The Artful Amoeba

The Artful Amoeba

A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth

Natural History is Dying, and We Are All the Losers


A few weeks ago, I came across a new paper in BioScience called "Natural History's Place in Science and Society" that contained the following graph.



The left axis and the bars show the minimum number of natural history-related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US colleges and universities since 1955. The median number is indicated in writing inside the bar. You'll note that since 1995, the median number of courses has been zero. Zilch. Zip.

In other words, the people society depends on to know the most about life -- people with college biology degrees -- in nearly all cases have no obligation to learn anything about actual living organisms. To me, this is a shocking dereliction.

My Story


That quiet time wandering, listening, and looking among the loblolly pines and playing in the red dirt planted a love in me of nature that didn't germinate until years later. It wasn't until late high school, in fact, that I realized I loved biology and wanted to be a biologist (incredibly, in middle school and early high school I thought I wanted to be a lawyer).



I loved the classes especially that taught me about the diversity of life, that took me out into the field to see it up close, that let me watch it moving and wiggling under the microscope, that let me dissect animals or flowers to see how they worked, that taught me about their evolution and the history of life on Earth. But no biologist did that stuff any more -- at least not for the major part of their time. What they did, I found, was sit in an office staring at a computer screen writing grant applications and papers or creating computer models of their organisms or studying molecular biology. Occasionally, they went to meetings or mentored students or taught a class. That was *not* the bill of goods I felt I'd been sold on what biology was -- and what it meant to be a biologist -- as a child.

A life as a biologist would, ironically, prevent me from learning about life -- or, at least, the spectrum of life that I wanted to learn about -- and sharing it with the public. And so I became a science writer (albeit with career prospects arguably even worse than those of a scientist), and when the time was right I founded this blog dedicated to natural history and biodiversity.

There are other reasons I did not become a professor, but the lack of ability to be a natural history generalist was one of them. In another age, in another time (and assuming I'd been born a man), I might perhaps become a professor of natural history, a generalist who taught students biology and natural history, perhaps specialized in one or two extremely large groups of organisms (plants, fungi, etc.), wrote popular articles for the public, and wrote scientific papers about this or that interesting thing I'd noticed in the field. But by my time, those days had gone. That was no longer an option. And the reason for that is another story.

The Unfashionable Science

Just what is natural history? One thing that has not helped it, perhaps, is that name. The term is beautiful but also old-fashioned and a bit puzzling. I know what nature is. I know what history is. So is natural history the story of life on Earth? That's part of it, but the term is meant more broadly. When the phrase was coined, history meant something more like "description", according to mammologist David Schmidly, and so you could view natural history as a description of nature, and naturalists those who describe it, ask questions about the creatures' origin, evolution, behavior, anatomy and relationships using science. Vague "ecology" and unwieldy "organismal biology" encompass much the same thing, but lack the romance of the older term. Naturalists are interested in organisms and groups of organisms for their own sake, and not just what those organisms can tell them about higher order processes like DNA replication or genetic drift. Rather, they are more interested in what higher order theories and processes can tell them about their organism.




Naturalists, too, commanded respect at universities, and taught many field classes and courses dedicated to identifying and understanding the life histories and evolutionary relationships of particular groups of organisms: flowering plants, mosses, lichens, mammals, fungi, insects, invertebrates, birds, insects, fossils, birds, and so on -- a host of tangible living things to which people could directly relate.


That most professional biologists should know so little about life outside their labs is rather shocking, when you think about it. But this process began in the 20th century. At universities, process began to trump product, and what was once an esteemed part of biology evolved into a dusty, fusty relict. The pendulum swung away from outdoor field studies toward indoors laboratory research on fundamental processes. Scientists who studied underlying processes of biology -- evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, etc., -- got bigger grants and better publications than those who studied the organisms themselves. Funding and grants for natural history evaporated, and with them, tenured faculty positions. Pyle recalls his own college experience: "The only young naturalist on the faculty, shortly after receiving the outstanding teaching award for his magnificent classes in field natural history, was denied tenure; the department wanted superstar lab candidates who published frequently in all the right journals. A few profs interested in complete organisms survived by being strong on theory."





