are more the enemy than others.  In this sense, perhaps, maybe it is Coates who has it figured out—we fear one another most and certainly we can cause the most widespread harm to one another.  We think (in America at least) that we can solve all problems with weapons—that we can eliminate what we fear.  But instead, we create new monsters. 

Living Downstream, Breathing Air, Drinking Water, Taking a Bath: The News Ain't Great

One of the surprising themes in the books we’re read this semester is human rights.  Perhaps that shouldn’t be unexpected—or perhaps it’s indicative of thinking we are detached from our ecological environment that makes it surprising.  Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben both pointed out that climate change is a social justice and human rights issue—the poorest and most vulnerable will be most immediately and most seriously impacted by the ramifications of climate change.  Environmental contamination has always had a social justice component, since, likewise, the poor are more likely to live in areas where industrial activities can degrade the environment without much recourse given the limited resources of the population.  In Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber makes the point (one Rachel Carson made in 1962) that dealing with environmental contaminants “requires a human rights perspective. Such a view recognizes that the current system of regulating the use, release, and disposal of known and suspected carcinogens—rather than preventing their generation in the first place—is intolerable. So is the decision to allow untested chemicals free access to our bodies, until which time they are finally assessed for carcinogenic properties.  Both practices show reckless disregard for human life” (p 280).  We have a very limited ability to control our exposure to environmental contaminants given the pervasiveness of pesticides and industrial contaminants that move through the air, into our water, and in our food web. Should industry and pesticide applicators get to make the decision that results in our inevitable exposure??

                Steingraber highlights that cancer pamphlets that you find in the doctor’s office often focus on individual behaviors that contribute to cancer, often giving little or no recognition that most cancers have a strong environmental component—that your fate is in some ways a lottery of where you were born, of the propinquity of your home to a factory releasing toxic compounds or a farm applying pesticides.  I find this perplexing.  Have my loved ones worried that it was something they’ve done—too much wine, too much food?  Have they gone to their deaths thinking this was a bed they made for themselves and that they should have walked a narrower path?  This is horrifying.  She also points out that even if we take the outdated low estimate for environmentally related deaths from cancer—6%--that this is approximately 33,600 US people who die from “involuntary exposures to toxic chemicals.”  This is significantly more who die from hereditary breast cancer and non-smokers who die from lung cancer from secondhand smoke.  It illustrates our failure to adjust our fear to the proper targets, something humans are famous for.  It may be our superpower. 

Steingraber goes on to say that “In 2007, 834,499,071 pounds of known or suspected carcinogens were released into our air, water, and soil by reporting industries. In this light, the 33,600 deaths can be seen as homicides” (p 281).  It sounds kind of extreme, but is it really?  If our regulatory agencies fail to take the available data that suggest or even indicate the potential harm and continue to allow its release—despite the presence of alternative methods—then it doesn’t seem extreme at all.  It sounds downright realistic (aside from the fact that the estimate is a gross underestimate).  These are problems that we can solve, but the power that industry either has or is given by our government undermines the solutions, which is ridiculous.  Steingraber notes that “…cancer organizations in other nations seem far less bewildered about how to prevent cancer” (p 274) and, therefore, they regulate sensibly.  Something we should try a little more often here in the US.  

Sandra Steingraber is our modern Rachel Carson and I am so glad to have discovered her.  And I am grateful to the graduate students who read along with me this semester.  We have read six non-fiction books and I would never have made it through all of them this quickly alone; and I could have never had such interesting conversations with myself as we’ve had together in our seminar.

Living Anywhere, Really: Thoughts on Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber

“Benefit of the doubt goes to the children, not to chemicals.” (P 118--in reference to parts of Canada banning pesticide use for cosmetic reasons)

Sandra Steingraber’s book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, weaves a personal journey—that of a cancer survivor—with the rise and distribution of environmental contaminants and how science, policy, and society respond to the risks inherent in (especially) purposeful release of contaminants into the environment.  As a form of science communication—and by a scientist—Steingraber’s book does a beautiful job of creating an engaging story grounded in science and why different societies come to different solutions in regulating their contaminants.  I find this story interesting on a personal front because Tazwell County, Illinois is where my mother’s family is from and where most of them still live—not only for this reason, but this is also a book that I think some of them might be interested in reading (perhaps the very first of them in the seminar this semester) because of its readable prose and because contaminant exposure is something they must think about living amid the corn.  So, of course, now I’m extra worried about myself and my family, pondering the contaminant load that we may all carry.  But, of course, Tazwell County is not an exceptional county—it is nearly Any County.  And Steingraber is not an outlier (although we could argue that she is exceptional in her talents)—she is Every Woman.  We all bare the risks of a nation and world that is profligate in its contaminant use.

