What a damn cliché it is to say "time flies" but doesn't it? It's been twelve months since I arrived at Midway and probably a good time take stock of the situation. And given the fact that my previous post, a sort of mini-travel guide to the atoll which I expected to have broad appeal, seemed to founder a bit on the internet shoals, perhaps it's time to spice up this blog with revealing personal details, juicy gossip and perhaps a couple of scandalous photos thus making it better suited to modern-day social media. Violence? You'll have to wait for that as I plan on devoting an entire future post to it.
I came to Midway with a couple of goals in mind. To take
break from the responsibilities of the job that I'd had for 13 years and to
expand my professional horizons while gaining some new skills. I also realized
that as the years were passing by, the list of places I wanted to see was growing
faster than the list of places I was visiting and thought spending a chunk of
time out here in the far Pacific Ocean might be a good first step towards my
goal of "seeing the world". I also looked at this this assignment as
a personal challenge. How would I fare living in such a small and remote place
so far from family and friends? Would the isolation -- very limited options for
entertainment and internet that brings back memories of the old dial-up days –
drive me nuts? Or would it compel me to do slow down and focus on low-tech activities
that modern-day, hectic life had prevented me from doing?
"So how's that all working out for you?" you might
be wondering. I'll try to answer this question first from a professional
perspective and then from a personal one.
The opportunity to work on island restoration and seabird habitat
issues (as opposed to North American temperate grasslands) has been great. Not
only is Midway Atoll a very different ecosystem from the grassland I had been working
on, but the scale of the work is very different. At Midway we are working to
create habitat basically from scratch (an abandoned golf course, building
demolition sites, etc.) which is in sharp-contrast to the work I was doing on
the Zumwalt Prairie where the focus was on protecting and enhancing habitats
that were mostly intact. The intensive restoration work being done at Midway
combined with the sites extreme isolation requires that plants need to grown right
here in our own native-plant nursery before being planted at restoration areas.
This has exposed me to many new facets of restoration ecology, including seed
collection, plant propagation methods, and detailed restoration site planning.
It's also given me the chance to conduct a variety of experiments, for example,
on best practices for broadcast seeding for different native grass and forb
species.
Restoration at Midway usually requires starting from scratch with plants grown in our own native-plant nursery |
In addition to new skills my experiences here have changed the
way I think about ecology and conservation. Living in close proximity to
millions of albatross with such an intimate window into their lives has given
me insights into nature I could never get from reading books or any other
means. Is nature fragile or is it resilient?
This question is at the heart of many debates regarding the place of
humans in the natural world. If you believe that nature is finely-tuned sensitive
to disruptions, you're probably of the mind that people need to live as lightly
on the planet as possible to avoid doing harm to the plants and animals that we
share it with. The counter-argument, that after billions of years of evolution,
plants and animals have been through it all, leads many to believe that people
are just as much a part of nature as other species and that we shouldn't make
such a fuss. Albatross
are some of the toughest animals out there and have survived for millions
of years in some of the most challenging environmental conditions the planet
can dish out. The annual survival rate of an adult Laysan albatross is over 95%
and birds don't seem to even age in any conventional sense. The oldest known
wild bird ever known is a 67 year old Laysan albatross that was born in the
middle of a Navy base on Midway and continues to return each fall to breed
within a stone's throw of where she was born. Despite the obvious toughness of
these seabirds though they
can be taken down in a matter of days by a single mouse. What this says to me is that nature is be both
tough and vulnerable simultaneously and you need to look at each species and
each situation anew and not put too much faith in your assumptions or past
experiences.
Related to this are my thoughts about what kind of knowledge
is most needed if we – humans – are to figure out how to protect the plants,
animals, and ecosystems that make our world such an amazing and hospitable
place to live at a time when our numbers continue to grow and our technology
gives us virtually super-human powers. Almost 25 year ago I gave up a career as
a computer scientist to study of ecology because I wanted to do something that
might help reverse what I perceived as downward trend in the health of the natural
world. In graduate school I learned how to do research and collaborated on
several research projects during the years I worked as an ecologist for the
Nature Conservancy. Scientific research
-- at least some research – is important but the typical study looks only at
how a one or two factors (fire, grazing, etc.) affect one or two other things (the
population size of some species, the amount of some nutrient in the soil, etc.)
over the course of a few years in some particular place. Results of such
studies tend to be very limited and are time and place specific. Research is
also typically designed and conducted by "experts" without a lot of
direct involvement from the people who are supposed to benefit from the
knowledge gained making the results difficult to understand and apply in the
real world. I worked on a really cool project with folks from Oregon State
University on the effects of cattle grazing on grasslands and unlike many studies
we deliberately measured the effects of different levels of grazing across a
wide range of species. But the study only looked at grazing in June and only for
two years. Despite the huge amount of effort put into that research, the
results were complicated and have proven difficult to translate into specific
recommendations for land managers.
Another way of acquiring conservation-relevant knowledge is
something called adaptive management which might be best described as a cross between formal research and old
school trial and error. Adaptive management was developed nearly half a century
ago but started to attract a lot of attention in the 1990s as a way to address the
uncertainties in managing complex systems and provided a means improve what
seemed like a pretty spotty track record of decision making in land and water
management, especially by government agencies. If research provides you with
facts about how nature works, adaptive management gives you a way of figuring
out how to apply that knowledge to real world situations. I feel that what
prevents us from being better stewards of the planet these days is not a paucity
of facts but our inability to apply that knowledge effectively.