In the 1980s, more than 30 herbaria -- repositories of plant and fungal specimens -- were added per year. Now that number is fewer than two per year. The authors comment that the numbers are similar for similar repositories of other kinds of life. The disappearance of specimen collections makes it harder to engage local communities and submit local specimens, although it can make accessing specimens easier for biologists (everyone loves one-stop shopping).


Further, exposure of students at all levels to natural history is diminishing. As we saw in the graph at the top of this post, all colleges and universities surveyed in the 1950s required at least some natural history courses for a biology degree - a median of 2.25. Today, most colleges have no natural history requirements for a biology degree, and the slim section devoted to natural history in the center of most textbooks has shrunk 40 percent and is usually skipped anyway, as I'm sure those of you with biology degrees earned in the last 20 years can attest.

As the classes vanished, so did the natural history training. Field trips and field classes disappeared, and without them, "these subjects are dead and the students who study them risk coming away with little but cold abstractions," wrote biologist Reed Noss in a paper mourning the demise of natural history in 1996. Most biology students no longer learned to identify species, and few learned about taxonomy or systematics, much less about the diversity of life within particular groups. The vast majority would work only with a few species in their studies, "becoming specialists before they are generalists," wrote mammalogist Michael Mares in 2002. "They are sublimely ignorant of the diversity and complexity of nature."

The ultimate consequence was that jobs for systematists and taxonomists likewise vaporized; observing and describing became passé; "natural history" and "naturalist" perjorative. Lab research brought "prestige, glamour, and grant money -- especially grant money", Pyle says. Natural history brought quiet ridicule, or at least condescension -- so much so that many young scientists would not even suggest they might be interested in organisms for their own sake. "All of us have met and heard students who, in explaining their work on some aspect of the biology of mammals, birds, or insects, say that they are not interested in mammals, birds, or insects as such but, instead, as models for studying principles," wrote David Schmidley in a 2005 commentary. "They do not view themselves as mammalogists or herpetologists but as ecologists or evolutionary biologists -- as if being a mammalogist were a badge of shame."

A Picture of a Slug Is Not a Slug



Comstock's book stressed the importance of kid-on-critter time. But increasingly, in the classrooms and museum exhibits that I've seen or visited, still images or interactive games are considered adequate substitutes. They are not.


Judging by a recent article in The Atlantic and by Richard Louv's 2008 book Last Child in the Woods, my wandering outside alone at a tender age was a common childhood experience a generation ago, but it has virtually disappeared today. Some parents never seem to let their kids out of their sight no matter how old they get -- they are constantly supervised and never allowed time to explore on their own.


In schools, "environmental education" has often replaced natural history, with its emphasis on general structures and concepts like food webs or trophic levels. But such vague ideas are often boring and abstract. It would be hard to think of a kid or a biologist with a passionate devotion to a food web, but how many can you think of with a passion for a particular bird or dinosaur? But this kind of education -- and lack of exposure to life in the field -- produces kids for whom "every evergreen is a pine; all brown birds are sparrows; and if a spring chorus is to be heard at all, a frog is a frog is a frog," as Pyle writes. Actually, I bet you'd be hard pressed to find a kid today who knows sparrows are brown -- and many would not know it was a bird.

On a recent fishing trip to southeast Oklahoma, our guide related that he'd had a client who wanted to know what all the trees on the hill were that still had their leaves on in winter. In shock, my guide realized this man had no idea what a pine tree was. When the guide discovered the man worked in real estate, his interest was piqued. How could a real estate agent not know what a pine tree is? One that works in *commercial* real estate, apparently. On my old blog, I related the experience I had right out of college when I worked in a plant nursery and a man came in looking for an ostrich fern. As I sorted through the five or six fern species we had, he remarked "I never knew there were so many kinds of fern!" There are 10,000 species of fern.

When kids do not grow up around natural history, they become adults who are not only ignorant of natural history, but who do not care about nature and view it as disposable and unimportant. "Ecological ignorance breeds indifference," as Pyle put it. "What we know, we may choose to care for. What we fail to recognize, we certainly won't." Few reactions to climate change irritate me more than the "disposable Earth" attitude -- surprisingly common among young adults -- that if we ruin Earth (for our uses, at least), no biggie. We can just go terraform Mars or something (Not an exaggeration of this attitude. See prime example here, but I have heard it elsewhere too).

