Why I am an Independent/Democrat

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Tuesday November 12, 2013 · 6:32 PM PST

2013/11/12 · 18:32

A Demopendent?

I am headed towards my second year of my PhD and have been fighting being pigeonholed for my entire career. I have been fighting the propensity in the scientific world for academics to specialize or over-specialize. My feeling is that, as exciting as it would be to be the world’s most renowned expert on the humped bladderwort, might it not also be valuable to know something of the soils, water and system that the bladderwort is supported by? Every year my advisors try to narrow my focus down to a single species view while I fight to keep my scope and education as broad as possible. My thinking, my belief, is that we need folks that, might, understand the whole picture too and not just the individual myriad pieces of a puzzle. We need people who can bring all of the constituent pieces together and find out how they work together. We also need individuals that are able to bring together all of these schools of thought and the ever increasing anthropogenic influences and be able to explain or relate these concepts to the general public.

This thinking has served me well. I took a decade off of academia and started my own land management company. I started off with more pure forestry but quickly branched off into general land management and environmental restoration. To do this, and do it well, someone who knew how to tie all pieces of complete environmental restoration together was needed at the helm. It was with this background and experience that I went back to school with when the economic bubble burst.

More below the muffin thing. . .

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