Story of Me, Part 1
My own personal mid-life crisis crystallized as I was lying on my couch, sick with pneumonia, January 6 2012. My whole family had joined much of the Northeastern US in having an unusually deep-seated and long-term cough, and after a week of struggling not to cough hard enough to wake the 11-month-old infant sleeping snug against my left side, some germ had settled low into my left lung long enough to found its own little bacterial outpost and give me pneumonia.
Something about being ill leads me to a mild depression that manifests itself as self-criticism. In fact, after my older child and I had collaborated on introducing our immune systems to each and every one of the circulating local “bugs” a couple years ago, I had come to recognize that before the fever hit, before the muscle aches and prickly skin, the first signs of my coming down with something was feeling unmotivated and self-critical. This time, laid flat oscillating between cycles of fever, I was asking myself what I was doing with my life.
By itself, being sick would not have precipitated a midlife crisis. There were several factors at play, the most salient of which was the weather outside. Foggy and a bit windy. A balmy and warm 54ºF. Pretty nice actually. A pleasant surprise for the first week of January in upstate New York. An upstate New York native, I knew (and had repeatedly told my husband) about those first intense cold snaps that often hit that week between Christmas and New Years. To me, this otherwise pleasant departure from normality was a glaring and ominous reminder of what had been increasingly troubling me for years; our changing climate.
At the time, professionally, I was two things: an evolutionary biologist, and a curator of a biological collection. As an evolutionary biologist, I had had the pleasure and privilege of traveling the world to study some of the cutest (if you’re a person), or sexiest (if you’re a female bird), displays of some of the most amazing little birds on the planet. My specialty was describing how the wings of some male birds have been sculpted by the idiosyncratic preferences of their female counterparts into forms not exactly perfected for flying. More interestingly, from a macroevolutionary perspective, I tried to understand how these modifications occurred over evolutionary time by analyzing how they manifested themselves among different species. It was the coolest research I could imagine doing.
As a curator of a research-serving collection of birds and mammals, at one level I had to develop and oversee the management of the collection itself, but at another I had been answering to a personal mission that I have been on of promulgating understanding and knowledge of biodiversity, conservation, and science itself using research specimens as my foil. This manifested itself as cultivating knowledge of biodiversity in myself and others, and sharing this in 100’s of small tours and talks, a dozen or so lay-oriented publications, and a lot of just lobbying the collection’s-uninitiated public on everything from the role of variation in biology to the ethics of collecting.
So, what did all that have to do with Climate Change? Unfortunately, not a whole lot. This was the nagging problem that led to my crisis. How does a biologist who studies the evolution of feathers, muscles, bones, and bird courtship displays, contribute in a significant way to solutions to Climate Change? How does anyone contribute in significant ways for that matter. I’d long ago changed out my incandescent lightbulbs. I’d been trying to carry reusable canvas bags with me since the early 90s. I was increasingly needing to be engaged in the Climate Change issue to a degree more proportional to the size of the problem and my concern about it, and how to do that eluded me.
January 2012 marked the beginning of my personal journey to change my life to bring it more in line with the challenges we face with Climate Change. That week I resolved to embark on a new mission in life, spurred by the realization that as a biologist, a scientist, and a communicator, I had a “place of power” to interact with people from. I realized in order to answer the question of “what to do” we all have to take the specifics of ourselves into account. Who am I? Where’s my passion? What am I good at? What communities do I interface with? The problem is so multi-dimensional, there is no one approach or tactic that is the “right one,” rather, we can all find a niche , customized by ourselves, for ourselves, to make a difference.
I resolved then to take whatever skill set I had, and whatever “power” of position I had, to apply it towards the challenge of mitigating climate change to the greatest extent possible. All I had to do was to figure out how, and that was the beginning of the process that I still find myself in the middle of all these years later. In the next handful of posts I outline the story of myself, to show the foundation on which my motivation and determination rest, and in the hopes that you will recognize a bit of your story in mine.
Comments