Escaping poverty

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I drove through an Indian Reserve on a class trip this weekend. Homes were rundown and ramshackle, with junk piled helter-skelter. I was deeply uncomfortable without knowing exactly why.

Then one of my classmates ‘explained’ that the houses looked so bad because the First Nations people of the area owned the houses communally, with no family having full ownership of their own home. Without a sense of personal ownership, no one cared to keep up their houses.

My discomfort, my anxiousness to get through the reserve was replaced with absolute fury. This person who had earlier described her painful lesson of personal responsibility when her parents restricted her use of their third car was passing judgment on these people.

I turned to her, incredulous and angry, and said, “This is what poverty looks like. This is what your house looks like when the only jobs around are mindnumbing, physically hard and/or dangerous, and pay so shit you can barely afford to feed and clothe yourself, when education is so bad and funds so constantly short that there seems to be no way to escape the desperation of living paycheck to paycheck, or when it’s cheaper to live on unemployment and welfare than to apply for minimum wage jobs over and over and over, when saving money is impossible and even if you have extra you may as well spend it on beer or cigarettes or cable because it’s never going to be enough to get out of this crap town and at least you’ve got people here that you care about.”

She looked at me like I was crazy and continued her conversation with another student. (She eventually suggested that as the Canada was the ‘conqueror’ of the First Nations, Canada should stop trying for reconciliation. After all, the Egyptians didn’t try to accommodate those Hebrews and great things like the pyramids resulted!)

I didn’t join in that conversation. Instead, I sat back and looked out the window, overwhelmed with the familiarity of the surroundings and a need to be far, far away. I didn’t really think about how odd this was, that a place that felt like home, that I felt like I needed to defend from the privileged analysis of my peers, made me physically restless and upset.

I didn’t plan to write about this experience. I probably would have pushed it out of my mind in a day or two, but reading Femmedagger’s experience in a run down diner forced me to recognize the source of my discomfort and the surprisingly personal anger I felt towards my ignorant classmate.

The waitress came over to us, awkward, bustling, with one, dingy-white bra strap falling limp against her arm. Scores of errant hairs escaped the meager ponytail at the nape of her neck and her forehead glistened with what I imagined to be spores of oil from the air. A faint line of foundation rimmed her jaw, but under her eyes and around her pursed mouth it resigned into each crevice and wrinkle like a film of butterfat over heavy cream. A rough smile spread across her face, exposing the broken and uneven landscape of her teeth. She approached us with two menus, as I meekly spoke of wanting malts. I grabbed the menus, not even reading the words on the page, as a similarly bedraggled woman chirped to us from behind the counter that they made the best malts we could ever imagine.

…

The waitress returned to take our orders, but had neither tablet nor memory to fully handle all of the seemingly special requests we threw at her. I was overcome with pity for her, but also twinges of guilt for my pity. I told my friend I was uneasy; asked if we could sit outside, in the sun, away from this dust and gloom, this sadness and this heavy, heavy air. Everyone in that place was shamefully nice to us. Shameful only because with every smile and eager attempt to please us, I battled more and more against some unknown feeling. I turned my attention towards the regulars inside. Here we were, I thought, two queers from the city, fresh from a day of swimming and idling at the river, and there they were, stuck inside this relic of a 50s diner on the last hot day of summer.  It was gorgeous outside and they contented themselves with sitting at a counter sticky to the touch, in a depressingly low-lit room, smelling frozen chicken patties sizzling in a deep fryer. How could they bear it?

Our malts arrived and my stomach heaved at the sight. I did not want to put anything that came from that restaurant into my body. But, once again, I felt it rude not to touch it. With each spoonful, I ebbed closer and closer to why I was overcome and oppressed by the situation. And the thought occurred to me—as bald and unadorned as deep revelations are bound to be—that this place, these people, this low-quality ice cream with synthetic syrup flavoring, felt familiar and like home. And home is not always a place I want to return. I looked upon the women working at the diner and was faced with the specter of poverty and fear of living a life of disappointment that had haunted me many of my days. I projected upon them how I would feel had my life turned out this way—with me slinging days old coffee to silent and expectant regulars, my face and body ravaged by years of hard and unrelenting living. But the truth is, the diner was a community. The regulars at the counter and the waitresses had an easy air between them that suggested they had spent years in this place, talking to one another, sharing in the joys and hardships of life, and forming cultural practices through which they were constituted as interconnected human beings. And the even bolder truth is, I did not see them for who they were, but rather, as embodiments of those deep, dark parts of my personal legacy that I seek daily to repress.

