Adventures scaling the realized niche, saving the world, and searching for values

Abstract

I describe my unlikely path into marine science from a childhood in the Arizona desert and Oregon woods. Without realizing it, I developed a sense of place in nature and the value of open interdisciplinary communication among diverse scientists. My undergraduate education emphasized physiological adaptations to the environment or what might now be considered the “fundamental niche”, and my graduate thinking was inspired by a population/community based evolutionary understanding of how strong interactions define a “realized niche”. I have attempted to define strong interactions in three different ecosystems. This difficult problem is confounded by the loss of natural systems resulting from human impacts. I discuss my frustrations with eroding conservation efforts in a society that is rapidly devaluing nature and consider how we might recover our most fundamental values. I conclude that there is an urgent need to improve field-based teaching of undergraduate non-majors about nature and to be much more effective in our interactions with the general public. If we hope to have our legacy include a liveable world with natural places, we urgently need to act unilaterally to shift some of our values and reward systems towards the challenge of educating the undergraduates and especially the general public.