Book Club: The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday

Jared Diamond

Penguin, 2013

"What can we learn from traditional societies?" is the subtitle of this book by the author of one of my favourite books of all time, Guns, Germs & Steel. Dr. Diamond is a biologist and geographer employed by the University of California, Los Angeles whose fieldwork has included decades of interactions with members of traditional societies, particularly in Papua New Guinea.

Unlike an anthropological investigation, the subtitle's question is not "learn about traditional societies" and invites us - those of us who don't live in a traditional society - to take what we can from lessons of observation. The book is divided into sections that cover major ways in which traditional societies differ from civilized societies, such as child-rearing practices and settling disputes and conflicts.

The term "civilized" may be controversial and Dr. Diamond mostly avoids using it (I use it in the literal sense; the word means "city builder"). He defines "traditional societies" not in opposition to those of us who live in cities and nation-states with books and processed food and tall social hierarchies, but simply as societies that closely resemble how all people lived until the dawn of agriculture. Hence the main title, in reference to the fact that something like 99% of the time of human existence has included no agriculture and no cities. He repeatedly makes the point that the very broad diversity of traditional societies and how such people accomplish basic human universal tasks represents a natural experiment; we can observe the 'results' of these experiments and gain useful knowledge to improve the organization and daily life of our own societies.

The enormous diversity of traditional societies makes it difficult to draw broad generalizations except by defining the term against non-traditional societies. Dr. Diamond describes a hierarchy or social-development pathway (while reminding the reader that societies can and have moved in the opposite direction) from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to nations, separated by increasing levels of population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. Most currently-extant traditional societies are very small, qualifying as bands or tribes, because most of the world is owned by nations. The categories grade into each other rather than having firm boundaries, so it could be argued that some of the smallest modern states or sub-state nations (I'm thinking of the semi-autonomous republics of the Russian Federation here) are chiefdoms, but the historical pattern has been one of nations annexing or destroying smaller societies.

The basic idea of the book, to present examples of ways in which various traditional societies may do things like care for the elderly and then attempt to apply some of those methods to our own societies, is intriguing and I think useful. There isn't one optimal way to live, and there is a wider array of choices than most people may be aware of. On the other hand, many of the things that traditional societies do that we might wish to emulate are embedded in a drastically different culture. Simple things, like carrying a small child so the child's face is close to the adult's eye level, facing forward and able to observe the world while in physical contact with a parent (or "alloparent", a non-related adult caregiver) may be easy enough to implement. Dr. Diamond is a little pessimistic about that example, suggesting that social disapproval in a modern society may lead such adventurous parents to abandon these attempts, but among the parents of young children I know, caving to social pressure like that doesn't seem particularly likely.

I either disagreed with or was apathetic about many of Dr. Diamond's suggestions for changes to modern society. Many of his examples, comparing how some particular traditional society did something to what he's seen in Los Angeles seemed to me to be maximized differences by comparison to LA or the broader culture of the United States; comparison with other modern societies such as Canada or various European cultures might not make the difference seem so stark.

Other examples ignored one of the most important differences between traditional and modern societies - the risk of death at any age. It's facile to compare causes-of-death between the two categories of societies and imply that intertribal warfare or infected wounds have simply been replaced, one-for-one by modern car accidents and heart attacks. Yes, those are the leading causes of death in most modern societies - and Dr. Diamond does devote considerable text to the questions of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes - but the every-day risk of dying in an automobile collision is drastically lower for a member of a modern society than any potentially-corresponding hazard faced by traditional societies.

The consequence of our modern lack of death is dramatically different demographics. Unfortunately, Dr. Diamond does a very poor job of describing these differences. He relies heavily on the often-misunderstood concept of expected lifespan. Given his scientific training, I do not think Dr. Diamond fails to understand this concept, but he fails at clarifying it for his readers.

The most commonly cited measure of life expectancy, period-specific life expectancy at birth, is based on a number of factors and does not apply in many situations that many people try to use it in. For example, in his book Alone Against the North, modern-day Explorer Adam Shoalts discusses hypothetical, historical aboriginal populations in northern Canada as having a life expectancy of less than 30 years, and therefore there would have been no elderly people at all in those societies. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT MEANS. Sorry, I get frustrated by this stuff. A life expectancy of 40 years, to use an example that appears several times in The World Until Yesterday, does not mean that nobody much older than 40 is to be found in that society. It's an AVERAGE, a mean value based on counting how old each person was on the day they died. The period-specific part comes in when discussing societies that experience PROGRESS, which I'm going to define as the long-term improvement in human lives driven by intentional and accidental changes to human societies through time. Traditional societies, more or less by definition, do not experience progress - every day is much the same as every previous day, stretching back through thousands of years - so the different life expectancies of modern Canadians born in 1950 vs. in 2000 are not relevant here.

A life expectancy of 40 years at birth could be created through a wide range of factors, but the most common among humans is a high death rate for infants and children combined with a lower and fairly steady death rate for ages higher than early childhood. Extreme values - those that are far from the mean - have high 'leverage' because they have a large influence on the value of that mean. A population in which large numbers of people die shortly after birth but those who survive typically do not succumb until much older will have a mean life expectancy that few people would be expected to actually die at. A society with a life expectancy of 40 years probably has many people much older than 40 and many dead children, who conveniently get swept out of sight and out of mind. Societies with many dead children also probably have many living children, hence observers tend to miss the fact that in the absence of child-killers like periodic famines and the various diseases that cause catastrophic diarrhea there would be twice as many children teeming in those quaint villages as what you see. A life expectancy of 40 means an individual is expected to live 40 years on the day they are born. A year later the dice have already been rolled for many, many events that could have but did not kill that 1-year-old. This is true for everybody still alive, so their subsequent life expectancy is considerably higher than the at-birth population level expectancy, especially in societies where children die at much higher rates than adults - which is all societies, though modern societies have considerably reduced that difference (see Progress, above).