 

 

ESA Interviews: Jeremy Fox

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I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is one in a series of posts about those interviews.

After a lazy Sunday morning spent reading Middle World over buckwheat pancakes and strawberries, I poured myself another cup of coffee, opened up JeremyFoxInterview.txt, and had a small heart attack. The file had just one line: ‘Notes from interview with Jeremy Fox.’ Unable to find a version of the file actually containing those notes in a month of backups, I sadly sipped my now cold coffee and, horribly embarrassed, began composing an email to Dr. Fox: ‘Hi Jeremy, Remember making time at the end of an exhausting meeting to sit down and be interviewed by a graduate student? I’m afraid that was a complete waste…’ But halfway through writing the email, I realized that I didn’t remember tossing out the original handwritten notes I’d done during the interview. And then there they were, tucked away in a catch-all pile of papers between a student loan bill and a customs declaration form.

I’d been planning to go through that pile of papers for weeks, but if I had, those notes would be part of a cereal box by now. So, brought to you by the power of procrastination excellent record keeping, my interview with University of Calgary ecologist, Jeremy Fox!

Dr. Fox decided to go into ecology when he was a teenager. Influenced by a childhood spent exploring New Jersey tide pools, he decided to be a marine intertidal ecologist, and kept this goal into graduate school. Luckily, his undergraduate advisor knew better than he did what Fox actually wanted to do and encouraged him to do his graduate work with community ecologist Peter Morin. Community ecology is where Fox stayed, though I doubt he’s lost his fascination with the marine intertidal zone.

intertidal zone by Flickr user neofedex

by Flickr user neofedex

Research

When I asked Dr. Fox about the big questions in ecology, he didn’t give me a list of problems or unknowns. Instead, he described how he answers ecological questions. He tries to think in a process oriented way about how our world works and to bring models of those processes to bear on data. Instead of focusing on this or that particular piece of information, he’s interested in developing tools that can deal with whatever set of questions we think need answering.

One of the tools he uses are microcosms, which are intentionally simplified and/or highly controlled versions of some natural system. This kind of approach is widespread in ecology: Nick Gotelli uses the mini-food webs in pitcher plants and Steve Ellner builds his own system of predators and prey in chemostats. The reason this simplifying approach is so widely used is because it excludes extraneous factors to let us get a clear signal from the underlying ecological process we’re trying to understand.

But can studying two protists in a bottle [pdf] really help us understand what’s going on with elephants or crocodiles or other organisms? Fox acknowledges that elephants and crocodiles are clearly different from protists in many ways, but pointed out that they’re the same in others. If we’re trying to understand general principles, those principles should apply to both protists and crocodiles. Using a microcosm to answer a question in ecology is a bit like building a model airplane. If your tiny model can’t fly, your  real sized plane probably won’t either.

Using microcosms, he and his collaborators have recently learned a lot about the spatial synchrony of predator prey cycles. Here’s a description of the project from his website:

The aim of this project is to explain two common, important features of natural communities: stability and synchrony. Stability refers to the fact that most populations in most places persist for many generations without wild oscillations in abundance, despite environmental fluctuations. Synchrony refers to the fact that spatially-separated populations of the same species, and coexisting populations of different species, often fluctuate synchronously. This is problematic from a theoretical perspective, because theory suggests that synchrony and stability are rarely compatible. David [Vasseur] and I are developing and testing realistic (i.e. stochastic, nonlinear) models of spatial community dynamics (metacommunity dynamics) to tease apart the links between synchrony and stability.

Microcosms are only part of how Fox figures things out. He also relies on math, going so far as to say that

It’s impossible to develop and test rigorous hypotheses without mathematical help.

The world is complicated and thinking logically and rigorously is hard. Math makes you smarter – or at least forces you to explicitly define your problem and predictions. He’s not saying that everyone needs to be a modeler, just that we can’t get by on natural history and intuition alone. If you don’t have a strong math background you can collaborate with people who do, or you can buff up your own math skills, perhaps by forming a reading group with other people at your institution looking to do the same.

