And here’s where this blog takes a turn. Up until now, I’ve been trying to capture my limited understanding (and unlimited appreciation) of some of the science happening at B2. I’ve been lucky enough to interview a number of passionate, bright thinkers, and even tag along in the field on occasion. And all this time I’ve been searching for a wink from my notebook, a raised eyebrow or a significant glance that says I’ve found the thing—the image, the concept, the starting point—for the creative piece I’ve agreed to make, having been inspired by science. And after a few months of learning about woody plant encroachment and desertification and interdisciplinary science and non-linearity and the water cycle and volatile organic compounds, I think I’ve found the thing that will launch the creative work ahead.
Sujith Ravi, who is now completing a post-doc at B2, is to thank. Following our conversation about global trends in the relationship between the fire cycle, biological invasions and accelerated soil erosion on the desert margins, he emailed me a PDF of a report submitted to the National Research Council in September, 2008. The report, titled “A Frontier in Earth Surface Processes: Dynamic Interactions of Life and its Landscape,” discusses “the consensus view of a select group of early-career researchers” arrived at during an NSF-sponsored Meeting of Young Researchers in Earth Science (MYRES). (Sujith also passed along a book recommendation—Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery; I haven’t read it yet.)
I’ll quote from the abstract of the report: “A long-standing paradigm is that physical processes sculpt a landscape and set the template on which biological agents occur; these biological agents then interact with each other and with their environment within the constraints of this habitat template. However, it is increasingly recognized that biotic agents can actually shape the abiotic environment directly, leading to the important recognition that life and the landscape interact and feedback upon one another over a wide variety of temporal and spatial scales.”
And that’s what I want to write about: biotic/abiotic feedback. That’s my wink.
I don’t know how I’ll approach it yet. I might look at the research summarized in the MYRES report and create prose poems that evoke the various examples of feedback. I might stick with this paradigm as it relates to the research I witnessed at B2. I might do both.
The struggle for me has been that as a fiction writer, the things that move me to write are characters who take shape in my mind. I hear them and see them and witness them in some sort of situation or predicament, and the story begins to form. I haven’t heard any stories stuttering forth from my B2 experience. I’ve been fascinated by the passions and personalities of real people and their work, and intrigued by the evidence of the interconnectedness of life and systems on our planet. But a story hasn’t started in my mind. So I’m trying something new. I’m starting with a concept. I’ve got a purple Post-It note on my desk that says FEEDBACK and has arrows connecting to form a circle.
