I have the honor of attending the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC) located in the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute for the fall of 2023. I will be posting weekly on what we are doing and learning from the country’s leading conservation researchers, educators, and policy-makers. Come along for the ride if you’re interested. Maybe we’ll all learn something new.
Western science is developed in terms of purely logical, numerical data. We want absolutes. We try so hard to determine infallible truths. A plus B will always equal C. Establishing these base rules or language to describe the world makes communication easier. It allows us to make assumptions which provide a foundation for further science.…
“It’s not our place to judge people in history. Our job as conservationists is to protect what we have and move forward.” – Stephanie Lessard-Pilon It is difficult to swallow the history of how we have treated the natural world. The stories we hear seem outlandish, at least to me. There was once a period…
I always knew what path I would end up on, more or less. My parents joke that I could swim before I could walk, that I would throw temper tantrums when they made me come in from the rain where I was ardently observing the ant colony in my grandmother’s pool deck, or wake up…