Favorite Papers

At his first job interview, Fox was asked about his favorite paper. He named this paper by Brian Enquist and others because he was very impressed with how creative it was and the range of things it explained. And then his interviewer pointed out that Fox’s work wasn’t at all like that. Oops! He does still think it’s a good paper – part of the reason it still impresses him is because it’s very different from anything he would or could ever have done himself. Now he’d recommend Bill Wimsatt’s book chapter False Models as Means to Truer Theories [pdf]. The essay is a bit of applied philosophy of science on ways that false models (which all models are, of course) help us learn the truth – in spite (or because!) of the fact that the models are false.

Fox wrote about his own favorite paper over at Oikos Blog, and this is my favorite part of the post:

It represents hard-won knowledge. It literally took me three years of hard work to really understand the Price equation (‘speed’ is not one of my strengths as an ecologist). And there were several points at which I thought I understood it but didn’t. One of those ‘false dawns’ led me to embarrass myself in front of Alan Grafen, a great evolutionary theoretician and one of the world’s leading experts on the Price equation. He came to Silwood Park to give a talk while I was a postdoc there, and I scheduled a one-on-one meeting with him to tell him about my clever idea. So we stood in front of a white board and I started walking him through my idea. After about 30 seconds he interrupted with a small question about my notation. It was an easy question, so I started to clarify—and then I realized I didn’t actually know the answer. Which meant I didn’t actually have any idea what the hell I was talking about. The conversation went downhill from there. When Fox (2006) finally came out I had a strong urge to send a reprint to Alan Grafen with a note reading “Sorry for wasting your time.” Or perhaps “See, I’m not an idiot after all!

It’s nice to know that other ecologists feel like idiots sometimes, too! Fox’s experience also shows that attempting to communicate our ideas early on – even when we’re wrong – is an important part of making progress on hard problems.

Blogging

Fox is my favorite ecology blogger and the most prolific of the bloggers over at Oikos Blog. He’s pretty web savvy for an ecologist (Did you notice the Wordle on his lab page?) and enjoys the platform blogging gives him. (It’s also given him a bit of name recognition among younger ecologists, which is probably good for his career.) But he’s careful in his use of technology and social media – he doesn’t use new tech because it’s new, but because he finds it useful. I couldn’t convince him to join twitter, even when I mentioned that I link to fabulous shoes on a regular basis.

If you’ve enjoyed my posts about ESA and the ecologists I met there, I recommend reading Fox’s ESA posts, especially the ‘Highlights.’ And here’s Fox talking about blogging in an interview with Wiley-Blackwell:

What’s a neuroscientist doing at ESA?

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Every year at ESA, I meet awesome new people. This year, one of the very most awesome was Zen Faulkes of NeuroDojo. He’s a neuroscientist studying crayfish nervous systems – not exactly who you’d expect at an ecology meeting! But it turns out that the crayfish he’s studying is a new invasive species with some really interesting ecology. (His Scientific American guest post on Marmorkrebs is great if you want to know more about them.) So Zen is a neuroscientist and an ecologist!

One of the cool things about talking to someone like Zen is his perspective as a semi-outsider. ESA is the biggest ecology meeting in the world and it feels huge to me, but compared to big neuroscience conferences it’s pretty small. At the same time, it’s more appreciative of breadth of work, probably because of the urgency of ecological problems and the demand for solutions.

We also had a wonderful talk about the conflict in ecology between activism and research, which he wrote about. Here’s a snippet from his post to entice you to click thru:

Ecology seems to be a field locked in heated argument about whether it is an academic research science, or a mix of science and political action group. The society, and its members, seem to be utterly conflicted, from the point of view of this onlooker.

Why our political discussions don’t go anywhere

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I normally delete comments that merely sling insults and don’t contain any substantive contribution/critique. But I had to leave this comment by Dave Koch from Prescott up on my post poking fun at the poor writing skills of of AZ Representative Paul Gosar (or his staff). I left the comment up partly because it (amusingly) has even more errors than Gosar’s letter and partly because it demonstrates a kind of thought pattern that I find really interesting and problematic.

Dave Koch is really pissed off. That’s alright. I’m pissed off too! I bet Dave Koch and I are probably pissed off for some of the same reasons – like unemployment, and the prospect that the future is going to be worse than the past. I’d say that’s a good starting point for working together to fix a problem.

But I know how a discussion with Dave Koch would go. He would focus on how I am (or how he thinks I am) different from him (right now he assumes I’m some sort of welfare queen), and claim that all of my arguments and positions are invalid because of my age, my sexuality, my religion (or lack thereof), etc.