Living Downstream makes a number of very good points:  that it is difficult to link clusters of cancer to local environments for a number of reasons including having a good control group, the problem of being spatially confounded, the lack of a federal cancer registry that tracks people and place throughout a lifetime, and the latency between exposure and effect which may span decades.  When contamination was listed a potential cause for amphibian population declines, a research area that I was focusing on, it was clear that even if contamination did contribute to declines, the link between declines and contaminants was going to be challenging to make because (1) thousands of contaminants are purposefully released into the environment and any one of them could be the cause or any combination of them may be necessary to elicit the effect; (2) effects of environmental contaminants typically do not cause direct mortality, but they can have more subtle effects that could be missed, such as death during overwintering or increasing susceptibility to disease or reproductive impacts that decrease fertility; (3) measuring contaminant loads in the field and in organisms is typically cost prohibitive on a large scale especially if you do not know which contaminant you are targeting; (4) timing of exposure can be important in determining the effect it has, for instance exposure early in life may have profound effects, while exposure at later life stages does not; and (5) exposure may have occurred, but it may not be detectable since many pesticides are relatively short-lived.  All of this plays to the advantage of industry and chemical manufacturers when the regulatory system assumes a chemical is “innocent” unless other, often unfunded independent researchers, can demonstrate that there is ample evidence of harm. 

So, it is particularly interesting to read that parts of Canada have banned pesticide use for cosmetic reasons—no chemical lawn care (which should be a low hanging fruit solution)!  The European Union member states revised their policy because it failed to protect people and the environment and their new policy is one of precaution that gives the government “a freer hand to restrict chemicals and compels substitutions of toxic chemicals with safer ones.”  (They have for instance, banned the herbicide atrazine based on the available evidence, something that the US regulatory agency seems unlikely to do in any reasonable time frame.)  In contrast, industry plays a large role in the regulatory process in the US, which may explain why few chemicals in recent times have been banned, despite indications that they can cause harm not only to natural systems, but humans as well. 

A childhood friend just shared this morning that she has metastasized breast cancer.  We have all, undoubtedly, lost people we love and care about to cancer—or if we are lucky, we have watched friends and family survive cancer but have seen the toll that is paid to be a survivor.  Some of us will get cancer—any living life form is at risk.  When we do the cost-benefit analysis, how do you put a price on human suffering not to mention the ecological changes that result?  There are certainly times when pesticides are needed (or contaminant release may be necessary), but because of the inherent risks, the bar should be reasonably high.  Instead, the bar is set woefully low. It’s why Silent Spring remains relevant over 50 years after its publication, although *most* of the biocides she refers to have been banned or are more limited in use.  Sandra Steingraber makes a compelling argument in the 21^st century, and demonstrates that scientists can relay the data in meaningful and beautiful ways.  I am cheering for her (despite my disposition against cheering in general)…on multiple fronts.  

Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey: Bee Identity Crisis

“We weren’t, obviously, going to outspend them [Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and Peabody Energy]. We would need to find other currencies to work in—passion, spirit, creativity. We’d probably have to put our bodies on the line.  But what we lacked in cash, we could make up in numbers—that’s what organizing was about. If enough bees could fill a fifty-gallon drum with honey, it was worth a try.” P. 204

Oil and Honey offers an interesting perspective on how a movement is built to address a societal need when current policies and government fail on their own. The Climate Movement has used civil disobedience to garner wider awareness for the problems at hand and our failure to sort it out.  350.org has been creative and relentless in their activities and protests, and through this effort of many, they have had significant impacts.  If they were bees, they would have been filling the supers (if that’s the right name for bit of the hive needed to collect more honey).  I have great admiration for the way they have created this movement—and I applaud their efforts.