These demographic factors mean that modern societies differ from traditional societies in a few fundamental but apparently invisible ways - we expect our children to grow up, even premature babies and others with (sometimes severe) risk factors present on the day they are born. We expect to become old, to retire from our jobs or careers and then enjoy some time alive beyond that point. Obviously, retirement is a concept largely absent from traditional societies because their older people continue to "work" even if they're not walking a zillion kilometres a year through the bush. And we moderns famously have little experience of death, despite the trivially obvious fact that everyone dies. But with our low death rates at every age, the only civilized people who have much experience of dead and dying people (besides medical professionals) are the very old, whose memories compress the deaths of everyone they've known through their long lives into a short subjective period. Yes, everyone you knew is dead - but that process took decades. For a child without playmates because of a sweep by cholera, that process took weeks.

Getting back to the concept of progress, it is that which I believe separates modern societies from not just traditional societies but also separates us from pre-scientific societies in history. I struggle with a concept I call the "Wall of History" - I find it very difficult to empathize with or comprehend the lives of people who lived before effective cures for diseases or the ability to travel long distances and then return existed. I constantly think about how tomorrow will be different from today, but a pace of change fast enough to make that relevant (i.e., significant changes within an individual's lifetime) was missing from everywhere until approximately the Industrial Revolution. That's just me, I'm sure, but when I read Dr. Diamond's suggestions for improving modern societies by picking and choosing aspects of various traditional societies I stumble over objections based on microbiology, macroeconomics, or engineering. There are certainly some good, or even great ideas here, but I need more convincing.

Lab Girl

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

Alfred A. Knopf, 2016

Hope Jahren is a scientist and a professor and has a blog (www.hopejahrensurecanwrite.com) that I started reading a couple of years ago. Mostly she blogs about her life and her work, which includes plenty of rants about sexism in science and related subjects – she’s a woman scientist, and this isn’t an easy thing to be. This book is her autobiography, potentially Volume I of a series because she’s far from the end of her career and/or life at this point so I assume there are many more stories to be told. But Hope sure can write so I’m quite optimistic that she’ll keep us updated as she sees fit.

This was a highly-anticipated book among the other bloggers I regularly and semi-regularly read. It was also an anticipated book among many of the people I know in real life, who may or may not have their own blogs but many of whom are women and scientists and women scientists. I bought this book in the Chapters in West Edmonton Mall in May; I was at #WEM with my post-doc advisor, Dr. Maria Strack and when I showed her my purchases I promised her I’d loan her the book when I had finished reading it myself. I’ve just loaned it to Charlie so Maria will have to either wait or buy her own copy.

I read Lab Girl in a single weekend. I haven’t read an entire book start-to-finish in a weekend like that for a long time – the last time I’m sure I did that was with Jurassic Park, and I was about 16. I think there’s something about some books that just hooks me at the right age; when I was 16 that hook was in Jurassic Park, when I’m 38 that hook was in Lab Girl. So my opinion of Lab Girl is very positive. But Book Club blog entries have never been about just reviewing a book, they (should) always be about other ideas that flow from reading a book. Such as this idea of age-dependent hooks in books (rhyming is good and fun). Oddly enough, Lab Girl was certainly not written for me, so the hook in it that got me counts as by-catch.

I say that because there is so much in Lab Girl that’s inspiring as a scientist, that gets right at what I want to do as a scientist. More than once, Dr. Jahren describes walking out into an ecosystem, and just letting the environment and her mind interact at some subconscious level until she comes up with a Research Question (capital letters denote things that are more permanent than the daydreams I romp through almost continuously). She kneels in a peat bog in Ireland until an Hypothesis regarding ecohydrology occurs to her, then she starts collecting specimens. She helps a colleague unpack samples and then spends half a decade running fossil carbon through her mass spec. But while I love those stories, they’re not for me – they’re for somebody like me but who has experienced things I have not, things like sexism and manic-depressive mental illnesses interacting with pregnancy.

Having said that, there’s actually less sexism and discrimination and injustice in Lab Girl than I was expecting based on my reading of Dr. Jahren’s blog. My impression of her blog is that she is angry – completely justifiably! – about the institutional sexism and high-level bullshit that infests academic science. That anger is present in Lab Girl, but it’s very much in the background. She may have made her blog about it, but she didn’t make her life about it. Her book, in other words, is not a product of her blog; both her book and her blog are products of her writing, which is itself a product that passes through many filters and checkpoints on its way from her life and her mind. At least, that’s my meta-impression of what of hers I’ve read. I intend to read her scientific papers (well, some of them – at one point in Lab Girl Dr. Jahren mentions a mid-career total in the neighbourhood of 70 peer-reviewed papers) for another look at her overall writing but also because I find myself in a related field. The parts about water-use by plants is especially interesting at the moment.

There are a couple of small errors, and while I really really like Lab Girl, I feel like I need to point them out. The most glaring is a description of DNA and chromosomes as protein. She’s describing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, that workhorse of plant genetics, and in two separate paragraphs talks about the length of protein unraveled from each cell. No. Chromosomes do include plenty of protein, but genomes are made of DNA.

In another part of the book, a shocking (to me) casual negligence toward automobile seatbelts is described. Look, just wear your damn seatbelts, OK? Every. Time. Complaints about “Grizzly Adams” field scientists not taking her seriously are much less impressive after reading her laissez-faire attitude towards field work. If you’re going to tell me you don’t feel safe around that creepy post-doc, don’t follow it up with multiple stories of car crashes and heads bouncing off windshields. The creepy post-doc might have legitimately been terrifying, but he didn’t give you a bloody nose and a concussion the way bad car decisions did.

