Theoretical & Creative Ecology (SCIENCE & ECOPOETRY) with Madhur Anand
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

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Oh, hey, it's that guy on the train next to you shopping for phones on his phone, Allie Ward. And here we are together. It's raining in Los Angeles.

It's an atmospheric river. We're serving a cozy little romp through words and science. So I met this ologist on an island last summer. Don't get too excited, though. It was Catalina Island, just off the coast of LA. And while I was presenting this audio storytelling symposium for USC's Wrigley School, it's a story makers program they do. It was actually very exciting because it was full of climate scientists learning to communicate their work to the public. So I was there to talk to them about audio storytelling.

And we all chatted after dinner around this little campfire. And I learned that this guest was not only studying the earth, but also doing poeming as well. And not just like as a hobby. A real-life theoretical ecologist, a professor of ecology and sustainability, and a director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research, also an internationally lauded poet.

an author. How? We're going to talk about it. So among her scores of ecology publications are three books. There's two volumes of poetry, a new index for predicting catastrophes, which was a Trillium Book Award finalist for poetry. And her next poetry book was called Parasitic Oscillations, which was a Globe and Mail top 100 book. And then her memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, won the

the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. So after we had this fireside chat, I showed up the next morning on the porch of her bungalow on the Wrigley campus on Catalina Island with my battered bag of mics and a recorder surrounded by salty air and birdsong. And we talked about her work

and the intersection of science and art before our boat to the mainland kind of threatened to strand us at the dock because we were talking too long. More on that later. But first, thank you to all the folks at patreon.com slash ologies who submitted questions for her to answer. You can join that for a dollar a month. And thank you to everyone out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Thanks to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read so that I can pull a recent one. And thank you personally, such as BPEP's recent review that read,

I bonded with a girl over how much we loved your podcast because I randomly said a fun fact about opossums that she recognized. Never stop doing this. Bebeps, I shan't. At least for a while. So with that said, let's get to creative ecology. So did we create this term? Just desperate to talk about science writing and eco-poetry. Is eco-poetry a term?

It is. And so is creative ecology. So in fact, UC Santa Cruz, I looked this up, has a whole program and a center for creative ecology. And they define the field as the intersection of culture and environment. And they examine how filmmakers and writers and activists and photojournalists and theorists

can creatively negotiate environmental concerns. So yeah, what to do if you have one foot in science and the other in language or visual arts? You straddle that division. Yeehaw. And just call it creative ecology. So drag up a patio chair, come sit with us for climate storytelling, narratives in science, anticipating human motives, carbon stability, finding the absurdity in just everything, vegetation dynamics, modernization,

I love your purse. I'm so jealous.

Of this $10. Mervyn's purse. I am. I'm jealous that it was $10. Ten bucks. It definitely could use a little zhuzhing. I got the handles fixed by a guy named George, cobbler in the neighborhood, but it's been everywhere. It's perfect. First thing I'll make you do is say your first and last name and your pronouns. My name is Madhur Anand. She, her. You are, we found out yesterday, we've discovered, a creative ecologist.

Yes. Yes, I am. Did you go back and do any more Googling into it? Or were you just like, once we figured that out by the fire pit, it was like, no, it's on. No. As soon as I heard the term, I thought, yeah, that works. And then after, when you actually found that it's objectively out there in the universe, I'm like, yeah, that's, I'm good. I'm good with that. Let's talk a little bit about the ecology part and the environmental science part. Sure. Yeah.

Can you tell me what field were you in before you started writing? What did you identify with in terms of like, this is my job, this is what I do? Yes. So there's several kind of names for it, but in ology terms, I'm a theoretical ecologist and I still am. I still am a theoretical ecologist. What do they do?

And by they, I mean she. So Dr. Anand, side note, got a PhD in theoretical ecology at Western University, which is in London, Ontario, with a dissertation toward a unifying theory of vegetation dynamics. And her research gate list of papers just keeps going and going like this winding river full of plants.

and frogs and climate change. And some recent scientific publications she's co-authored include things like Drivers of Tipping Points in Coupled Human Environment Systems, Health and Equity Implications of Individual Adaptation to Air Pollution in a Changing Climate, a Novel Approach to Assess Livestock Management Effects on Biodiversity of Drylands. Did you know that this was a job that you could do?

So theoretical ecologists generally tend to make models of ecosystems. So they try to create abstract descriptions, often involving mathematical equations or computer code, to try to simplify, summarize.

very complex ecosystems that you can't go out and study in nature or manipulate as much as you want to, to understand something about the underlying processes. What were you theorizing on in terms of ecology, like space or islands or planets or oceans or all of the above? So mostly it was terrestrial ecosystems and mostly it was forest ecosystems initially. And

And I wanted to understand how all of the different species that occur in an ecosystem interact, what creates the incredible diversity that we see, why do we see it in some places and not others, what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of disturbances and perturbations on these systems, etc.