But…and this is part of the little tete-a-tete I’ve been having with myself while reading and admiring the Climate Change effort, as I feel McKibben beckoning us all to join the march…what if you are more of a carpenter bee than a honey bee (honey bees are after all non-native in the Americas...oh wait, I'm not native either!).  Carpenter bees are solitary, creating their homes in wood, pollinating and nectar collecting—ecologically, valuable.  McKibben himself would perhaps argue he too is more of a carpenter bee, but there he is riding around in buses for days on end with other worker bees—and he suggests that if he can, we all can, because this is a mission we all must be on board with to ultimately win the war against fossil fuels.  Maybe McKibben has overcome his species’ limitations…or maybe he really is a honey bee after all (even queen bee!), but no matter what you do, most carpenter bees will not make honey. 

One thing we know from ecology is that ecosystem function is dependent upon many parts of the system. We can each play a role in the system’s function and our roles may be quite different.  Or, as Paul wrote to the people of Corinth, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” (The biblical folks figured out this dilemma long ago.) Maybe we are doing science, maybe we are writing letters, maybe we are living off the land like Kirk the bee guy, or contemplating other ways that we can be a part of the solution.  Some of us are not going to be good cheering (the best I can do is roll my eyes) or marching in a protest—even while seeing that those efforts are important and can have the needed impact.

What I feel as I read Oil and Honey is very thankful that the movement has Bill McKibben sometimes acting as a queen bee and sometimes as a worker bee.  Because he is following his heart on this mission and because we can all support him in various ways, it means that perhaps we can follow our own hearts more fully, which may mean we can hole up in our solitary nest for some of the time while greeting each other warmly as we go about our daily pollination.  Or, maybe, this just means I’m ecologically lazy and not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to pick up the hive and start marching.  I do not know the answer, but I think this book asks us to figure out a role we can play and the cost we can pay in the fight against fossil fuels to preserve biodiversity.

What’s a Scientists to Do When Activism is Called For: Thoughts on McKibben’s Oil and Honey

“You might think it’s a waste to preach to the choir, but the truth is, you need to get the choir fired up, singing loudly, all out of the same hymnal.  The choir is always there, but most of the time it’s just humming in the background, or singing so many different tunes that no distinct harmony emerges.”

          When you work as a natural scientist in the field of conservation biology, there is a bit of schizophrenia between the need for scientific objectivism and the desire to take or inspire action to stem the biodiversity crisis.  Although I would maintain that there is a need to stay in good-scientist mode in the area of our own expertise to maintain your credibility, it does seem like there is room to be advocates for biodiversity and for policy to minimize the impact of climate change.  None of us in the graduate seminar are climate scientists, but we do understand the process of science and can understand and interpret the scientific literature outside our immediate disciplines.  Most of us, however, are by our nature a little more reserved and conservative in the lines we are willing to cross when the data are not fully in—we are a little less prone to revolution.  The data on climate change though is compelling and certainly makes a strong case for reducing carbon emissions ASAP. The book by Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything) and now Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey, sing to the choir.  They have me humming “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” and thinking about what our role as scientists and citizens should be in helping turn the tide on political inaction of climate change. 

           McKibben’s Oil and Honey leads us on his journey to activism and it is, as it is meant to be, rather inspiring.  He is the queen bee, as he says, of 350.org, while acknowledging that even queens are replaceable (though he would not be easily replaceable with his mix of powerful speech and thoughtful approach to the issues). He has been busy pollinating as he travels across the country and world to sing to the choir, to rally the troops in both civil obedience through writing letters to politicians and civil disobedience in asking the choir to be willing to risk arrest to raise global awareness of climate change.

            After reading Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson two years ago, which was Miami U’s freshman summer read, about the attempt to get African Americans registered to vote in Mississippi in the 1960s, I have wondered about the level of complacence I may have had if I had been alive at the time.  I do not come from a people who willingly seek out danger. Climate Change is the issue of our time, and I am rather complacent.  As McKibben points out, changing our light bulbs is not enough. How much are we who have so much willing to sacrifice to inspire change?  How much should the scientific community be doing—is it really enough that we are collecting data and doing experiments?  It is easy to think that we each have our own role to play, which is true enough, but does that give us a pass on the most important issue arguably in the history of human life on earth?

          McKibben’s approach to the revolution is fascinating. Maybe he is the Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. of climate change.  He takes the high road—he takes the words that Obama has said and embraces them saying that they will hold him to it.  The demonstrations are peaceful and creative, making the point in ways that tap into a possibility that didn’t seem possible.  And I wonder, what will this book inspire in all of us, conservative scientists that we are?