The last thing in Lab Girl I didn’t like – and in a discussion like this I feel I need to remind myself that this is a really good book, like top 10 lifetime books I’ve read GOOD – is a description of what amounts to a “teachable moment”. After her misadventures in Ireland, which culminated in all of her meticulously documented samples being disposed of by an Irish customs agent (Get a permit. It’s not that hard. But I digress), Dr. Jahren has come up with a test of new graduate students that aims to simulate that crushed distress upon having one’s recent hard work destroyed. She describes an exercise in which a new student, somewhat insultingly referred to as a “noob” (LOL OMG BBQ) is made to carefully label a large number of sample vials in anticipation of an upcoming field trip. Then Dr. Jahren and her long-serving research partner (that’s a relationship for a separate Book Club, it’s too big to tackle here) play a game of “Good Cop-Bad Cop” that ultimately results in the entire set of vials being unceremoniously dumped in the trash. This is, on a certain level, a simulation of the end of their Irish trip. But the intent is entirely different, and intent matters.

The intent of the Irish customs agent was to enforce the law, a law that Dr. Jahren should have known about, and Dr. Jahren should have had a permit to export plant material from Ireland. There was a bit of an aside in there about checked vs. carry-on luggage and I don’t think she learned any lessons there; she did claim to have learned the lesson about permits, even if only at the “I’m sorry I got caught” level rather than the truly “I’m sorry for what I did” level.

The intent of Dr. Jahren and Bill in their test-the-noob exercise is to see if an A+ student is really an A+ student or is really a B+ student. The difference, and this is my taxonomy not hers, is that the A+ effort includes something well above-and-beyond expectations, some action that counts as Outstanding. She slyly describes a student who “passed” this bullshit secret test by pulling the vials out of the trash and cleaning them, making them potentially useful for another field trip. There’s so much wrong with that, but I’m going to just focus on the stupid bullshit of a secret test – and that’s all a “teachable moment” is. I went through one or two during my time as a grad student and they were always completely unjust and unfair. If you need me to do something, I’ll do it. If you need me to learn something, I’ll learn it. But don’t “cleverly” combine the two and ruin both. Please. Please, Dr. Jahren, please stop doing that label-vials / good-cop-bad-cop exercise. It shows considerable contempt on your part towards your student, and is a violation of trust. Cut it out.

I would be very happy if pretty much everybody I know could read Lab Girl. It’s a damn good book, a series of great stories told with considerable skill and pushed together into something much bigger than the sum of the parts. I especially want a handful of individuals I know to read Lab Girl; I’m looking forward to presenting this book, this individual copy of a mass-produced hardcover to Maria. And I want to buy more copies for other people. It seems like a mild violation of privacy to describe any of these other future-gift-recipients by name here, but I can plug the wonderful, horrifying, terrifying, fantastic writing of my internet-friend Elise the Great here, and Elise, please read Lab Girl. I’ll send you a copy or an Amazon gift code or something.

My Leatherman

7 Years

I had my Leatherman tool, on my belt, for seven years. My soon-to-be-PhD-advisor-at-the-time, Dr. Steven Siciliano, gave me a Leatherman Charge TTi - a top-of-the-line multitool - before my first field season with him and his research group in 2009. He gave it to me around March or April of that year, and I've worn it on my belt nearly every day since then.

That's around 2500 days of that lump of complex, hinged, bladed metal on my left hip. I've gone through three sheaths and I don't know how many subconscious hand-passes over my belt to make sure its still there.

Early this year I accidentally tried to take it through security at Pearson International Airport, on my way to visit Charlie in February. The security personnel were quite nice and polite about it, and let me mail it back to myself in Waterloo; it was waiting in my mailbox when I returned a week later. 

At the end of my 6-week-long bookended-by-conferences early-summer-2016 fieldwork I sent it in to Leatherman's facilities in Burlington, Ontario, for warranty repairs. Before I flew from Calgary to Fredericton, I went to Canada Post and sent it to Ontario. Tonight, it has been returned to me.

Or rather, an updated substitute has been returned to me, and my Leatherman is no more. Because the Charge TTi has been replaced in the Leatherman Inc. lineup by the Charge Titanium, that is what I now have. This new Charge Titanium is a thing of beauty, a tool of vast utility that fits perfectly with the accessories (sheath, screwdriver bits) I was instructed not to send in. But it's not my Leatherman (yet).

The knife blade is flawless, not the chipped, scratched, and haphazardously-sharpened blade I used to cut ludicrously-fresh tomatoes and pears on the top of an Arctic mountain.

The saw blade is perfect, not the scratched, difficult-to-open tooth I used to cut branches and an uncountable number of zipties (using the sharp hook on its tip) on seven years of Arctic expeditions and Prairie Rivers canoe trips.

The file - both sides! - is clean to the point of optical illusion along its cross-hatched surface, and bears no trace of the steel soil-gas probes I filed and filed and polished and cursed before fitting their machinist-perfect but field-work-distorted hammer-cap on to drive into the rocky soil of the Arctic polar deserts.

The pliers are smooth and shiny, not the sticking, misaligned grip I pulled endless nails from endless boards with.

Even the scissors, tiny and sharp, are quite excellent, and not the cutters I pushed and squeezed through paper, string, cardboard, and plastic over the majority of a decade.

I'm going to enjoy and appreciate this tool over the next seven years - or more! - but I do feel like an old friend has been lost, and a concrete symbol of my PhD has disappeared.

Thank you, Leatherman, for making such fine tools. I hope my use of this new multitool lives up to the legacy of the previous one. And thank you, Dr. Siciliano, for sending me down this pathway seven years ago.

My Boring-by-Comparison Fort McMurray Story

My summer 2016 schedule is a bit different from last year's. Instead of staying in one place, working at a single site for four months, I am spending this summer travelling to several different sites. My job this year is primarily to help the graduate students in our lab get their field work established, and set up a side-project Maria and I came up with that adds a little bit of extra work to the day-to-days of the students and research assistants. I give a bit, I take a bit.