So for a long time, I was just studying like that in ecological terms. And then over the past 10 years, I've been starting to couple those dynamics to models of human behavior. Because I had this big epiphany while teaching an undergraduate course several years ago that, you know, ecologists have spent a long time, including myself...

understanding the effects that humans can have on ecosystems, which is, you know, often negative. But if we really want to see change in the world around us, we actually have to understand the humans as well. Oh, what a big puzzle. What a big wrench to throw into a theoretical model of humanity. God, they are, they're really hard, right? You know, that Bjork song, Human Behavior. Yeah.

It applies. And when you're studying forest ecosystems using theoretical models, are you figuring out like,

when a forest fire rips through or when it doesn't rip through or what a beetle infestation does if there's an invasive species. What types of things are you able to look into the future and see like, oh, this might be a problem? Yeah. So we know that there's lots and lots of problems. What I've been interested in trying to figure out is what kind of interventions, what kind of ways of looking at the system could

could possibly create a reversal of those negative impacts. So how can we create like a positive feedback loop where the humans in the system learn from what they've done and change their behavior? So if you want to take an example of invasive species, and in fact, we have worked on some insect infestations in forests.

And, okay, the thing about those systems is that, like, initially, so humans are obviously involved with invasive species in the sense that we introduce them, often accidentally. But the interesting thing about, like, forest pests, for example, is that the initial introduction is...

It's bad, but not really that hard to control. The harder part is when humans subsequently move that invasive species further and in unpredictable ways. So in forest ecosystems, that happens through moving firewood. No. Really basic. Really? Yes. That would not be a thing that I...

Would find disastrous. I would be like, if you're testing out a flamethrower at your cabin, that's an issue. Or if you're, you know what I mean? Like you're clear cutting. It seems so benign. Yeah. And on the flip side, you'd think, well, then that's just really a simple thing to not do. Yeah. Right? But if you go to the website, like the Canadian, you know, natural resource website on how to control invasive species, the number one thing on their website is don't move firewood. Oh.

Oh my God, that's so simple. Oh my God, that's so simple. But people don't do that. And for more on this, you can see her paper, Modeling Interactions Between Forest Pest Invasions and Human Decisions Regarding Firewood Transport Restrictions. And yes, beetle infestations are kind of a secret ingredient in wildfires, and climate change and drought are kind of giving them a leg up. They're giving them a leg up.

They're giving them six legs up. So many legs up. And some species of longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer and bark beetles leave them like giant standing matchsticks in a forest. And for more on fire management, you can see Dr. Gavin Jones' fire ecology episode we did and the indigenous fire ecology episode with Dr. Amy Christensen about how colonial firefighting systems are finally beginning to incorporate indigenous land stewardship principles. But

But yeah, humans and specifically colonist populations have been picking up and transporting hitchhiking beetles. So we looked into sort of what would be the conditions under which that would happen. And then again, you sort of think, okay, humans are pretty, you know, simple in the sense that, well...

Just give it to them for free. For free? For free. That was my idea. Oh. That was my brilliant idea was let's just give it to them for free when they go camping or wherever they're going to the campground, right? Mm-hmm. It turns out you don't even have to do that. So as wonderful and sometimes terribly predictable as we are, we don't actually behave completely rationally. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Okay. Which is a good thing, actually. Right? In a sense, because if we did, then like, so this is to say that we don't always behave in response to economics. We do things for other reasons. And those other reasons are the things that I think are going to save us, actually. What are they? What are those reasons?

Love. Oh. Yeah. Like who can put an economic, well, maybe some people try. Valentine's Day. I don't know. But yeah, you know, like we care. We care about things. We love things. We find things beautiful. Right. And so all of those different types of valuation, air quotes around valuation, are

All of that kind of valuation is important in our decision-making. And I think those are the aspects of humanity that will help us save the things we love, right?

So is finding solutions appealing and understanding human psychology of what they love, what they care about, what they'll prioritize? Yes. Yeah. We need to include those types of things in our, we call them utility functions in the models. Which means what alternatives are people most likely to prefer and use? You know, you got to get in there. You got to get in their heads. Yeah.

Like what's easiest, what's most feasible, and also what matters. But we try to include that, right? I mean, there's other factors too. Like we care about our own health, right? Like we care about our own survival. We know that we are interdependent on healthy ecosystems, right?

So we're not going to do things that we know, that we consciously know are going to hurt us, right? So there's things like risk perception too that come into these models as well. And what about for you, what got you into science? Was it the love of outdoors? Was it the love of mathematics? Did science seem like a well-worn path in your future, you know, from you were raised in an academic family? Yeah.