Keeping Common Species Common: Thoughts on Mooallem’s Wild Ones

“I like raccoons. I can’t understand why they’re so underappreciated—not detested like rats or opossums maybe, but not known for delivering thrills either. They’re surely one of the most cuddly looking and admirable synanthropes—what biologists call species that succeed in the human environment.” –Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones (p. 260)

One of the current favorite stuffed animals of my daughter is a little raccoon named Starlight.  We frequently see raccoons (real ones) in our backyard and it is why Starlight had such appeal when my daughter was making her stuffed animal selection in the Smoky Mountains. We also have a beloved skunk living under our deck, which we rarely see but frequently smell, and opossums and deer are also regular interlopers in our yard.  We occasionally see signs of fox or coyotes (i.e., scat—another of my child’s obsessions). And of course squirrels.  Lots of squirrels.  We’ve been live-trapping Peromyscus in our house with the change in weather (apparently our five cats have other things to do) and there are quite a few indicators that the moles have a virtual city beneath the surface of our yard.  This is part of the mammal diversity of our neighborhood. It is our household’s philosophy to love what is common, as much as what is scarce.

Mooallem’s Wild One brings up the strangeness of valuing species only when they are near their evolutionary end.  The examples of trying to save a butterfly or a crane species when the numbers are down to dozens does seem like a futile effort and highlights how failure to protect what is common ends up in difficult and sometimes awkward situations.  (Mimicking the mating dance of a crane in order to get a sperm sample that can be shipped to a zoo to inseminate a female of the beleaguered species?  The horror.)  I am reminded of Elizabeth Kolbert’s comments that many of the species on the verge of extinction today (as well as the Pleistocene mammals) have natural histories and life histories that make them inherently susceptible to extinction when they live on a planet with humans.  The story of the characters involved in saving the butterflies and cranes often ends with a kind of hopelessness and acknowledgement of an unavoidable failure—but a species at the point where intervention becomes necessary is already in a precarious situation—that we save any of them from immediate extinction is actually somewhat surprising. While there have been success stories, it is hard to wonder what the long-term success will be given the price that has been paid in genetic diversity, isolation from other populations, and the abundance within  and between populations. It’s like opening Anna Karenina and reading:  “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  What is the probability that this story is going to have a happy ending?  The stories in Wild Ones of the polar bear, Lange’s metalmark, and the whooping crane have an even lower probability of a happy ending than poor Anna.

I am torn between the two ideas that, on the one hand, symbolic efforts matter, and on the other hand, we need to be realistic and triage our efforts. What would we do in a war zone (of which my knowledge stems from watching reruns of M.A.S.H.)?  Do you want doctors to make symbolic efforts to save a person that is likely past saving or is triage essential to save more lives?  Of course, it’s not actually a war zone in the US, at least—we have 7.3 billion people on planet earth, and we have more than enough people who could help bring back species that are on the brink of extinction—and the humans may benefit from that effort as well. However, in the medical field, it is preferred to avoid a crisis by focusing on preventive care.  But we seem to lack an appreciation for preventative care with wildlife.  My neighbors do not appreciate the presence of the raccoons, opossums, or (especially) skunks, which puts the common species in the community around us at risk.

In the biodiversity crisis, it does seem like the other war zone analogy is that conservationists are learning as they go—they are trying to save species in the absence of the necessary information and sometimes without adequate resources. Certainly that appeared to be the case in all three of the stories in Wild Ones. There is often a limited ability to do the needed sorts of experiments to determine best practices for some species. The crane migration is heroic, but without experimental tests to determine the techniques that will lead to successfully making the whooping cranes independent of human fostering and migration, then we are not going to make fast progress. 

I liked Brooke Pennypacker’s comment in Wild Ones that “Humanity caused the problem to begin with, and so it’s very hard for humanity to solve the problem. Because it’s humanity!  … It’s not a bird project…It’s a people project. The birds are an excuse for doing something good” (p. 278). In the end, I am all for efforts that may be largely symbolic—we created the crisis, not on purpose exactly, but we created it. The least we can do is to try to help species return to being more common.  Maybe in the end, that will make us more human.