Observations from a mid-career, hybrid scientist communicator

Having firmly entered my mid-career years as a hybrid academic practitioner, it occurs to me to share a few things I've learned in case it helps those starting out. Although I only attend professional scientific society meetings once a year at most these days, I do still see a whole lot of tweets and am many conversations related to how the current system of training is not serving most students, who will go on to careers outside of academia. As someone who started asking these questions 20 plus years ago and organized quite a few "alternative science career" workshops in graduate school, it's interesting to reflect on where I am at this point. It also feels like there are enough of us that have already chosen or otherwise been on this path that there should be some lessons learned that can be shared.

Chronic versus acute problems

When the California drought really got going, in the sense of a generalized panic about it, it was late 2013 / early 2014. The drought had actually started at least a couple of years before that. Now, here we are, a couple of years later, and by most accounts it looks like we're entering year five, despite a relatively wet winter in some parts of the state.

In those early days, I treated the drought much like I used to treat wildfire events when I worked on fire issues: as an acute problem -- an intense, urgent event that would have at least a somewhat distinct end. This is as opposed to a chronic problem -- one relatively unchanging in condition and with no definite end.

Scientists Have Feelings Too

I was a scientist just a few years out of graduate school when I had a career-altering experience speaking with a man in tears at a community workshop. A large cluster of wildfires had burned through his small, close-knit northern California town, and many residents were forced to evacuate their homes. They were worried that their properties would be unprotected in the time they had to stay away: firefighting resources were strained due to additional wildfires in other parts of the state. Emotions ran high for everyone as my colleagues and I presented our work on how houses burn during wildfires.

From water to agriculture, more evidence that human relationships matter

The interest in and recognition of the value of relational work when it comes to science and conservation, and really across all sectors, seems to be reaching a critical point. Just this week, several pieces on everything from farming to water scarcity to forest management directly addressed the generative power of relationships between people in environmental work. I am thrilled, to say the least.

Relatedness in action in science practice (#3)

In a beautiful blog post, Megan Adams gives a personal and honest account of both the benefits and challenges of community-engaged ecological research. In "Doing Science that Matters: Engaging with Communities in Collaborative Scientific Research," she describes working in coastal British Columbia and collaborating with groups of indigenous and non-indigenous people with "long-standing, adaptive, and evolving knowledge of natural systems" on a variety of projects.

Reconciling science research and practice

There is a lot of conversation these days around "bridging" research and practice in various fields - as a science and conservation type I tend to pay more attention to that piece, but I also see it in active conversation in the humanities and other fields as well. There are two main threads here that I think are helpful to break apart - one is how to better connect the results of research (and, not often enough, the process of research) with practice. The other related, but somewhat separate, piece is how to better train graduate students for practice-based careers in the sciences.

Boundary spanning

I am in the middle of preparing a talk for next week's 99th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), which will be in Sacramento, CA this year, an easy train ride for me. This is my first slide for my talk, which is (sadly but predictably) still taking shape.

Almost 20 years ago, I spent a couple of years working for ESA, first as a public affairs intern and then as staff with a program within the Society that was called the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative, launched after a paper from Jane Lubchenco and others proposed the concept in what was at the time a controversial paper published in Ecology. While in graduate school at Berkeley, I continued to be involved with ESA, starting the student section in 2000 - it is really exciting to see how that section has truly taken off. I am now ending my final year of service on the ESA Public Affairs Committee and will be going out on a good note with a short talk on California's drought that I will be giving to introduce rancher Dan Macon at a lunch for ESA's Rapid Response Teams. I am particularly honored to open for Dan, whose blog post on the emotional toll of drought inspired my own on live-tweeting the drought.

Trauma-sensitive environmental work

Many of us understand and have directly experienced trauma -- generally defined as the emotional response to overwhelming and often terrifying experiences -- in some form in or another. From growing up in abusive or addiction-ridden homes, suffering with serious illness, having been in or witnessed accidents or violent crimes, lost jobs, lost loved ones, and the many other ways in which trauma plays out in our very human lives, we get it on some level. We get the wounds trauma can leave, both visible and not. Some of us have actual scars and others the leftover remains of anxiety, depression, dissociation, grief, insomnia, violence, flashbacks, or bodily pain. And, we also see the ways in which healing is possible -- how we find resources, sometimes where we least expect them, and how we pull together in community with generosity, compassion, and love.

Interested in relational approaches to science practice? Retreat? Community?

So, I've got a small bit of funding to convene a group of folks that are interested in relationship-centered approaches to professional practice across disciplines. Over the past several years in my own work, I've fortunately connected with lawyers, doctors, psychologists, scientists, and others that have similar interests. There is a core group of us that will get together sometime this spring/early summer for a couple day retreat, and I want to extend an invitation to a few more folks that might have interest but that I might not have connected with yet (or haven't explicitly talked to about this).

The secret superpower of subjectivity in science practice

Subjectivity - our internal experiences and perceptions of ourselves and our world - can be devalued in many aspects of life, and particularly in scientific training and careers. The pursuit of objective methods and analyses can lead to a sense that subjective experience more broadly is unimportant or inaccurate or irrational -- this is part of the "hidden curriculum" in graduate training and related professional norms. But, the thing you are rarely shown is that a healthy relationship with your subjective experience can be a big asset, particularly in fluid, practice-based careers.