Yeah, no. So I am the first person to get a PhD in my family and I am the first...

scientist in my family. So it was not like directly from family sort of experiences, except to say that my parents, perhaps predictably as immigrants from India to Canada, really pushed me to continue in science when they saw that I was good at it. Because in high school, I really did love like arts and science equally, but they were like, oh, well,

if you're, you know, good in science, go there, like do that, do that. And they, you know, they were like, well, cause you know, we don't see a lot of women in science and they were already quite ahead of their time. So yeah, so I did that. Obviously they were probably also thinking of my future and wanting it to be more stable. So they did push me in that direction. And then in undergrad, I took a degree in ecology and evolution. So,

So there was not much exposure to anything else. So all the stuff that I realized I loved in high school, I couldn't really pursue. But I was also learning a lot of new things. I didn't have any experience in the field. I didn't grow up in nature. I grew up in cities. But in fourth year, two things sort of simultaneously happened.

One is that I took a course called theoretical ecology. And I just loved that ecology and science could be filled with ideas, filled with like speculation about how things work and just like at a really high level. And I think already at that point, I was going to see that it could be really creative. I just loved that I could play with ideas in my head.

And that things actually, if you kind of squinted, look like little fictions. Like the little theoretical models that we were studying just were so strange. Yeah.

And I found that really appealing. So theoretical ecology involves possible narratives, almost like science fiction brainstorming for ecological futurism in the real world, filled with psychological aspects. It's kind of like D&D for nature nerds. And then the other thing that happened was that I took my first field course in

It was the first time I put on hip waders in my life. Yeah. City girl and hip waders. Yeah. And so we had to like choose little projects that we would work on. And like we had to put forward a hypothesis and test it while we were there. Oh, wow. So my hypothesis had to do with submergent aquatic vegetation in a lake. Yeah.

I was going to look at like how things change along a gradient in this lake. So I had to get in the water. I had to like get these quadrats and move along, walk along and estimate all of the species that were in the quadrat and then analyze that data. And as we learned in Karina Newsom's wildlife ecology episode on field work,

And the recent indigenous phytology episode with Lee Joseph, which was on ethnobotany, these are called transect studies. And it means scientists make a big old grid and they count things in individual squares to make this bigger picture of what's going on in the area and then also in the world. But it starts with counting tiny plants and animals. And basically at that point, again, it was a really beautiful environment. I certainly...

like learn to appreciate the beauty of nature through that. But again, like I think the thing that I really, really loved was the empowerment of asking your own question and then finding a way to answer it and then sharing that with the world. Yeah. And tell me about the first time you wrote poetry. Okay.

Okay. So it happened in the final year of writing up my PhD thesis. Okay. I had been studying vegetation dynamics. So I went on to study vegetation dynamics and I was looking at how to reconcile the fact that there were different phases in vegetation dynamics. There were more like linear, predictable types of dynamics that would be easily fit by standard models.

But then there were also these really, really unpredictable, turbulent types of dynamics happening.

part of the same system, but that conventional models couldn't predict. So I was trying to come up with a new model in which there was a kind of vegetation recovery process that started out really, really linear and predictable, but then suddenly became turbulent. Ooh. Yeah. Drama. I know. Yeah, exactly. Meanwhile, as I was writing up my thesis in the final year,

Something happened one day. I was like spending a lot of time alone in the lab, writing code, writing this model, analyzing this data, thinking about these different theories and how to combine them. And I just remember feeling one day that I could not continue. I couldn't continue working at my desk. And in retrospect, what I think I was feeling was scientist's block. Yeah.

Just stuck. I was stuck. Yeah. You know, and I couldn't explain why or what it was. And I walked to the window of the lab and I looked outside and I just remember seeing a horse chestnut tree surrounded by lawn at the university. I came back to my desk and I wrote a poem. Was that common for you? I had never done that before. Oh.

So that was my very first poem that I had ever written. And what is going on? What is this? Who is this? Yeah. And then basically after that, like every few days, you know, that would sort of happen. And I started to write a few more because I was like...

What's going on here? And honestly, they were just coming out. Well, take me back to writing that one. Did you take out a notepad? Did you write it on the back of an envelope? Did you take out your laptop? Like what made you open a document? Did you have a line or two and then it started to crystallize out from that? I think I wrote it on paper. So the very first one was a rhyming poem, but her second ever from the same era, writing her PhD in Ontario, Canada is titled Cold. Cold. Cold.

no wonder where's her coat now it was covering her costume give her a blanket now she has work to do it might be a fever making her shiver she's usually quite warm they say what was she doing outside anyway

Pretty soon after that, I had completed my thesis and I was submitting it, right? And I was showing it to my supervisor, like the final stages of it. And I was like, you know, something weird has been happening these days. I've been afflicted with poetry. I've been writing poems. And he said, it's marvelous. Without even actually looking at them, he said, you must include them in your thesis. What a gem. Yeah.

Was that the reaction you were expecting? No. Was it what you were hoping for? No. Really? No. I didn't think they were very good. And they're not. What? But anyway, I'll just say that if you want to see those poems, there's one poem at the beginning of each chapter of my thesis, which is publicly accessible at Western University's database.