To that, I just want to shout "Are you insane??! Even if that were technically possible, have you seen what a good thing we've got going here? Have you SEEN Mars?" And I think a large part of this attitude stems from the fact many people -- especially young people -- have NOT seen what we've got going here. They haven't spent hours in the woods quietly rambling around, listening, smelling, tasting, and observing. They swum above a coral reef. They haven't experienced the grandeur of open grassland. They haven't walked through a fog-filled forest and seen the lichens and algae glow. They haven't seen the beauty of the desert in bloom. They haven't even looked at the magic in a drop of wild pond water under a microscope. Because guess who else hasn't done that yet? Me. And I even own a microscope.



How Natural History and Sari Cloth Can Thwart Cholera

But natural history loss and apathy isn't just bad for academic naturalists and kids. In the same BioScience paper that produced the graphs in this post, lead author Joshua Tewksbury and colleagues point out that it can be bad -- and extremely costly -- for humanity in some very practical ways.

The waterborne illness cholera has killed millions over the centuries, famously killing some travelers on the Oregon Trail within hours of the first symptoms. What was not recognized or thought to be investigated until early 1990s was what cholera was up to in the environment when it wasn't killing humans. Cholera doesn't exist to afflict humans. It is a wild creature -- a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae -- which its own fascinating life history in nature. As it turns out cholera bacteria are actually native to the sea and commonly attach themselves to copepods and other zooplankton. Using this bit of natural history, scientists can now forecast cholera outbreaks in India using satellite images of phytoplankton blooms in the Indian Ocean.


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What Can We Do?


  3. Natural history education -- and simply looking, observing and exploring nature -- are the birthright of all children and biologists. Failing to teach natural history and spend time in nature has serious practical consequences for individuals and for society.



Schmidley suggests some good could come of ceasing to think of "naturalist" and "scientist" as mutually exclusive, "the supposition that one must be either an old-fashioned "-ologist" or a builder of conceptual frameworks, but not both". He suggests an alternative -- "the scientific naturalist." "a person with a deep and broad familiarity with one or more groups of organisms or ecological communities, who can draw on his or her knowledge of systematics, distribution, life histories, behavior, and perhaps physiology and morphology to inspire ideas, evaluate hypotheses, and intelligently design research with an awareness of organisms' special peculiarities." I have known a scientist or two like this, but we need more.


Service intern Byron Hamstead helps identify stream insects (8026518273).jpg"Service intern Byron Hamstead helps identify stream insects (8026518273)" by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region - Service intern Byron Hamstead helps identify stream insects



How could I get science curious friends who aren't already passionate about biology interested? Take my kids out for a nature walk -- and grab a few neighborhood kids while I'm at it? Get involved in volunteer outreach at my local natural history museum? Find the time to take *myself* for a walk in nature, field guide, magnifying glass, and binoculars in hand? I feel screen suck too ... but put down the phone and go outside.

If I'm a public school teacher, how can I incorporate more natural history -- and especially field trips and kid-on-critter (and not just vertebrates) time -- into my curriculum? If I'm a university faculty member, how can I increase or encourage the increase the teaching of natural history and field science and its requirement for a biology degree at my institution? Noss suggests that faculty and students donate time to schools parks, or other public agencies to help develop or improve educational programs in local natural history, and that lab or office-bound scientists get back out into the field themselves and make the effort to learn the organisms that live in their own backyards.


A Final Plea for the Dignity of Natural History


Ernest Rutherford famously said "all science is either physics or stamp collecting". No science has perhaps been a bigger victim of this attitude than natural history. But is it a waste of time to visit and appreciate the paintings in the art museum? Is it stamp collecting to study and research the works of Vermeer, or Las Meninas?



"A naturalist is the person who is inexhaustibly fascinated by biological diversity and who does not view organisms merely as models, or vehicles for theory, but rather as the thing itself that excites our admiration and our desire for knowledge, understanding, and preservation," writes David Schmidley. That is who I am. And I'm sure I'm not alone. But natural history will dwindle -- and humanity will suffer accordingly -- unless society prioritizes natural history research and education, and we who feel this way share our passion with others.



"Scientific abstractions and fancy technologies are no substitutes for the wisdom that springs from knowing the world and its creatures in intimate, loving detail. We owe it to ourselves and our students to keep opportunities for acquiring this kind of knowledge alive." --- Reed Noss, Conservation Biology, 2001


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