Celebrating science

Exploring a massive Ficus tree; pure joy!

Ten years ago I was a troubled teenager, full of social anxiety and with a strong disappointment regarding the failures of humanity. My country was drowning in blood, result of a half-century conflict, climate change threatened the lives of billions of people, tropical forests where being chopped at unprecedented rates, and many other issues made me feel ashamed of my kind. I was almost hopeless about our future as a species, and the future of our planet. Tough times.

I walked into a first-year biology classroom, having no idea what to expect and still uncertain between biology and the other options I had in mind: anthropology, literature, history and agriculture. I can't remember with complete certainty but I believe it took me less than a week to deeply fall in love with stories about orchids that mimick wasps to fool their pollinators, wasps that lay their eggs in other insect´s bodies for them to rear, and fungi that take over ants' bodies and minds. My mind was blown away; biology had unlocked the door to an incredibly vast universe, and this discovery gave me an intense feeling of freedom. I felt like a child again, full of happiness. I  marveled with the sight of a flower on my way home or when I spotted something moving under the fallen leaves of a random garden. Life was full of sense again.

About to leave one of the most beautiful places in the world PNN Cueva de los Guácharos, where we spent a couple of days chasing plants and birds

I spent five years devouring every book that was offered to me. Some of them struck me as lightning: Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb; Wade Davies' One River; Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene and The greatest Show on Earth; Francis Hallé's In Praise of Plants; and Desmond Morris' Naked Ape. My life had changed- for ever. I understood my real part in the world, as an infinitely minute piece of the mechanism, and not under the anthropocentric universal spotlight that I had been taught. I was shocked.

I was a happy man, though; I had become a volunteer of the herbarium at the local natural history museum, and we traveled a lot around Colombia learning about plants, collecting them and spent long hours in the museum working with specimens. The curriculum courses I was enrolled in also had field trips so I got to spend several weeks looking for invertebrates in the Caribbean, birds and monkeys in the eastern plains, or snakes and frogs in the Amazon. Life was great as a biologist but I knew there was something deep in me that felt uncomfortable still, and it was growing bigger and bigger.

A big challenge: teaching Rayita, a re-introduced Woolly Monkey, how to harvest insects from Bromelias 

As soon as I finished my BSc I traveled to Asia, where I tried to deal with my inner concern. Humanity had made a big mess of everything and although I wanted to change things, a good-for-nothing feeling invaded me whenever an idea of change landed on my mind. A fantastic group of people received me in Auroville, India, with the promise of teaching me sustainability in the most real-world scenario: by living in a sustainable community. Again, several eye-opening books landed on my hands: James Lovelock's Gaia; Charles C. Mann's 1491; Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins' Secrets of the Soil; Peter Tompkins' Secret Life of Plants; and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution. This time my readings had departed from scientific literature into the realms of cultural and social interactions between humanity and agriculture.

The experience in Asia was wonderful but my problem wasn't solved yet; the planet was troubled but I couldn't help. The issue, as I interpreted it, was that the voice of solution bearers (i.e. scientists) was not loud enough to be listened by solution seekers (i.e. politicians), or that the later decided not to listen because scientists spoke ecosystems, biodiversity and conservation gibberish while most politicians could only understand money language. So I embarked on a new journey, this time to Australia, on a postgraduate adventure into the mysterious universe of agriculture and resource economics, and then into the more familiar waters of ecology but to the somewhat remote islands of urban ecology.

Spending nights in the lab is awesome, especially if you have a couple of insects to ID and pin!

I have been in this journey through Australian academy during the last five years and will be in it for the next four. I've taken some months off since mid-2017 to read my navigation plans and re-trace my route. As I look back I realized that my concern had not been solved so I was still feeling upset with my inability to change things. A series of stupendous and unexpected events took place and another door was unlocked: the door of hope.

Shortly after landing in Colombia I received a gift from one of my dearest friends. The gift: a book. Yes, again one of these unanimated paper objects was able to transform my perception but this time the book had the answer to that annoying issue that had been driving me crazy for so long. The book: Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind. During years I believed that the world was spinning downwards into a massive turmoil; I thought of past centuries as glorious times but our present as something close to a dystopic nightmare. I had a difficult time whenever presented with questions about happiness of people before and nowdays. With extreme subtleness, Harari's book demolished even my strongest prejudices and paradigms about past and present times. His elegant explanaitions proofed me wrong once and again but curiously I never felt attacked or frustrated. Instead, I felt a lot of peace and hope.

Harari's point is very simple: there is no problem that science can't solve, or at least address and alleviate. And beware: we live in times where science is more powerful than ever before. Natural disasters, inequality, global warming, corruption. You name it, science can deal with it as it has dealt with other problems that seemed impossible at their time.

As a field biologist I have met hundreds of loving people who've opened the doors of their houses for us to stay while we do our field work.

Sure, this sounds great but we still have to deal with Mr. Trump's delusion about climate change, mega-corporations' irresponsible tropical forest clearing to grow cheap oil palm, and mining threats in  the worlds' most pristine ecosystems. But we are not the only ones who have to fight absurdly powerful paradigms. Newton, Galilei, and Darwin defied the religious establishment with their theories; Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, and many other women scientists have had to resist a biased society; and brilliant minds like Nikolai Vavilov and Alan Turing where victims of radical systems that wouldn't tolerate their personal or political views. Despite having been persecuted, those brilliant scientists forged the modern world we live in, showing us that science is undefeatable.

It's only the 10th birthday since that day I sat on a first-year biology lecture room. A lot has happened, though; I´m a happy biologist, and a very optimistic one too. We are living through troubled times but a change is possible, and it is in our hands: let´s make science happen.

MLT

***P.S.------

I have been away from my blog for more than a year now, and I regret it. On a recent post on the LSE Impact Blog, Dr. Manu Saunders talks about her recent paper about science community blogging. "Blogs give scientists an opportunity to strengthen their writing skills and develop new collaborations [...]. They provide networking opportunities and a source of advice and mentorship for students, women, isolated individuals, and other underrepresented groups." says Dr. Saunders, and I agree. Science community blogs are powerful tools for scientists to reach peers, students, citizen scientists, and even general audience who are into science. As much as I would love to give my blog some status, I wouldn´t place it under the "science community blogging" label. The fair thing is to put it under the more humble "online personal journal" category, which feels more comfortable, not as serious, and far less limiting. 

I am not sure if my blog will ever evolve into a more academic style. For the time being I enjoy witting for all those who are interested in nature but stand outside of the scientific arena; I love to write my blog thinking about friends (and friends-to-be) who want to explore the world of ecology. I know there are some scientists who follow my blog too, and I hope to give them a little break with my lines, maybe even steal one smile, while addressing interesting topics. Apologies, then, for all those who enjoy reading my blog and haven´t received anything for more than a year. Some of you have expressed your concern and a couple have even complained; I will try not to delay my writing for this long ever again.