And again, that paper is titled Toward a Unifying Theory of Vegetation Dynamics. And I looked it up. I found it. And I was scanning this 255 pages. And then I found nestled between graphs and tables and citations were poems holding court on otherwise blank pages. One read, mine before I take it. That's how things go typically. Done before I make it. Sure before I fake it.

And when certainty was not a guarantee, I did not admit desire. What happened to me? Man, I wish I could go back in time to her thesis defense. I bet it was a great party, but also a very smart one. What happened when it came time to defend? Um...

I didn't present the poems in my oral presentation. But of course, all of the committee members and the external got them in the thesis. And everybody commented on how original it was and how lovely it was actually to have included the poems and how much they enjoyed having them. And you look embarrassed that you have to admit like everyone...

Did love them. Like, I'm making you toot your own horn right now. People responded well to them. Like, that must have been surprising for you at the time or... Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, totally. You were like, oh, shit, I just became a doctor and a poet on the same day. Like a published poet. Well, actually, you became a published poet because you're published. Yes. You got a BOGO. You got a buy one, get one. I got it.

So you became literally, the day that that published, you were a doctor and a poet. Oh my God, yeah. Now that you put it that way, I'm realizing that's true. Yeah, it's the same exact moment, like Schrodinger's cat kind of like... Okay, not really. Don't email me. Just listen to our quantum ontology episode with astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, who is the author of the book, What is Real? Because what is...

real? Does anything even matter? Are there more of us in countless universes just living our best and our worst lives with our best hair? I don't know what's going on out there, but what's holding you back from acting weirder in this one life that you're in, that you've got? How can you shift your limiting philosophies toward one that says, fuck this, I'm just going to be me and you're going to like it? What was it doing for you to write poetry? Like what itch was it scratching?

So it's always hard to know when you're in it. But in retrospect now, because that was about, gosh, 25 years ago, and now that I have two books of poetry, when I look back, I think the thing that it was doing was allowing me for a way to express all of the parts of my heart and mind that I was not able to express through doing this really, really intense,

focused

scientific method. Also, I was probably at a cusp, right? So this is a thing I've also thought about is that when you get to the end of your PhD, you would think that that's a point in time where you feel really good and you're like, okay, I'm the expert now in this very specific thing. I know most about it in the world because I'm about to publish a PhD, you know, thesis on it. I did it. I did it. But...

I was feeling the opposite. I was starting to feel like, oh my God, I know nothing. Really? Yeah. And it's that thing where it's like, oh, you know, the more you know, the more you realize how much there is out there to know. Right. And I was starting to feel that. And I think it was that kind of like, I don't know, Molly, like, there's got to be a word for that or like psychological term. Yeah.

Okay, I looked into this and I found Plato's work called Apology. It's his 399 BCE recounting of a public trial of Socrates. And Socrates was Plato's philosophy mentor. And Socrates asserts something along the lines of, I seem to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know, I do not think I know either. This is sometimes referred to a Socratic paradox. Although I'm sure...

some of our furry ancestors way before that grunted some kind of spitty equivalent of like, hey man, one thing I know is that I don't know shit. And if you've ever studied anything in depth, you get it. But in fact, I was just realizing that completing the thesis was actually just not an endpoint, but it was like a

starting point for something. It's not like crossing a finish line, is it? That's right. That's right. Yeah. And it's like a completely different race. You get to the end of a marathon and then they're like, a starting gun goes off and it's like, and the rest of you. Yes, exactly. That was just a warmup. Tell me about publishing your poetry in book form because you have two volumes. Which one came first and why did you title it that?

Okay, so the first one is entitled A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes. I love the title so much. And it took many, many years for that book to come about. So Dr. Anand got her PhD in 1997, but didn't really jump deep into poetry like right away. Kind of like the protagonist in some film that I wish existed. She sort of hip-waitered in gently as she completed a bunch of postdocs overseas. Oh, okay.

I went to Trieste, Italy. Heard of it. Went to Jerusalem for a year. I went to the Netherlands, Utrecht, for nine months. And then I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a while. And then I got my first tenure track position. So I really didn't quite return to poetry seriously until...

after I started my position. And then I started to read a lot of poetry though. And then in that sense too, it was almost like, oh yeah, this is the world of poetry. I have, yes, I've published a few bad poems, but like, this is what I actually want to do. If I'm going to publish, I want to publish like these poets that I was reading. There was a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for

I think in the same year that I published my PhD thesis. So Vysla Waszymborska became a Nobel laureate in 1996 for, quote, poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality. And her volume, View with a Grain of Sand, Selected Poems, is a good place to start if you want to get to know her work. So I just like grabbed that book, right? And I carried that around with me.

And I think I was really lucky that she won the Nobel Prize that year and not some other poet like, I don't know, Bob Dylan or something. Yeah.

