Week Two: September 1 - 7

Sunday and Monday were off, so nothing to add here.

Tuesday was the first day of proper classes, now that we're done with orientation week. We did a panel on conservation leadership with Marshall Jones, Dr. Nucharin Songsasin, and Will Hackman. They were all absolutely fascinating - I especially enjoyed hearing about their takes on the importance of communication in conservation. I'm hoping to pursue sci comm as my main focus (ideally with a Master's in something relevant), so it was really nice to get a variety of perspectives on the issue from both the research side and the policy-focused side. Mr. Hackman in particular reminded me of my class on public participation in environmental governance (it was a really unwieldy class title, but it sure was accurate!), since we had to do a lot of research into how policies would effect a variety of shareholders; not just the people living in the area, but also businesses, related industries, and all sorts of other concerns. It's a really complicated field, trying to balance all the needs of everyone in a community.

The rest of the day was pretty straightforward. We talked about some basic conservation concepts with Stephanie and then did some scientific sketching practice with Jim. I drew a lovely cerulean warbler and had an absolute blast. It was a very pleasant, meditative activity, though I'm glad I brought my own brush with me - I don't know if I could have pulled off some of the details I did without it. If I were more confident in my ability to get paid for my art, I think I would really like to try scientific illustration, if only for a little bit. It seems like it would be a really neat field.

Wednesday was another lecture on conservation, focused more on the social aspects and the values that we place on biodiversity. It reminded me a bit of my wildlife conservation class I took in Australia, since we went over a lot of the same concepts of how people use and interact with the environment. The more formalized categories for that are really useful, I think. After that, we talked about Wicked Problems (apparently they need proper noun status) with Jim, focusing on a case study with spotted lanternflies. I didn't know that they were first found in the Northern VA area in the Sheetz between 37 and 81 - that's not too far from my house!

Finally, we had the counterpart to our sketching seminar yesterday: conservation photography with Anneke. I've never been very good at taking nice photos of things, or at least not ones that really pay attention to composition, framing, all of that. I tend to use them more as a quick fix tool to help me remember the situation, rather than as an art form in and of themselves. But now that I have to figure out how to tell a conservation story through photos, I'm going to have to get better at it! I'm planning to do mine on how nature reclaims urban areas, I think. Once I have the photos done, I'll probably put the whole little project up on here to share with people.

Thursday was our first journal club and the start of our bit about ethical arguments. Honestly, the reading we did for the journal club pissed me off - the core argument was that we should only care about conserving species that are directly relevant to human survival. Admittedly, the headline was a bit of a clickbait situation, but the actual article wasn't too much better. It ran up against a lot of my own ideals when it comes to conservation, and that really made me consider what, exactly, those ideals are. I'm a strong believer in the innate value of nature, and I think I have a really strong feeling of... guilt, I guess, about the fact that humans have caused so much damage to the ecosystems around us. Not all of my motivation to do conservation work comes from that, but a lot of it does. Which is a bit weird to realize.

On Friday, we got to meet with Marshall Jones again to discuss elephants and tigers and the difference in the various international conservation approaches for those species. It was fascinating to hear about all of Marshall's experiences! He worked really closely with the regulations around both species, and it was obvious that he's an expert on the topics. Just hearing all of his stories would have been well worth the time, even without the fact that he was teaching us about conservation policy. Learning all the stuff about how CITES works, the way ivory has bounced in and out of being legal to sell, and how that's had an impact on elephant populations (unsurprisingly, allowing legal sales does in fact increase illegal sales) was super neat. I knew, in an abstract way, about the ivory crushes and things like that, but I learned a lot about the politics surrounding it all. Kenya was really making a bold statement when they did that first ivory burning, even before ivory sales were illegal internationally (thanks, CITES!) or elephants were actually registered as an endangered species. And the tiger side of things was interesting, too - the fact that there's been such an increase in the overall tiger population since 2012 is amazing! But even with their status as national symbols for so many countries and all the conservation work done to help them, there's still been really harsh declines within individual nations. Some of those make sense (Myanmar) but Russia being so cryptic about the actual tiger populations they have is... deeply suspicious.

After Marshall's talk, we got started on a new semester-long project - a case study on a topic of our group's choice. My group wound up going with monarch butterflies, which I think is going to be a lot of fun! I'm looking forward to learning more about the way that education and outreach have impacted the public perception of monarchs and other insects. Honestly, as much as I love the research side of things, I'm really more passionate about the outreach. I enjoyed educating people when I worked at Hidden Pond Nature Center, and while part of that is just that I like to talk about topics I know a lot about, I think the other part is that it's always different. There's always new ways to teach the same material to someone, and not all of those ways will work as well with a given group, so you have to be able to adapt on the fly to teach something so that it will actually stick. And every group asks different questions, takes different angles, and can teach you something new. I'm hoping that this case study project will help me figure out more about the methods that can be used, and maybe I can even come up with some unique ones myself!