Direct experience and motivation
I have spent a fair amount of time in wilderness areas, and paying attention to ‘nature’. I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to spend time exploring some of the worlds great ecosystems — the southern African deserts and bushveld, the great forests, mountains and deserts of North America, South East Asian and South American tropical jungles, and oceans warm and freezing. My original interest was skewed towards wildlife and epic scenery, but now includes pretty much anything, from plants and fungi to ants and otters, to energy dynamics in the ocean and the movement of wind through a forest canopy.
It is from all of these experiences, that my motivation has grown to learn more about the sciences of nature and to hopefully contribute to its conservation. It is also from these experiences that I think I have built a more implicit and unconscious understanding of a lot of the dynamics and interactions at play in the natural world. I can’t imagine what it would be like only learning about certain things from books and videos, without having spent time in their presence, to allow a more holistic understanding to soak in to my mind.
I wouldn’t guess that there are many people who want to get into ecology or related fields, who don’t enjoy spending time in nature, but I also imagine that with the quantitative and algorithmic turn in all sciences, this could actually be a growing trend. The problem lying in wait is that you can’t know what you are missing. Solutions to problems, creative ideas and the realising of missed variables or influences on a problem come to us as if by magic, from outside the bounds of our normal consciousness. Most likely these key ingredients to being a good scientist, artist, maker, thinker etc. come from the complex network of mental models and analogies we have somehow ‘stored’ in our minds. Some of these, that we have learned from books etc., have explicit forms and are maybe named after the genius who concocted them, but by far the majority are undefinable and have emerged from our daily experiences, and the attention we have paid to the world around us. You cannot convey adequately in words the idea of the wind moving through a tree, and each leaf acting as a small paddle, its resistance equal to the springiness of its stem, and how the forces from all the leaves on a twig convey the force of the wind to that twig, and in turn all the twigs to their parent branch, and every branch to the trunk of the tree, and the trunk to the ground via the roots. OK I feel like I did a decent job there actually :D But in seriousness, words and diagrams can never be anything but woefully inadequate, no matter how eloquent or well designed.
The point is that to truly ‘get’ something as much as you can, and therefore to truly contribute to a field of knowledge as much as you can, you have to somehow immerse your mind in it, beyond simply consuming the written and recorded material about it. If you do not do this, you run the risk of only ever working on the ‘map level’ of the discipline, rather than in the ‘territory’. If you do do it, then your mind will grow and form models of complexities and richness that you cannot consciously fathom.
For Einstein, his childhood toying with wooden building blocks helped to form these unconscious mental structures and models. Luckily for those of us interested in ecology and earth systems sciences, this means spending more time in nature, of course paying as close attention as possible to the goings on around us.
