A Search for Place

I'm posting this article as i find the author and i both have same innate feeling about nature and we cognate ourselves in many matters.

A place that is a good fit for me. A place where I understand how the system works. A place that I can identify with, and believe in. A place where I can see spending the rest of my career.

Like many other Ph.D.'s on the market, I will be looking for a situation that meets those criteria in the coming year. Most people in an academic job search want to find those characteristics in an institution, and maybe in the town in which the campus is located. I do, too, but for me there is yet another aspect of each job opportunity that must fit my criteria.

I'm looking for little things -- aspects of the world that most pass right over. Outside the ivy-covered walls, what little spirits flit from tree branch to tree branch? What are the identities of the tiny green shoots that wave in the breeze?

I'm looking for things that many people would rather not think about. If you spend all day walking around turning over rocks, what creeping creatures can you rouse from their subterranean hiding places?

I'm also thinking about phenomena that others notice, but maybe don't consider to directly affect their working conditions. If I spend all day working in mid-July, what are my chances of getting a sunburn, or being doused by a sudden storm? If I decide to conduct research during the institution's January term, can I expect to face frostbite and the cold north wind, or to enjoy warm winter sun?

From those clues, the reader has probably discerned that I will be a candidate for faculty positions in ecology or the environmental sciences, and that a very important component of my work environment is the world outside the office and the classroom.

In contrast to some colleagues who fly to South America or Borneo for three weeks a year to conduct their fieldwork, I tend to work on long-term projects that involve repeated visits to the research site throughout the year. Thus my field sites have to be close enough for ready day trips, and I get very familiar with the local climate and weather conditions, year-round.

For three semesters in graduate school I was the teaching assistant for Environmental Science 101, and during one of those semesters, the professor emphasized how the traditions of different cultures affected their relationships with nature. Many Native American societies identify very strongly with the organisms, landscapes, and climate with which they share their part of the world. While that association is often weakened in modern American culture where people spend most of their lives inside climate-controlled homes, offices, and cars, and where individuals routinely move across the country to locations where the climate and wildlife are entirely different, in my experience field biologists are an exception.

An academic hero of mine, the herpetologist Henry Fitch, has conducted over 50 years of continuous research on every conceivable critter that lives on what he calls "my square mile" of Kansas countryside, and still resides within that square mile. Dr. Fitch may be an exceptional case, but deep professional interest and (even for the allegedly dispassionate scientist) a strong personal connection with the inhabitants and environmental conditions of a specific place are common to biologists.

I have been sufficiently itinerant in my budding career that I have developed deep associations with several radically different environments.

As a boy, my interests in ecology were groomed by exploring the comparatively low but venerable mountains in the Northeast, and especially at the family vacation destination, a long-inactive farm in the foothills. It is that landscape with which I most identify, with its glacier-carved valleys, long, snowy winters, and cool but blissful summers.

My dream is to conduct formal research there, with the appealing side benefit of being able to revisit some of the places of my youth.

As a graduate student, I met the rolling hills of the Great Plains -- collecting insects, conducting mouse censuses, and identifying and measuring plants. I currently have three images of that landscape decorating the walls of my cubicle. There was one small area, less than a 10th of a square mile, that I got to know inside and out. That location provided intellectual stimulation (and generated most of my dissertation), but it also was a place that I felt a part of, and that in some way belonged to me.

Emotionally, I don't identify as strongly with that place as I do with the landscape of my youth, but in a scientific sense I learned to understand it in greater empirical depth. It saddens me to think that the memories will fade, that both the place and I will change, and that I may gradually lose touch with a critically important part of my intellectual development. Possibly to fend off that possibility, a photograph of the prairie graces my computer desktop.

Now in a postdoctoral position, I have learned to respect the organisms that defy the scorching sun of the desert Southwest, and to appreciate the stark beauty of their home. I am developing an appreciation for the oft-overlooked inhabitants of yards and commercial lots in the middle of a major city, a landscape that many people currently have a close association with, but whose secrets they overlook.

Is that landscape, with its harsh challenges imposed on its inhabitants, visually striking? Yes. Scientifically fascinating? Yes. A worthy place? Indeed. But I don't yet have a powerful emotional attachment to it. While that could develop in time (and probably would), Iwill not be here long enough. Indeed, I am already in search of a new place.

In graduate school, I once calculated that I spent nearly one out of every three days (including winters, weekends, and holidays) walking prairie hillsides and exploring bushy fields. As I visited those places often on a daily or weekly basis, I didn't merely collect data on my specific project. I also observed how the local community of organisms responded to changing seasons. I developed an appreciation for the rare events that people only see when they spend extended time in a place.

I saw a mother skunk walking by with her brood, a Disneyesque runt stumbling behind the others, occasionally nudged along by its mother. I watched the sun caught on a spider's web, just at the right moment when it gleamed off beads of morning dew. I brought my sleeping bag and camped out overnight to hear the bird chorus at dawn. I was present on the warm day in early spring when the snow melted, revealing previously hidden field-mice tunnels below.

I love getting to know a place and all the organisms in it that well. My ambition is to become the expert on one point on the Earth, working out all the interrelationships between the landscape and its inhabitants. Although I understand the concept of different strokes for different folks, I can't imagine why any scientist would confine him- or herself within the walls of a lab, where the chances of Mother Nature dropping that hawk out of the sky are precisely zero.

I don't want to leave the impression that a good field site is the only thing I care about, as I search for an academic position. Ideally, I would accept a job at a liberal-arts college, but one that is serious about undergraduate research. The department would have one or two young faculty members interested in the ecology of local organisms. The area would provide opportunities for my wife to continue her career in the social services, and eventually allow her to start her own agency. Many criteria will enter into the decisions to apply for specific jobs, accept interviews, and (I hope) land a real, live, tenure-track faculty position. However, the search for a place will always remain toward the front of my mind.

I take solace in the fact that I am clearly an easy mark for the call of wild and even domesticated locales, and, given the flexibility of my academic interests, many places could become the place. What I really need is to find an institution that wants me, with the opportunity to interact with a few students interested in being introduced both intellectually and emotionally to the concept of place.

David S. Marks is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. in ecology and a postdoctoral researcher at a state university in the West. He will be chronicling his search for a tenure-track job this academic year.