Summer field work in Canada south of the Arctic Circle often gets started in May, or late April if conditions allow. There are four sites in northern/central Alberta where I'd like to do some science, and two conferences to bookend this early-summer setup season, so I created a plan back in February / March to spend around one week at each site, covering the last week of April through to late May.

The first site to visit was Fort McMurray; we're continuing work with Suncor on their wetland reclaimation / restoration project, and we have a handful of "reference" sites in the area. Sarah, a master's student in our lab, was planning to spend the entire summer working at Fort McMurray on these sites, and because her work is largely focused on hydrology (especially the transport of dissolved materials through the study systems), she wanted to get some instruments into place as early as possible. In an ideal year, that would have included snowmelt, but given how weird 2016 has been pretty much everywhere, we had to satisfy ourselves with the last week of April.

I flew from Munich, Germany (my weekend in Munich will be the subject of another post, sometime) to Calgary on Monday, April 25, stayed with my parents one night - a too-short visit by far! - then picked up my rental car Tuesday morning. I drove up to Fort McMurray, an entirely uneventful 7-hour drive up the middle of the province.

We had our Kickoff meeting - a general overview of the project, with an emphasis on safety with our contacts / immediate supervisors at Suncor - on Wednesday morning, then Sarah and I got to work installing her runoff collectors and carrying out other beginning-of-field-season type work. I've had to explain these tasks in varying levels of detail to a range of other people - safety folks at Suncor, passers-by, other researchers, etc. - and to be honest, the details have kind of blurred together at this point. Digging and playing with soil, for the most part.

Suncor has tight rules regarding photographs at their property, and while I do have a valid camera pass, I have to submit any photos I plan to share with the world (websites, scientific conferences, etc.) to a manager at that company, and at the moment I think they have higher priorities to worry about. I have lots more to say about this issue, but not right now. So, no pictures of Sarah's experimental apparatus, or anything else at Suncor.

We can only work at Suncor on weekends if we really need to, and we didn't, so we had a chance to visit the reference sites on Saturday and Sunday. My side project, a look at the effects on greenhouse gas exchange (especially methane) of the cutlines so abundant in the Canadian boreal forest, needed to get started. Sarah and I went to Saline on Saturday, expecting a modest day - maybe 6 hours of work - and a need to work fairly hard given the still-frozen soil in many places and the long walk in to Saline. Saline is, as the name suggests, a fen (a wetland with a direct connection to groundwater, contra a bog, without such a connection) with high levels of dissolved ions in the local water supply. The vegetation community is dominated by sedges and reeds, with very few mosses able to tolerate the high salinity.


The Saline Fen. The pipes sticking up in the front-left are a nest of piezometers, used to measure water flows through this fen.


We use 60x60cm collars to isolate patches of ground and measure greenhouse gas exchange. Ours are constructed of steel, and rust rapidly in the salty peat of the Saline Fen.


My new collars (actually, just relocated old collars that were not too rusty), on the cutline that cuts right through the Saline Fen. I'm not sure why this cutline was constructed; possibilities include to provide a winter road or temporary access to areas beyond the fen, a seismic survey looking for buried deposits (in this part of the world, oil), or some other reason.


The cutline, continuing on to parts unknown.


On our way out - surprisingly early, we were back at the truck by 11:30 - we spotted a couple of caribou (Rangifer tarandus).


One seemed a little curious about us.

We returned to the house in Fort McMurray rented by the University of Waterloo, and had a few small tasks to complete mostly concerned with getting ready for Sunday, with a visit to Poplar, a tree-covered bog.


Poplar Bog. Both the "Large" and "Small" cutlines are visible here, along with the patch of "undisturbed" bog between them where I placed my reference collars.

Despite a greater number of collars to install and more difficult soil conditions - ice was close to the surface at Poplar, and abundant tree roots made cutting into the peat especially challenging - we were again finished before lunchtime. My plan was to drive to Peace River, a road distance of nearly 700 km, on Monday so I could attend a required safety training course in Peace River on Tuesday morning. Sunday afternoon was thus spent in quiet relaxation. Later in the afternoon we noticed the smoke plumes to the south and to the north, indicating wildfires. Wildfires are not particularly rare in the boreal forest, and given the hot, dry conditions the area had experienced all April, such a fire in the forests near Fort McMurray was not surprising. 

We treated the circling firefighting aircraft - we saw at least three water-bombers plus at least two helicopters carrying buckets and one "birddog" control-and-direction airplane - as a pleasant and interesting diversion on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I was a pretty enthusiastic airplane nerd when I was around 10 years old, and I snapped a few pictures.




Suburbia-and-smoke shots


It's hard to see, so I've highlighted the water stream, but a neighbour a few houses down was watering their lawn. I took this picture thinking it made an amusing contrast, but in hindsight it takes on more of a futile-gesture feeling.


I snapped this shot off at an awkward angle, but it shows the red stain from the firefighting foam this airplane has been dispensing. I saw none of the famous Canadair scooper-type waterbombers, and these 'planes need to return to an airport after dropping their loads. The advantage of the foam over water is greater wetability - water isn't actually that wet, especially when splashed onto burning trees. And, I'm not certain that a scooper would be able to operate effectively around Fort McMurray - the Athabasca river has very few straight parts, I don't know how deep it is, and there are few large lakes in the area.





Sunday night was quiet - I don't think waterbombers usually operate at night - and Monday morning included a heavy haze of smoke over the city. I dawdled my morning, sticking around long enough to wash and dry the sheets from my bed, and triple-check I wasn't leaving anything behind.

