Yet studying ecology in the Rust Belt clearly involves a public relations problem. Students, parents, administrators, and funders often fail to understand the appeal of local ecology. Even some ecologists, with their focus on biological diversity, tend to ignore the local in favor of places seen as globally significant or simply exotic. In fact, it is surprisingly easy to earn a biology degree without once interacting with organisms in a local habitat.
Any college worth its salt has a Study Abroad office. Just once, I would like to direct a student to the Study Our Home office. After all, the word “ecology” means the study of home. We have biology courses where students spend half a semester studying the natural history of Ecuador and half a semester photographing blue-footed boobies. What might happen if students spent an equal amount of time immersing themselves in their own landscapes?
To begin to focus attention on the local landscape, I realized that I needed to be able to recognize, articulate, and communicate the specific lessons of local ecology. What can students learn locally better than anywhere else? What exactly am I teaching when I teach ecology in urban wastelands, wetland restorations, the humblest of parks, or wherever is nearest to hand?
One late spring, I had planned a pollination ecology lab, but no native plants were flowering yet. So I took my students to a CVS parking lot, where a hedge of ornamental quince bushes had a pink riot of flowers mobbed by bees. After some urging, they set to work with their field notebooks, hand lenses, and butterfly nets. What is the difference if I teach pollination ecology in a rain forest in Costa Rica or in a CVS parking lot? Students learn the same observation skills and pollination ecology techniques. The same ecological principles pertain. The difference is that, to get to the rain forest, students must endure a six-hour flight and likely a harrowing bus ride. They must pay thousands of dollars and don their technical polyester zip-off pants. All of this communicates to them that what they are about to see is worth paying attention to. By teaching ecology in a CVS parking lot, I send the same message: This is a place worth noticing, a place of ecological interest.
The first lesson local ecology teaches is: Pay attention. Once I had a hundred-year-old holly tree in my urban front yard, but not until I did an assignment I had given my students did I learn about holly leaf miners. Apparently there are several species of insects whose whole life consists of making traces in holly leaves, and there are several scientists who have spent their careers figuring out this interaction. I went outside. Sure enough, my holly tree had them. Sharing the street with holly leaf miners made it look slightly different.
Last fall my students discovered a spectacularly armored wheel bug in an abandoned orchard behind a baseball field. They had no idea that something like a wheel bug could exist. Do they respect this place more, given the possibility of wheel bugs?
“Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea,” Thoreau wrote late in life. “We can any afternoon discover a new fruit there, which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw in my walks one or two kinds of berries whose names I did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely, if not infinitely, great.” In fact, none of us has the least idea what is going on under our noses. Geneticist Christopher Mason and his colleagues recently reported that almost half of the DNA they found in the New York City subway system was from organisms unknown to science. The New York Times quoted Mason as saying, “People don’t look at a subway pole and think, ‘It’s teeming with life.’ After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you’d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present.”
The second lesson: There is plenty left to discover, and you can start right here. Also, what you discover might change your mind.
Deep and inchoate ideas about how people interact with nature have a surprisingly strong influence on the teaching and learning of ecology. In his book Thoreau’s Country, David Foster pointed out that when Thoreau built his cabin, the landscape around Walden Pond was extensively farmed, fenced, and populated. Diana Saverin recently noted in The Atlantic that while Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she was a suburban housewife. Few people remember that Edward Abbey spent his formative years in western Pennsylvania, near the town of Home. These facts need to be emphasized because many implicitly assume that only an individual alone in the wilderness can experience nature. Is it any wonder children don’t spend enough time experiencing nature in their backyards when parents hardly credit their backyards with offering an authentic experience of the natural world?
I might walk to work on the streets of Berea, Ohio, and daydream about building a cabin in Alaska or backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with valuing wilderness or visiting Alaska. But this thinking can demean my surroundings. There are probably plants in the sidewalk cracks I can’t identify yet.
If everywhere is nature, why not turn the question around? What is the difference if I teach pollination ecology in the Costa Rican rain forest instead of the CVS parking lot? The difference, I think, is that we live here. Students buy ramen noodles at this CVS. They are complicit in the processes that led to the paving, the planting of ornamental quince bushes, and the importing of European honeybees. Whatever happens here, to the asphalt and the quinces and the bees, they need to know about it, because