The emotional lives of scientists

"Scientists should be allowed to be upset about things that are in fact upsetting" was the general gist of an interesting set of live-tweets that came flying by me from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Naomi Oreskes, Harvard professor and author of "Merchants of Doubt," was giving a talk that is now conveniently summarized in this ClimateWire article. At the time that article was not yet written, but because I was intrigued I searched around and came across a seemingly recent (can't find a date on it to save my life) piece she wrote called "The scientist as sentinel" in a special issue of Limn on "sentinel devices." What had first captured my eye about her talk, at least what I could glean about it from the tweets, was the need to "allow" for the emotions of scientists to be a part of the discourse around climate change. It makes me somewhat sad that we need permission, but also, um, yes, please?

Relatedness in action in science practice (#2)

As my first post on "relatedness in action" mentioned, I'm trying to make the concept less abstract by pointing to examples of it that I see in the science world. Science journalist Michelle Nijhuis recently wrote a piece in the New York Times Opinionator blog on "The Science and Art of Science Writing." You should go read the whole thing, but in short it beautifully describes her work as a newly minted college graduate who while "looking for strange animals in strange places" found herself even more fascinated by the scientists she was working with as they gathered eagerly around a rattlesnake than she was by the snake itself.

Grief and science

Grief. It's a mouthful. It kind of hangs in the air when spoken, it can even be heavy on the page and the screen. Some people might view it as a downer of topic for this time of year, others might be relieved by its expression during these long nights. I remember the first time a person I deeply respect told me with great compassion that she saw me struggling with grief  - it was many years ago and I actually found it deeply confusing. And yet, now, it is so clear that was what exactly what that feeling was. I'd experienced it acutely a couple of times with the loss of a friend, a teacher, a grandparent. The idea that grief could also be chronic was new to me.

Reinvisioning training - "clinical" practice in the natural sciences

I have written a bit about non-academic careers in the natural sciences from the perspective of what comes after policy fellowship programs and legitimizing the non-academic career path. In that second post I briefly touched on the idea of "clinical" training models and their applicability in the natural sciences. In fields like law and medicine, after (or while) time spent learning in the classroom or the lab, students are given the opportunity for "real world" learning via clinical practice. In law school that might involve taking on real cases, and in medical school, working with patients.

Relatedness in action in science practice

Although these days I spend a lot of time writing in a theoretical way about relationship-centered approaches to science and engagement (in short, explicitly recognizing the importance of relationships between people in science), I am, first and foremost, a practitioner and most interested in just doing good work every day. To that end, I am trying to spend time recognizing work that I think of as "relatedness in action" -- even though the people doing it might not primarily see it that way -- both to make the topic less abstract and to help myself continue to work pragmatically.

Welcoming resistance

Recently, I was lucky enough to be a part of a circle at a small professional retreat focused on process and relationship-building where a group of incredible people with really diverse experiences, many dedicated to social justice and peace-building efforts, shared recent challenges in their work. After a long and winding discussion, the facilitators were able to masterfully weave together a strong thread that had emerged from the conversation. In sum, that thread was that the very places where we face the strongest resistance can often be the exact places that our work is most needed, and hardest. And, that maybe instead of viewing resistance as failure, we could see it as a sign that there really is something to be done there, simply based on the fact that the push-back exists.

Just do it: The beauty of practice

I identify myself professionally these days as a scientist practitioner, which I've written a bit about here and here. Sometimes people react badly to the term "practitioner," maybe because it's something that is often used to distinguish it from research, particularly in expert communities. When thought of in that way, it's a challenge to see it in a positive light, because it's already been described in the negative, as what it's not.

How about the "purposeful" PhD?

Late last week another article on the lack of academic jobs came out - this time in the New York Times, with the very sad title "The Repurposed PhD: Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It". As many of these articles do (and there are a plethora of them, particularly in the Chronicle of Higher Ed), it starts by reinforcing the idea that everybody in a PhD program wants an academic job, and can't get one, and we are all very, very depressed. Though always careful to throw in a sentence about how some rare people don't want academic jobs anyway, that is usually about as far as that discussion goes.

Careers outside academia: After the science policy fellowship

I have been involved in discussions of non-academic careers (yes, it's problematic wording - substitute "diverse" or your favorite term of art as you wish) for longer than I'd like to admit. As a graduate student 10-15 years ago, I started a student section of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), my primary professional society. As a student, I also organized a career workshop for several years at the annual meeting, and the tradition continued beyond my tenure with the section (which is super awesomely active these days). Increasingly, I find myself on the same kinds of panels I once organized - including one at ESA this summer.

Toward a more expansive view of being a scientist

So, I tried to write an editorial for a science journal this summer, and a few things about the experience were very interesting. First and foremost was the back and forth with the editor about whether or not what I had written about was actually "science". For me, this gets to the heart of the matter what it means to be a scientist and what is considered science (not to mention how hard it is to publish as a practitioner). I deeply believe that we need be more expansive in how we think about both.