Conditions cleared up completely once I was about 15km south of town, and my drive down the infamous Highway 63 was about as calm and uneventful as is possible. Highway 63 is infamous because of the high death rate during the peak boom years, about 4-5 years ago. The news across Canada would periodically cover the more spectacular crashes, most of which were generated by young men with large incomes and powerful cars beyond their abilities to properly control driving at ridiculously high speeds and making dangerous passes on the two-lane undivided highway. Last summer I saw intense construction activity all along Highway 63 from its junction with 55, about 250 km south of Fort McMurray; this year, they appear to have completely twinned the highway except for one short section that feels like a normal construction zone. I stopped for fuel in Wandering River, and continued on my way.

The rest of that drive is more interesting, but I'll save that for another post. It wasn't until Tuesday evening that I realized the wildfires I had seen near Fort McMurray were actually forming an existential threat to the entire city. Sunday afternoon we'd joked about the smoke, asking each other how far away that fire might be, and I remember saying something like "It must be pretty far away, they'd pull out all the stops if it gets too close to the city. There's no way they'd let Fort McMurray burn." The amazing damage to the city and the total evacuation puts the lie to my confidence in the unlimited abilities of northern Alberta firefighters. This fire - apparently now named "The Beast" - is beyond any normal human efforts, and I can only salute the crews working to minimize the damage from my safe vantage point.

Peace River is living up to its name, in stark contrast to the catastrophe I accidentally avoided.

Field Crews

I really enjoy field work, and if I did not have the opportunity to spend at least part of the year working outdoors I do not think I would have stayed in Science. Field work almost always involves a team of people, for reasons including safety (working alone is verboten by most institutions and organizations, public and private), effectiveness and efficiency, and the realities of funding. Employing* undergraduate students as field assistants for graduate students, post-docs, professors, and other academic researchers has a long history, and each and every time this involves building a field crew, a team of workers to conduct the research, usually for the first time for at least some of the people.

* The debate regarding unpaid positions for undergraduate students in labs and field crews is one for another post; suffice to say I am extremely wary of unpaid work, especially when a commitment of several months is required. This gets to the heart of several issues in the modern practice of science, and there are no clear and easy solutions to the problems of getting the work done with very limited resources.

In my experience, a professor makes most of the decisions regarding the composition and schedule of a field crew for each field season. New graduate students are recruited along with a few undergraduate assistants based on the funding available and the sometimes-tentative research plans. I have never had any direct input into the composition of the field crews I have been a part of during my PhD and post-doc field seasons, though I can think of a few occasions when I have been offered a hard veto that I have never exercised. I’ve never had a major problem with any person I’ve been working with under field conditions, and so far at least I have been able to smooth over or safely ignore any minor issues that arise.

This topic unavoidably addresses issues regarding women in science, a huge and very important topic that certain parts of the blogosphere – at least, parts of the bits I read on a semi-regular basis – talk extensively about. Most of those discussions are from perspectives quite different from my own, though our opinions may align well. In short, I support anybody having a career in science, because I’m having a great time here and I think lots of other people would, too. There are of course much more important reasons to support greater equality in science and in other areas, and I like those reasons, too.

Field work often includes activities in which a person’s physical strength is an important factor. Field crews I have been a part of have ranged from mostly-male (Arctic 2010 – 3 out of 4) to mostly-female (this summer, 3 out of 4 for most of the time). I am the only male in the lab group I am a part of for this post-doc, and nearly everyone in this lab does at least some field work.

Over the last few days, and for the next week, I have been working with one other person, Marie-Claire, a scientist from Universite Laval. She helped me with the last of my 2015 summer field work, and I have been helping her with some of her work. She pointed me towards a paper (Newbery, 2003) she read some time ago that I managed to find during one of our rare encounters with a useable internet signal a few days ago.

Newbery, L., Will Any/Body Carry That Canoe?

A Geography of the Body, Ability, and Gender. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2003. 8: p. 204-216.

This is a paper rather outside my usual academic reading, though not outside of topic areas I spend much of my time thinking about and talking about. To (awkwardly, and probably poorly) summarize, Newbery presents arguments regarding the concept of “strong enough” or “capable of performing that task” that could, and in most cases should be used as indicators of the suitability for a given person for a given role or job.

Among the various things we (“my” field crew) did this summer was boardwalk construction. Working in a wetland means building places to walk to limit damage to the vegetation; one of my colleagues quoted his former graduate advisor: “The boards are to protect the plants, not to keep your feet dry!”. The minimum boardwalk is literally just a board, something like an 8-feet-long 2x8 thrown down on the wetland in the direction one might wish to walk. I find this unacceptably primitive, and prefer something that doesn’t slide away or lever up and swing sideways when I step on it. Not just to keep my feet dry – I’m wearing big rubber boots, my feet stay dry regardless – but to prevent accidents and to prevent a big piece of wood smashing into various bits of scientific equipment. More acceptable designs include cross-pieces, a bit of 2x4 or 6x6 the walking surface is attached to with nails or screws that helps to keep the boardwalk in place. In extremely wet areas, where we are essentially working in a broad, shallow pond with a substrate made of very soft and water-saturated partially-decomposed organic matter, upright posts are used to minimize the pumping of the spongy ground that results from a person walking on the board. We measure gas flux, among other parameters, and pumping the ground leads to outgassing that invalidates our measurements of “typical” gas movements. The uprights I have installed this summer are 2x4s cut with a diagonal end and driven down into the peat.

Sometimes, an upright can be simply pushed down into the peat, then horizontal boards attached to it. Most of the time, however, an upright must be hammered down. A one-handed mallet, such as the 3-pound rubber mallet I purchased a week ago, works in moderately soft peat but is fairly exhausting where plant roots or other obstacles interfere with the post-driving. A two-handed hammer, such as an 8-pound sledge or a similar-weight deadblow hammer, is the best way I have seen to efficiently drive large stakes or posts into the ground. However, while I am (barely) strong enough to wield such a hammer in the usual manner – swing up over my shoulder, power stroke with the hammer nearly vertical above my head, driving down with the bigger muscles of my abdomen as well as my arms and shoulders – many of the people I work with are not able to swing such a hammer in that way. Instead, they lift the head to just above their head, with the handle nearly horizontal, then drive downwards using only the muscles of the arms. Power correlates very clearly with the speed with which a stake can be driven to the desired depth, so in some situations I am about twice (or even more) as fast as my colleagues. Accuracy is obviously important in this task, a missed stroke might be merely annoying or it could cause a serious injury. So it is important that one only uses this tool in a way that does not overstretch their strength or skills.