So because she's known actually to use some scientific ideas in her poetry. So when I started to read her poems, I was like, oh my God, there's science in here. There are scientific ideas in here. And I could really bring these two things together maybe someday. So anyway, I started to write. I started to sort of apply everything I knew about learning to poetry in the sense of like

going to workshops, finding mentors, reading poetry as research. And then, yeah, and then eventually, eventually, after a long time, and a few poems published here and there in literary journals,

I had a collection that got published in book form. Yeah. Again, this is in her 2015 book, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, which is this 102-page volume of poems whose dedication reads simply, for my parents. Mutter would later publish the following poem in her 2021 collection, Parasitic Oscillations. Mother says I talk like a son.

All her life, my mother shunned pets until now. Maybe because her right foot is less connected to her left brain since the stroke. It leaves her pervious to thunder, lightning, cats. She says move, but nothing moves. It was never one thing then two with my mother. It was a third thing.

igniting like rain on a wedding day, predicting nothing but more rain for all a bride's life. Now, out of the blue Guelph sky, my mother says, if you must have a pet, make it a parrot. They can talk. She tells me her every last dream and each dream's interpretation

both permeable as long-term weather forecasts. For all her life, my mother lived in someone else's dreams. Like pending rain, it's bad. She's at a wedding. She sees the bride's face, who should never be seen like that. Without a veil, the clouds part, and my mother is in post-partition Theradun.

What did your parents think of all of this? Were they like, yeah, well, we knew you'd do both? Or were they surprised by it? We know you'd go into arts and science or...

We knew you were always good at everything. Yeah. When are we coming to the Nobel Prize ceremony?

What did you learn while you were approaching it scientifically of like, I'm going to go to workshops, I'm going to get a mentor, I'm going to write poetry that I feel really proud of? Because I feel like no matter what you write, it's always hard to look back at anything you've done without thinking about everything you've learned or how you do it differently. And I'm sure that we look back on what we make with such a critical eye that other people don't have. But how did you feel like your craft in terms of poetry was changing? Yeah.

And how can people be better poets? Essentially, I'm also like, what did you learn? Tell us. Yeah. I mean, I think the most important thing is really to read. And you don't have to read everything because fact is, you're not going to like all of the poetry out there. There's like so many different types. But, you know, you do have to sort of ask yourself, why?

why are you writing this? And like, I mean, I couldn't help but ask myself that because I am a scientist, right? I was already a fully formed scientist. So I was like, what is this? Why am I doing this? And I was constantly asking myself that question because, you know, you can write poetry and not have the ambition to share it with others. People do it all the time. But I already had that ambition. I was like, how do I do that? How do I make it its own being? And

Tell us a little bit of a key takeaway. What was one big thing you learned while you were writing? Was it to not do a rough draft? Was it to write and come back and look at it later? Was it identifying cliches or anything like that? The difficult thing is when you're writing creatively, generally, and I think it's true with poetry too, you think that what you're writing and what you've written is

at the time is good. Like, I think that is just how it has to be, right? I write some poems, I revise them, I, you know, I do my best, right? But then at some point you think, okay, I'm finished and I think it's good. And you submit it to magazines and they're rejected, but oftentimes it doesn't really have to do with the

the fact of how good it is, right? It's really hard to publish poetry, by the way, if people don't know that. So you're basically up against practically impossible odds, but honestly, that also kind of motivates me. Like I do remember specifically the time that I was walking through the book fair at the Ecological Society America meeting when I was starting to write poetry and...

You know, all the books there are like science books, right? Textbooks, because it's an ecology conference. But I just went up to this university press and I'm like, do you guys ever publish poetry? And the guy goes, yeah, we do, but don't even think about it. Wow. Okay. Like, you'll never publish a book of poetry. It's so hard. Oh my God.

I was like, okay. And then I just like moved on to the next booth. But you know, there was a part of that that was like,

You're wrong. You're wrong. You are wrong. Right? So you kind of just have to have an incredible amount of confidence and faith in yourself. And it's okay to think that what you're doing is good, even if ultimately later you realize it's not, right? But that's all part of the process. So remember. So I guess what I want to say about all of that is that it's important to think that what you're writing is good. Super important. Super, super important. Yeah.

But then you also have to realize that you will ultimately look back on that work and say,

No, it wasn't. So I asked her in her scientific and her artistic opinion, if we tend to have a negative bias toward our own stuff, or is that just a factor of growth? Kind of like vegetation dynamics, but instead of plants, it's just cringe. Maybe, right? But it's a really good question because you've also become a different person. It's an evolutionary process, right? So you can't really get to any point without having those earlier forms. And-

And what about with the content of it? Because there is so much science and there's so much nature. It's just woven through kind of like threads. What is that doing for you creatively and in terms of gratification? Like, how did you feel putting a lens on nature and ecology creatively? I felt like I could be my whole self in science. Yeah.

