Bill Meredith
“…getting’ cards and
letters from people I don’t even know….” Glenn Campbell, “Rhinestone
Cowboy.”
“I may not agree with what you say, but
I will defend with my life your right to say it.” Voltaire
The year 2008 has been a year of 5x anniversaries. A 75th birthday came and
went this year. Fifty years ago I had just completed my first year of teaching
at Mount St. Mary’s; the fact that I survived was a minor miracle. (If we last
another couple of weeks, my wife and I will reach our 53rd wedding
anniversary—not a multiple of 5, but a miracle of somewhat larger proportions.)
Forty years ago we bought our house here in town. Ten years ago I ended my
teaching career and became a retired ecologist instead of a real one; and this
issue of the Dispatch contains the 100th article to appear under my byline.
Like everything else in my life, writing
for the Dispatch seems to have happened by accident. It was the first week of
September, 1995, when someone named Bo Cadle called my office at the college
for an appointment. I should have recognized the name, for his father had been
our family doctor for many years, but I was very busy with the details of
getting the semester started, and I just assumed he was a parent with a problem
or a salesman of some kind. It turned out that he was selling something; he was
in the process of starting a monthly newspaper that was to be called the
Emmitsburg Dispatch, and he wanted me to write a column in it.
I don’t know why Bo came to me, for I was
not a writer. Like all college professors, I had published a few articles in my
field and written a few pieces in college publications over the years; but
journalism involves a different kind of writing, and I had never done it. I
thought starting a newspaper was a nice idea, though a bit Quixotic, but I was
too busy to get involved, so I was evasive; and Bo was persistent. Over the
next two years I wrote a few occasional pieces, and when I retired the pressure
to start a regular column increased.
Selecting the column’s title and topic was
easy. I had always admired the definition composed in 1957 by Amyan Macfadyen,
an English ecologist (in spite of the Scottish name) who is now nearly 90 and a
beloved elder statesman in the field. He wrote:
“An ecologist is something of a chartered
libertine. He roams at will over the legitimate preserves of the plant and
animal biologist, the taxonomist, the physiologist, the behaviourist, the
meteorologist, the geologist, the physicist, the chemist, and even the
sociologist; he poaches from all these and from other established and respected
disciplines. It is indeed a major problem for the ecologist, in his own
interest, to set bounds to his divigations.”
This definition sums up why I became an
ecologist: I always enjoyed all branches of science, and this field gave me the
freedom to dabble in all of them. And who could resist a definition that ended
with such a lovely word as “divigations?” It is not even in American
dictionaries; it is literally an English word that means “to wander or stray.”
That is exactly what my mind likes to do best, and writing this column provided
the opportunity.
One of the best comments about writing I
have heard was by the syndicated columnist, Roger Rosenblatt, who said,
“Writing teaches you what you think.” When each month’s deadline approaches I
decide on a topic, but when the writing is finished the final product
invariably turns out to be different than what I had originally planned. Fuzzy
ideas, inaccurate facts and bad logic cannot survive a careful writing process;
putting words down on paper forces you to think clearly about what you’ve said
and how you said it. (The fact that most politicians do not write their own
speeches may account for a lot of the trouble they cause!) But I learned early
in my teaching career that even the most logically reasoned facts can be
boring, so I consciously adopted the style of storyteller in both teaching and
writing. It may be a sneaky way to go about presenting ecology to an audience,
but it does hold their attention. And it tempers the arrogance scientists can
fall into so easily. As Garrison Keillor said, “You get old and you realize
there are no answers, just stories.”
Among the themes that keep coming up in
this column are the nature of science and the distinction between ecology and
environmentalism. Ecology is a branch of science which searches for knowledge
and understanding of the environment; to practice it you have to have some
background in the other sciences listed in Macfadyen’s definition.
Environmentalism, on the other hand, is an appreciation of the importance of
the environment and the desire to preserve it by private actions and public
policy. Being an ecologist does not automatically make you an environmentalist,
and vice versa. Some ecologists have no interest in public policy; and while
some environmentalists are well informed about ecology, others are driven more
by emotion than knowledge. This distinction is not widely understood by the
public, and is regularly exploited by politicians and other policy makers who
value economic or other interests above the environment.
Ecologists are bound by the limitations of
the Scientific Method. We use data to establish theories and computer models
which can predict the probability that something may happen, but we cannot say
with certainty if or when it will occur. When ecologists warn that problems
exist, the public often responds like a teenager with a new driver’s license…
“Sure, accidents happen, but not to me.” For example, such models predicted
years ago that it was almost 100% certain that a major hurricane would hit New
Orleans, but they were ignored by policy makers who said the required changes
in levees and building restrictions would be too expensive. Incredibly, even
after Katrina, policy makers are encouraging people to move back and rebuild in
the same area. Global climate change is an even better example; ecologists were
predicting as long ago as1950 that greenhouse gases would cause polar ice
melting, sea level rise and changes in world climate, all of which are
occurring now, yet an amazing number of people still believe we should not make
policy changes because “scientists aren’t certain” and “it would hurt the
economy.”
Writing to a mixed audience like the
readers of a newspaper is the most challenging aspect of this column. Like
Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, since starting the column I have received
lots of comments. Most are complimentary, even flattering; some are critical,
even derogatory, but they are the ones I learn the most from. If I grumble that
people whose minds are made up are not easily persuaded by facts and logic, my
wife always comes to the rescue and reminds me that I should think of Voltaire
and be grateful for them. They have contributed to my continuing education.
Read other articles by Bill Meredith