(Picture unrelated) If you pound enough with a big dumb hammer, eventually it breaks. Doesn’t matter who does the pounding, hammers have a set quota of bangs they can handle before they catastrophically fail. This 8-pound deadblow hammer came from Princess Auto with a layer of hard blue plastic wrapped around the metal head. That chipped off over a few days of pounding.

Speed is probably the least important factor in this task, despite the automatic desire by anybody picking up a stake or hammer to just blast it out as quickly as possible. Newbery (2003) speaks of this subconscious urge and spends some time discussing difficult physical feats and the pride associated with success, measured perhaps by an ability to complete a task without interruption, or on the first try. It is rapidly apparent on some reflection that reaching the goal – boardwalks built to avoid outgassing, canoe and gear transported from one lake to another – is the only factor that matters (with the unspoken but important addition that safety – no injuries – comes first [or second or third, if you’re Mike Rowe]). Keeping the goal in mind, as well as the bigger picture of both safety and daily, weekly, or monthly work goals, certainly helps with safety because there is less pressure to rush through difficult tasks, and makes my life much easier because the attitude towards the work relaxes, for everyone.

This gets back to the “strong enough” or the simple binary “capable / not capable” that Newbery (2003) describes. I can carry two boards over my shoulder; my coworker might be able to carry only one, cradled in her arms horizontally in front of her, and she walks more slowly too. No matter, the boardwalk will still go to where we need it, the work will still get done, and if I try to do it all myself I’ll burn out or get injured, in addition to the damaging effects on team morale if I pull some sort of manly-man silliness.

Newbery (2003) also briefly discusses the emotional reactions to achievement – if you think you might be able to do something, then you do it successfully, it feels pretty good, to over-condense what looks like a rather sophisticated argument built on philosophy I’ve not yet encountered. Aside: I think I understood around half of Newbery (2003), the other half relied on an understanding of current philosophical work that I just don’t have. Getting back to achievement, I think letting people try, and either succeed or fail (and hopefully try again!) is far superior to any attempt to shield someone from something I might suppose they are not capable of doing. There is almost always more than one way to complete a given task* and I lack the imagination to instantly think of every possible method.

* Except the proverbial skinning of a (dead) cat – “There’s more than one way to skin a cat!” is an ironic statement because really, the only way is to get a firm grip and pull. That’s something I learned in a 3^rd-year Biology lab, during the requisite cat dissection. We had named the dogfish “Byf” but I cannot recall the name we gave our preserved tabby.

This long-ish, meandering post is meant as the beginning of a conversation, or just a point somewhere in the middle, not my final words on this subject. If you could point me towards a related discussion happening on a blog or public forum I would be grateful!

The Longest Field Season I've Ever Heard Of

The title of this post is not strictly true, but I am at the end - or, perhaps merely near the end - of an extremely long field season. Yesterday two days ago I finished the last round of gas-flux measurements that I expect to do as part of this summer of field work; the fact that these measurements were made less than 50 hours after the official end of (astronomical) summer is no more important to the definition of "summer fieldwork" than the first measurements made in May.

As usual, I have been basically terrible at keeping this place up to date and generally maintaining contact with people. Here's a short description of my activities since March of this year.

End-March, 2015: I drove from Saskatoon, SK, to Kitchener, ON, to start my new job as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo, working with Dr. Maria Strack in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management. At the time, I did not know if I would be spending my entire summer outside of Ontario, or would be visiting field sites for days or weeks at a time but basing myself in Kitchener/Waterloo. 

April 1: In what has so far not turned out to be an April-Fool's prank, I started as a post-doc at U Waterloo. Among the first decisions to be made, among such tasks as acquiring keys and locating work spaces, was that I was to spend 4 months in Alberta. As such, there was no need for me to find my own apartment and I could save thousands of dollars in rent money.

May 6: I flew to Edmonton, AB, and then was delivered to the house in the tiny town of Seba Beach, AB. 

May 7: We - I'll describe my coworkers in a moment - got started on the project. Briefly, Dr. Strack has an ongoing series of experiments looking at the process of cutover peatland restoration. After draining, clearing, and harvesting a peatland (either a bog or a fen, depending on local hydrology), restoration of the peatland involves returning the ecosystem to something resembling the natural site that was there before. This is very complex, but one approach is to examine ecological function, such as the net movement of carbon into or out of the ecosystem. Immediately after harvest, an exposed field of decomposed peat is a strong exporter of carbon, in the form of both CO2 and CH4 as the microbes in the peat digest the organic matter. As plants re-establish themselves on the field, their photosynthesis and changes in water movement patterns eventually leads to a situation in which the field as a whole is a net sink for carbon, with growth and accumulation outweighing respiration and near-surface populations of methanotrophic bacteria consuming all or nearly all of the CH4 still produced in deeper layers.

Coworkers: At the beginning of the summer, I was working with Ali, recently graduated with a B.A. in Geography at U Waterloo; Stephanie, working a co-op term with us after her second year of her Geography B.A.; and Cristina, AKA Dr. Cristina Lazcano, post-doc / adjunct prof. in the Geography department at the University of Calgary. Stephanie went to Manitoba in late June to replace a worker who quit. In late July we (Ali, Cristina, and me) were joined at Seba Beach by Sabrina, who started her M.Sc. with Dr. Strack in September. We had a few other visitors, but most such visitors were at Seba Beach for their own projects, which may overlap with what we were doing but they were not there to help us directly.