It felt like I could bring everything that I was thinking and knowing and learning, the language and the culture of science, I felt like I could integrate it with all the other parts of my life. Whereas previously, they felt very separate. Ah.

Ah, yeah. Yeah. It's like stereoscopic. You become stereoscopic. Exactly. Yeah. I was like, oh, now I can see things more clearly in a way. Yeah. It really did feel like that. Yeah. What was the reaction like? Did you think you were going to put out a book of poetry and be like, oh, I did it. Did you realize that you were going to put out another book of poetry and then a memoir that was two memoirs and then write a novel? Because did you expect to find a claim? No.

Like you have? Because you won massive awards. Like you've been lauded so much for your work. Did you expect that? No. Does anybody? I don't know. I'm sure some people. I don't know. I can't imagine even. No. So in her first book, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, she notes in the back of the book that, quote, the majority of the poems in this book are written in 13-syllable lines. Wow.

Of the three naturally occurring forms of carbon, only those with atomic mass 12 and 13 are stable, and they occur in a proportion of 99 to 1 in the natural world. So carbon-13 is a rare and a stable thing to behold. But also in this work is something called found poetry. And you know when you read a sentence and take it out of context, it's just like the most gutting or hilarious thing that you've ever read. So that's kind of like found poetry. They're these

literary quilts crafted of beautiful scraps salvaged from sources like in Mutter's work, Pedialyte Labels, or her own published scientific work, like this poem of hers called Forward Backward Procedure from her book, A New Index. Forward backward procedure. Because we simply do not have enough information a priori. Because no sequence is emitted.

no conservative lower bound. Because the annual cycling might represent a recurring disturbance. Because well-known abilities can be masked. We have no framework for dealing with the shortcomings, the curve as it approaches zero. There are four problems that must be solved. Drought, power,

I was just so thrilled to publish that first book.

And I was really curious. I was curious in terms of what people would think of it because it is really different. You know, it does use science in ways that other people haven't. And I thought, oh, are people just going to be turned off of that? Are real poets going to think, oh, this is not real poetry? I don't know. Oh, yeah. You know, that whole thing. Like, I thought, oh, you know, are people going to accept me really as a poet, which is really interesting.

I really wanted it to be read as poetry and not, for example, science communication. I mean, it's great that it also achieves that other science communication purpose, but it was not like, I've done all this science and now I just want to communicate it to you via this poetry. But no, that was not my intention at all.

And so, yeah, I was just curious how people would read it. Have you gotten any emails or letters of people who've been really moved by it or who have kind of like one foot in science and one foot in the arts as well that are inspired by you or inspired to care more about the theoretical ecology that you do because they found your poetry first?

Yes, yeah. I received a lot of feedback. There were a lot of reviews written about it, and both on the literary side and on the scientific side. People have called her work brilliant, intense, tender, soulful, fascinating, and innovative. And Mutter told me that it's still pretty rare to be a poet while doing scientific research so intensely.

And she gets a lot of letters and notes from other scientists who appreciate her own duality kind of as a proof of concept for theirs. And on the flip side, what I was hearing a lot from the literary community or just like non-scientists, I guess, was,

was that they found that they could enter into scientific ideas and language via the poetry that was felt like refreshing. It was different from how science was being presented to them in other media. Yeah. Can I ask you some listener questions? Oh, sure. Is that okay? Yeah. They know you're coming on specifically. Yeah.

I love that there's listener questions. I know. But before we get to them, let's send some money to a cause of her choosing, which is Rare Charitable Reserve. And this is a community-based urban land trust and environmental institute that protects over 1,200 acres of highly sensitive lands across eight properties in Waterloo region and Wellington County. And the organization also manages over 15 kilometers of trails free and open to the public.

And to learn more about them, you can visit raresites.org, which will be linked in our show notes. And thanks to sponsors of the show for making that possible. When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you,

They mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision making. They're in to help you through all of it.

because together they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal housing lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, US Bank. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring. Snoring.

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Okay, let's answer some questions about artistic sci-com or science-y art. Lisa Nahuyas says, this is the perfect field. How did I not know about this? And Alexandra Alcatul also had this question. Any tips for getting more into the creative side of the science world or how to break the barriers between fields?

Alexandra says, a specialization is the latest tendency in science, but cross-field studies brought us more discoveries. So how did you feel like breaking into that? Was it just essentially feeding a different part of yourself and allowing that part of yourself to sit down with a journal and write or open up a doc and kind of pour out your thoughts? Yeah. And also I would say that it was almost as though all of the rigor and research and discipline that I had been living as a scientist was

I was not afraid to use all of that towards the art. So, you know, use all of your like science superpowers, but you can use them for art, right? So take it seriously, really, is really the most important thing. And then, I mean, the barriers are definitely external, but a lot of the times I feel like the barriers are inside us. Mm-hmm.