Dave Koch doesn’t think that his comment on my Gosar post is silly and misses the point. He thinks that my imaginary position on the welfare rolls means that nothing I say is relevant. That’s how a whole heck of a lot of Americans do politics, and that’s a huge problem. Because the only way you can have a real conversation in that sort of climate is if you make sure that everyone has the same background, the same belief system, the same goals, the same lives. A country that enforced that kind of homogeneity would a really scary and miserable place to live.

 

ESA Interviews: Jean Burns

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I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is one in a series of posts about those interviews.

Jean Burns is an ecologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. She’s interested in community assembly and using invasive species to answer community assembly questions. She’s trying to figure out some big unknowns in ecology; we still don’t know exactly what factors influence why some species are rare and others are common, for example. Gaps like that mean we can’t predict what ecological communities will look like. What predictions we can make are context dependent, which is a very big problem when we’re trying to figure out what might happen in new situations – like with climate change.

One thing she’s excited about is understanding the how the evolutionary relationships between species influences species assembly.

If ecologists find lots of closely related species together, they might conclude that the closely related species all have similar traits (from their shared evolutionary history) that allow them to survive in that environment (shortened to ‘habitat filtering’ in ecology-speak). But if ecologists find mostly distantly related species all in the same place, they might conclude that closely related species are too similar to coexist (ecological theory says species that live together must occupy different niches). But wait a second! There’s an assumption in here we haven’t dealt with – how ecologically similar are closely related species really?

This is what Jean Burns and her coauthor Sharon Strauss tried to figure out in a really cool study recently. They looked at whether germination and early survival niches for some related plant species from Bodega Bay are evolutionarily conserved – that is, whether those niche aspects are really similar or not for related species. And they were! For the plants and environment in this experiment, that means that habitat filtering is a good explanation for at least some of the patterns of community assembly at Bodega Bay.

One of the cool things about her experiment is that instead of looking at a specific trait associated with germination (like days from planting to sprouting), they really were able to consider the whole germination niche in the field. If they’d measured just one or two traits, it would be really hard to be sure they were actually measuring traits important to the germination niche.

By Dinesh Valke

Commelina benghalensis by Flickr user dinesh_valke

She also spends a lot of time thinking about invasive species and what makes them so good at, well, being invasive.

One of the species she’s studied is the Benghal dayflower. Now, most people have nothing good to say about this plant, and to be fair, it’s a huge problem in agricultural fields many places. But it’s also a very, very cool plant.

It is so good at getting around. Plants know just as well as people do that putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea and often have a couple different ways to reproduce. Most plants can reproduce a couple different ways. But the Benghal dayflower has eight. In addition to spreading with rhizomes, pretty much any bit of the stem tossed onto soil can start a while new plant. And then it makes seeds 3 different ways on 3 different kinds of branches. It’s so complicated, I had to make a chart to figure it out.

Benghal dayflower flower types

No wonder it’s invasive!

So that’s a little bit about what Jean Burns has worked on, but how did she get where she is now?

She didn’t always know that she wanted to be an ecologist, but she’s always loved plants. She has fond memories of planting irises as a child and thought she might be a landscape designer someday. (Just like me! Except my fond memories are of zinnias.)

After having a fantastic time hiking around finding cool plants in a field botany course during her undergrad, she took an ecology job with the state where she could continue hiking around finding cool plants, but this time in the desert!

Even though Burns started out in botany, she’s got very good math skills – which is very important in ecology. A lot of students starting ecology degrees don’t learn as much math as they should, but since Burns’ mother, a CPA, always stressed the utility of math, she didn’t skimp on the math courses. This really paid off once she started doing ecology. She also has some really good advice about math for students: being good at math isn’t really about some sort of innate talent – it’s about persistence! If it seems hard, that’s because it is and you’ve just got to keep working at it.

Other skills she thinks ecologists don’t necessarily get training in that pay off big time are managing and working with people and being a good mentor. Based on my own experiences as a student of good mentors and then as a not-so-good mentor of good students, I can assure you that it’s not as easy it looks!

This interview is a little shorter than the rest because Jean Burns is the kind of person who makes good mentoring look easy. In our short lunch together, she managed to sneak in more questions than I did – and her questions helped me figure out more about what I wanted from grad school!