June 1: Convocation at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK. Because I knew well in advance I needed to get myself from Seba Beach to Saskatoon at the end of May I decided to gamble on vehicle ownership. At some point in April, while I was in K/W, I came up with what I thought of as my "Summer Truck" idea, and that it would be mildly crazy and a gamble. It was, but in a very good way - I like to think I won that gamble. My truck, now named Tarrandus*, has been fantastically useful.

* My truck is a 1997 Ford Ranger XLT. The name Tarrandus comes from the scientific name for caribou / reindeer, Rangifer tarrandus.


Tarrandus, seen here parked in front of a shop near Charlie's and my former apartment in Saskatoon. I intend to paint the white canopy in black-and-white dazzle camoflage, and I thought this shop's zebra stripes served as a first look.

June 4-6: Canoe trip with Charlie. Charlie and I have established our own tradition of canoe trips on prairie rivers on (or near) the May Long Weekend. This year, because of my work schedule and the date of convocation, we decided to have this trip a few weeks after May-Long, in early June. We completed the trip we had started two years previously, travelling down the Qu'Appelle River from our rescue-pickup location to Buffalo Pound Lake.


Our tent, shortly after a "gully washer" - a small, intense storm typical of summer rainstorms on the prairies - had blasted down the valley and repainted the sky.

June 28-July 2: ICoN4 Meeting, Edmonton, AB. Four years ago I attended the second International Conference on Nitrification (and related processes) in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The third meeting was in Japan and I was not able to attend, but the fourth was in Edmonton and when that decision was made I was in Saskatoon and knew I'd probably be able to attend. Seba Beach is only about 80 km from the University of Alberta where the conference was held.


This photo of the pre-conference workshop attendees was "favourited" and re-tweeted when I uploaded it to Twitter, mainly by other attendees or their academic collaborators.

July: I travelled to Saskatoon three times in July, to spend time with Charlie and to pack up our apartment there and move some items to Regina. Charlie moved to Regina for August 1, but my stuff as well as her items we could move to Regina before August were placed in a friend's garage in Regina. My stuff is still there, Charlie has moved into a fine apartment.

Also in July, plans formed for me to spend some time in September at various field sites in Western Canada. My coworkers, including other members of Dr. Strack's lab working in other places across Canada, finished their field seasons in late August, variously returning to their homes around August 21 to August 25. I had no fixed dates to be in Ontario to restrict me, so when opportunities for early-autumn fieldwork were raised I quickly agreed.

August 10(ish): The Vegetation Survey at the Seba Beach sites started to take over my life. Early plans were to complete the Veg Survey in the last full week of work, approximately August 24-28, under the assumption this would constitute only four or five days of work. In reality, the Veg Survey grew into a monster that completely consumed all other tasks over three full weeks. We placed around 600 quadrats on a grid of transects covering about ½ of the total area of the Restored Site and all of the (much smaller) Unrestored Site. Then there were accessory tasks, like biomass collection and some side-projects involving the spread of Birch trees into the Unrestored Site.


I took this photo during a short break from laying transects, while I was near the western edge of the Restored Site. If pink or orange flagging tape is visible in this photo, those are quadrat positions on the transects.

August 15: I was invited to a wedding in Nisku, AB, just south of Edmonton. Charlie’s friend Moose was attending a cousin’s wedding, and needed a neutral party along to help avoid or diffuse any family-history based awkwardness. I love weddings – any excuse to party, and a wedding is a damn good excuse and opportunity for that – and August 15/16 was pretty much my last free weekend of the summer so of course I went. I stayed at Airways Country Inn – Nisku is adjacent to Edmonton International Airport – which is a hotel catering mainly to truck drivers, and attached to Peelerz, a strip club. I did not go in to Peelerz, but I did enjoy my complimentary beverage (Gin & Tonic, for me) at Drillers, the lounge / restaurant at the hotel. My gift to the couple was a tea set from the knick-knacks shop across the street from the house in Seba Beach. Tea sets, it turns out, are kind of a specialty of that shop.


My gift to the couple with the unpronounceable names. Think stereotypical German meeting stereotypical Ukrainian, then throw in a hopelessly monolingual Anglo like me.

August 21: Charlie arrived – in Red Deer, I drove down there to pick her up after a day in the field - to spend a lovely weekend with me at Seba Beach, then she was a tremendous help with the final parts of the Veg Survey and some of those side-projects that we’d put aside during the main Veg Survey work.

August 28: Very early in the morning, Charlie and I dropped off the other three people (Ali, Sabrina, and Scott, sent to us from McGill to help. So I was wrong about none of the visitors helping us, above) at Edmonton International Airport, and then spent the rest of the day and most of the weekend relaxing at Seba Beach. It really is a very nice place to spend time, at least while the weather is good in the summer.

August 30: Charlie took Tarrandus to Saskatoon to help her complete her move to Regina, and I drove to Fort McMurray with Kim, M.Sc. student in Maria’s lab. Kim had spent most of the summer in Ft. Mac, and there was an opportunity for her to collect some early-autumn data from her sites there; I went along because I like those opportunities. Also for various fieldwork general-safe-practice reasons and because it’s good for me to show my face at Suncor in Ft. Mac for reasons to do with where my post-doc funding comes from.

August 31-September 6: Kim and I braved the terrible, terrible September weather of Fort McMurray and got the work done. Once again, UPS was involved and managed to be utterly awful in every way – that’s a rant for another day, but the short version is: DO NOT USE UPS. Despite these difficulties we had a pretty good work week and I’m happy with the data and samples we pulled out of the various wetlands there.


This is a view of "Saline Fen", one of Kim's study sites. Photos from the main study site on Suncor's mine have to be approved by Suncor before I can show them to anyone else.