So if you feel like you have to choose one or the other and you stop yourself from straying too far from your committed identity,

Rethink it. My advice, her advice, both. And she says, eventually, if enough of y'all are venturing out and trying this, then our greater society may see people less bound to these singular identities. It was very heartening to find out that, in fact, the world isn't quite as divided as it appears to be. And people are not as divided as they appear to be. And so, you know, once you start to do it, you will realize that everybody...

Everybody wants to be a poet or artist. Both of these are very just fundamental aspects of humanity. And I think that we pretend, our society's like pretending that they're separate, but they're actually not. That's such a great point. And just as you began, there's so much love in humanity. How can we use...

theoretical ecology. How can we use that love to our benefit to help turn some things around? So theoretical ecology colliding with creative ecology, like the natural world collides with the digital space. And Mutter wrote about this in Parasitic Oscillations with a poem hilariously dedicated to that square of scrambled pixels that have kind of Tetris their way into our daily life. Ode to a QR code.

in the ornithology wing at the Natural History Museum, which I cannot scan because my position, alignment, and timing are not in sync with the encryptor. All the minor corrections in the world cannot replace broken trust. What was there at the start, a non-human voice,

A silence that lives like a standing wave. When a scanner, and I mean I, cannot recognize a symbol, it will be treated as an erasure. Chances are, colored hands touched those skins first. Colored hands kept those blues and yellows alive.

while tiny black squares in large white squares were enveloped by quiet zones. Are we not so lucky Emily Dickinson's editor found her handwriting akin to fossil bird tracks? Every sign between me, dead bird, you, uniquely mapped to the same polynomial?

All the truth funds in the world cannot replace error. Justice is not the thing that seeks quick response. Pattern print is not the thing that seeks conversion. Tag yourself.

All right, back to your questions. Sienna Sinere wants to know, where do you see SciComm going in the next 10 years? And they say, I'm concerned most of SciComm going to a video format, which is not an area they're skilled at. But what are your thoughts on the value of traditional art and scientific communication, like fine arts, books, and poetry? Are those effective tools for reaching a broad audience? I think they absolutely are. If you think about like the literary arts, right? I mean, humans are...

we communicate largely through language. And I think it's very odd, right, that the language of science is so different from other languages that we speak as humans. Like it is really its own, it's almost become its own language spoken by a certain subset of

So her book, Parasitic Oscillations, focuses heavily on the theme of bird song. And speaking of kind of linguistic elasticity, the word jargon, I looked this up, it comes from the old French for gibberish, from a Latin root for the chattering of birds. Oh.

Bird song. Oh, these little mysteries. But language is also extremely powerful. It's basically all we have to really, really communicate with each other. Ultimately, you know, poetry and fiction and creative writing

storytelling are going to be essential forms for the future of science communication. You know, we really need to see that knowledge is, and access to knowledge is more democratic, it's more evolving. Yeah, and that we can't actually change as humans and make the changes that we need to see in the world without introducing and understanding each other, basically. Yeah.

You approached it with that kind of scientific rigor. You started with a poem back at the lab, and then you went to a book of poetry, and then you wrote a memoir that is the most bogglingly cool concept where it starts off as a memoir of your parents'

You flip it over and it becomes your memoir. So her book, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, is about the August 1947 change in political borders in India and the story of her parents' move to Canada. So that's the book.

But then literally flip the book over. Everything's upside down. You have to flip it again. And it's a new book. It's like you're starting a fresh book, starting from the back. And instead of her parents' perspective, it's her parents' daughter's perspective through this lens of biology and history and physics and poetry. So it's a homeland split into two. It's an experience split by generations. It's two books in one book.

genius. And then you just finished a novel. You just got news about your first novel, right? Yeah. So you're really kind of getting bigger and bigger as you go. Do you find that that trajectory for you of going from poetry to slim volumes, was it harder to write your first poem than it was your first novel?

Yeah, that's really, really a good question. And I think like a lot of writers who write in different genres, like poetry versus prose or poetry versus fiction, like they often get that question alone, right? So yeah, I mean, I think actually it was just that, like a lot of novelists actually start off as poets, marvellously.

Margaret Atwood was a poet before she became a novelist. Oh, right. Yeah. And Michael Ondaatje. I'm giving Canadian examples because I'm Canadian. They all started out as poets. So there is this kind of phenomena of poets turning to prose. And I think, okay, so I think the thing that I find really, really that drives my writing is when I find a structure that fits the story that I want to tell.

And so sometimes the structure is poetry, like small, little, tiny containers for big ideas that's like packed with metaphor. But then in other cases, it was like the memoir, which is this thing that is in halves and it's got these kind of asymmetrical sides to it, but two sides to it. I think I just keep finding like,

stories and structures. And sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big. And thoughts and ideas and creativity itself is that it's not a linear, it's not a progression. I think they're just all part of the same system. What about influences? Nadaria Knight asked if you have thoughts on Jack London. Some other listeners, and I will list them in an aside, mentioned like, I think Marie Oliver. Yeah.

We talked a little bit yesterday at the fire pit about traditions of nature and everything from haiku to, you know, Jack Frost. Do you think that... Do you mean Robert Frost? Robert Frost. Okay.

Thank you so much. Jack Frost was just nipping at my tongue there. But a question on the minds of patrons Anne, Lee T., Emma Ordine-Enos, Valerie Bertha, and Mari. In the tradition of science being in the creative arts, is there anything that's inspired you? Yeah. So it is true that there's a huge, huge history and tradition of nature poetry, including some of the ones that the listeners mentioned earlier.

The thing I find about all of that is that it's really beautiful, but it does kind of maintain that like division between humans and nature. And as we know, like it's not that simple, right? It's not like that we can just sort of say, okay, here's where humans are going to live. And here's where nature is and wilderness and these ideas about preserving something outside of us more and more increasingly in our world, you know,

that kind of division doesn't even exist anymore. Like we hardly have any places that remain wild. So then the question is like, okay, how do we put humans into the equation, into the environment, right? So it almost goes back to some of my research where it's like, they're not separate, they're entwined. And so we have to kind of put everything together into these works. So a lot of contemporary art,

There's like a whole movement of eco-poetry or ecological poetry. Really try not to, you know, aestheticize poetry.

the natural world, but sort of try to bring in more of the technologies or human relationships. Some formative poets for me were the ones I read when I was just starting out. So yes, Vyślava Zimborska's book, View with a Grain of Sand, it's an anthology of her work, but it's contemporary, right? That's contemporary poetry. I also really actually loved the work of John Ashbery, contemporary American poet.

So this is what I love, actually, is that so many poets write, but you wouldn't call them science poets or...

ecological poets but when I see ecology being reflected in their work even though that's not necessarily what they set out to do then I realize that there it is nature is everywhere it's all around us it's in everything we think it's in everything we do and sometimes when you come at it from an unintentional way I think it can be really powerful I think that's beautiful

So ask poetic people sympathetic questions, like about Jack Frost being a poet. Because look, she didn't even laugh at me. She didn't even mind. And I went for it. So we'll link Dr. Inan's work from the research to her poetry in the show notes, along with her charity of choice.

She's just a joy. I'm so proud to know her. I'm so glad that we got to be friends through this. And thank you to USC's Wrigley's Storymakers Program for having me two years in a row for their symposium teaching climate scientists about various forms of SCICOM. It was just such an honor to be there. And also, I got to harvest some interviews as well on Catalina. So we'll link to Woodard's social media and website in the show notes. And there are more links up at alleyword.com slash ologies slash Wrigley.

creative ecology. We also offer kid-friendly edits of our classic episodes. Those are called Smologies. And you can get them for free at alieword.com slash Smologies, which is linked in the show notes, or you can just look up Smologies in your podcast app. And we're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at alieword with one L on both Aaron Talbert, admins for Ologies podcast, Facebook group, Aveline Malik, and The Wordery make our

professional transcripts. Noelle Dilberth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director who does like everything. Kelly R. Dwyer makes our website and can make yours. And our editor of All My Chattering is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media also stepped back in this week to finish the episode while Mercedes is on jury duty. I'm going to

Thank you to the whole team. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week is, it is raining. There's like an atmospheric river in California. In LA, everything floods when it rains. But I have rain boots and I get to wear them maybe two, three times a year. They become, fill me with

dust from being under my bed most of the year, but I get excited to bust them out. I've had these things for probably like 15 years. I bought them for $10 in desperation when it snowed in October in Brooklyn once. And back when I lived in my studio apartment, probably like six or seven years ago, I went to go put them on. I was like, oh, it's raining. I'm excited. And I felt something in one of the toes and I don't wear them often. So I dumped it out and it was a cockroach, very dead.

I had smashed its head off of its brittle body. It was horrifying. And I don't know how that cockroach got in there. I didn't see them in my apartment building, but somehow it made its way into this rubber boot. And I took it out. I flushed it. I think I said goodbye to it.

waved it off to Valhalla or whatever. And then I think I sprayed some disinfectant in there and I still have the boots and I put them on excitedly when it rains. But every single time I think, God, I hope there's not a dead cockroach in this one. Obviously there has not been. Anyway, gross. Stay warm, stay safe, stay dry. Bye-bye. Hackadermatology. Homeology. Cryptozoology. Meteorology. Have a good trip. Thank you so much.

Holy smokes. And look at this. We made the boat. Watch your step. Come on board. Have a good time. Woohoo! Cam found out that group chats between different phones aren't private. Or encrypted. Or encrypted. Thank you. We only text in code. Yes, which I created. I created a code. Yes. Which can be a little annoying. Wait, what's...

Was that your attempt at the code? You already forgot the code, didn't you? I should have written it down. The place to safely send messages between different devices. WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.

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