September 7-10: Another opportunity for early-autumn fieldwork; Cristina and I collected a final round of gas-flux data at Seba Beach, then packed up the equipment and supplies, cleaned the house, and drove to Calgary on September 11.

September 12-13: Weekend in Calgary. I spent some time with my friend Rick who I hadn’t seen in several years; good times were had in a dim basement with bad movies and violent video games, just like old times. A++ would click frantically under fluorescent lights again.

September 14: I took a Greyhound bus for the first time in my life, from Calgary to Regina. This represented a bottleneck in my movements, because baggage restrictions on an inter-city bus are similar to those on an airplane. My usual habit of just tossing everything into the back of the car or truck was not useful here. The trip itself was pretty uneventful, and simultaneously less boring and less exotic than perhaps I had been expecting.


This pigeon had found a perch among abundant anti-pigeon devices, and seemed entirely unconcerned by my presence as I waited for the bus to return to the Husky station. The passengers had been deposited at this Husky station for 30 minutes, not enough time for me to enjoy a meal at the restaurant, and I didn't want to spend my time with the other passengers in any case, most of whom were smoking outside of the convenience store.

September 15: After only a few hours with Charlie I drove from Regina to Brandon, MB, to stay with Dr. Pete Whittington of the Geography Department at Brandon University. He is involved in peatland restoration projects in Manitoba (as well as other places) in cooperation with Dr. Strack and Dr. Line Rochefort of Université Laval. Dr. Whittington loaned me his drone after a bit of practice flying; a drone is a fun toy and I want one. I’m not sure what I might *do* with one outside of work, but they still seem like tremendous fun.


I took this photo in Manitoba while I was assisting another researcher at a site. I deliberately treated it like I would a bird, just to practice my birding technique.

September 16: I left Dr. Whittington’s house early in the morning, and had breakfast at the Husky House restaurant beside Highway 1. That would be entirely unremarkable except for two things: there was a clearly mentally-ill older man at a table who spent the entire time I was there talking to the various voices in his head, and the food was not the best I’ve had. I generally like Husky House restaurants for breakfast, I can get a “traditional” breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns and unlimited coffee for a reasonable price (that would make an American, accustomed to IHOP and Waffle House, weep for the prices Canadians pay for such fare). It was still pretty good, just not as good I usually expect.

My plan had been to pick up Ali at Winnipeg International Airport around 11:00, but heavy traffic on the 401 meant she missed her flight from Pearson (Toronto). She made it to the check-in counter before the plane actually took off, but not through security and to the gate in time to board. Air Canada allows passengers in such a situation to take the next available flight for no additional charge, so I received a text from Ali just after breakfast describing this situation and giving me 3.5 more hours to do whatever I wanted. So I visited Spruce Woods Provincial Park, between Brandon and Winnipeg.


Spruce Woods is an excellent provincial park. I went to the sand dunes there, and took this photo from the top of the hill just north of the dunes where an observation platform has been built that allows some tremendous views. Marshs Lake (no apostrophe, and this is not the usual plural of "marsh") has a walking trail around it and if I'd had more time I certainly would have explored it.

I have spent the time since September 16 at the Moongate Bed & Breakfast, about halfway between the two tiny towns of Elma and Whitemouth in eastern Manitoba; we are not far from Whiteshell Provincial Park. This B&B is quite pleasant, with a full kitchen that makes our lives much easier (and cheaper) than relying on a hotel / restaurant combination. If you follow the link, you might see that Moongate advertises itself as a retreat from the pressures of the modern world, including such nuisances as cellphone reception and the internet. This digital isolation (they use the term “digital detox”) is a bit of an obstacle to some of our work here, and I am posting this from the boardroom at Sun Gro’s Elma plant.*

* That was my plan. I wrote most of this yesterday, and I had intended to return to Elma Plant in the late afternoon but was distracted by the availability of good beer at the local "country" store. I am posting this from the house patio at Moongate, where the owner's wi-fi leaks out.

Ali returned home on the 22^nd, and I finished the last few tasks of projects I am directly involved in here yesterday (23^rd) morning; now I am a field assistant for Marie-Claire. Marie-Claire is a kind of researcher / lab manager / general task-manager and student-wrangler working for Dr. Rochefort at Laval, and is here in Manitoba to supervise some new restoration efforts at Sun Gro’s operations. We have been spending a fair bit of time out at the field to be restored, discussing plans with a highly capable and very easy-to-work-with heavy equipment operator named Bruce. He can draw straight lines across the landscape with his dozer in a way that makes me and my wobbly transects look like a drunken moose leaking bright pink flagging tape.

I will be here until Marie-Claire’s work is complete, which mostly means until she is satisfied that Bruce is doing exactly what she wants him to do as he fills ditches, damns drains (i.e. big ditches), and constructs “bunds” out of raw peat. I had thought this might be early next week, but it is now looking like we will depart next Thursday or Friday, or about one week from today.

If I do leave eastern Manitoba on Friday, then my field season will have been 149 days long, or nearly three times my longest stay in the Arctic, the 53 nights I spent in a tent at Alexandra Fjord in 2009. Of course, in the High Arctic by mid-September there is not-melting-this-year snow on the ground and air temperatures are averaging zero or lower, while here in south-eastern Manitoba we still have many of the signals of summer, including the blackflies and mosquitoes that bit me earlier this afternoon (yesterday afternoon, see above asterix), and some signals of autumn, such as the hyper-aggressive wasps that did not appreciate my appreciation of their volleyball-sized nest in a short tree. The swelling in my hand has almost completely faded (it's gone completely now, though a faint itchy feeling remains).


The nest, with angry wasps patrolling the exterior.


A close-up look at the entrance and entrance guards. This is a heavily cropped version of a photo taken with my 105mm telephoto macro lens; I did not get close to the nest a second time!