Several things are required to actually do adaptive
management: setting objectives, monitoring indicators of the species or
ecosystem and then using the data to evaluate how well management is working
and then deciding whether to continue with the status quo or trying something
different. Today, the US Forest Service,
Bureau of Land Management, and US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as
many non-governmental organizations and private land managers have adopted adaptive
management as their foundation for decision-making. Well, at least in theory,
that is. It turns out that actually doing
adaptive management is pretty challenging. Crafting thoughtful objectives for a
wildlife refuge, national park, or ranch requires discipline and often falls
pretty far down on the list of priorities for a land manager or biologist. Because
the effects of management can take a long time to manifest, monitoring needs to
be done consistently over the long-term, spanning the tenure of personnel whose
responsibility it is to conduct it. Long-term monitoring is much more difficult
to fund than research and often must come out of the core operating budgets
making them very susceptible in times of budget shortfalls. Finally, adaptive
management is not something that a group of ecologists and biologists can do on
their own as it takes coordinated effort across all parts of an organization,
from top-level managers to the folks with their "boots on the ground".
Successful implementation of adaptive management requires that an organization be
capable of executing a well-choreographed "dance" for years if not
decades.
At a meeting of the Society of Ecological Restoration some years back Debbie
Pickering and colleagues at the Nature Conservancy presented a paper on how
adaptive management was being used to manage habitat for the rare Oregon
silverspot butterfly at the Cascade
Head Preserve on the Oregon coast. In that paper I recall her remarking on how
difficult it was to find other examples of anyone actually doing adaptive
management, despite its apparent standing as a best management practice. I took
that as a challenge and spent the next few years working with my colleagues at
the Zumwalt Prairie to reshape and integrate the planning and monitoring we
were doing into an information-driven management program. When I left, things
certainly weren't perfect but I think I can honestly say that we were doing adaptive
management.
One of the attractions of this job here at Midway was the chance
to take what I'd learned about adaptive management on the Zumwalt Prairie and
apply it to a new system (ecosystem + human organization). According to my job description, my primary
role here is to "set up a robust habitat restoration monitoring system
that can be utilized and maintained by USFWS staff to holistically evaluate the
success of restoration efforts, encompassing and integrating complex and
large-scale weed control and native plant propagation programs" and I have
been working for the past twelve months to do that. While translating my
ecological skills and knowledge from grasslands to islands has been, on the
whole, fairly successful, getting things done within the US Fish and Wildlife
Service has been more of a challenge that I had anticipated.
Prior to this job, I didn't know much about the inner
workings of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and my work experience with the
federal government was limited to a three month stint I did as a biology
technician at Carlsbad Caverns National Park one summer while I was still in
graduate school. Although I am not actually employed by the government
(my paycheck comes from a non-profit partner organization called the National Wildlife Refuge
Association) my position here at Midway gives me with a quasi-insider's
view of the workings of the agency. I
have met some extraordinary and dedicated staff; true professionals that give
me confidence that our land and its wildlife are in good hands. The volunteer
program here at Midway brings in people of a variety of backgrounds though all
sharing a deep love of wildlife and natural places and a willingness to work
their asses off in exchange only for food and a place to rest at the end of an
exhausting day. It's also been informative to see how the agency approaches
science-based land management and conservation, as opposed to how it was done
by my former employer, The Nature Conservancy. But it's also revealed some real
limitations in the ability the organization's ability to implement adaptive
management effectively at a remote location such as Midway. Two significant obstacles
are staff turnover and communication challenges. Because of its remote location
and the personal sacrifices that are requires, the typical tenure of a Fish and
Wildlife employee at Midway is just a couple of years and volunteers and
interns rotate through every six months. The communication style here is very different
from what I've experienced working for other organizations and tends to be more
towards the "need to know" end of the spectrum and often I feel like
I am out of the loop on things that I should know. Because adaptive management
requires people in all facets of an organization to work closely together good
communication is critical and I have tried to help with that by developing a
set of shared calendars. Midway is also more "complicated" than the
average refuge and staff may be asked to set aside their normal duties for a
day or a week to respond to an emergency or assist with a special event.
Midway has also given me a chance to reflect on the years I
spent working with Nature Conservancy, both in terms of the organization but,
more importantly, the work I was doing on the Zumwalt Prairie. Beyond a couple
of my former co-workers back in Enterprise, I've had surprisingly little contact
with my former TNC colleagues. On the academic side of things are pretty quiet
too. I still enjoy conversations with a
graduate student from the University of Idaho and exchange occasional email
with one or two colleagues from Oregon State. When I left my job with TNC last
year it was with the intention to resume my work on the Zumwalt Prairie in some
capacity when my assignment on Midway concluded and thought I had made that
clear to my colleagues, but I'm not sure that the message got through and I now
wonder how easy it will be to re-connect in the future. And though I felt like
I had developed a good reputation and was kind of a "go to" guy, now
I wonder whether this I was simply the benefactor of the reputation of my
employer. These are the kinds of things you think about on an island.
From a personal perspective, my time here on Midway, despite
some hardships, has been a positive experience, though not in the way I had expected.
Living on an island in the middle of the blue Pacific might sound dreamy to
some people and I guess it did for me, but it's important to keep in mind that,
despite the white sand the blue lagoon, this is not a pristine paradise but an abandoned
military facility still in the early years of recovery that also happens to
be located such that garbage is constantly washing up on its shores (look
closely at the white sand and you'll see fragments of multi-colored plastic). The
atoll is small – less than 3 square miles in total – and though a bi-weekly
plane connects us with Honolulu, you can't leave without permission (I've been
"off-island" twice). For anyone who's become accustomed to the
connectivity that characterizes our modern lives, life at Midway can feel
pretty isolated. I've half-jokingly
suggested getting t-shirts made that say "Midway Atoll" on the front
and "We Can't Google Shit!" on the back.
The limited options available here on Midway make life more
simple for sure and I find myself having much more of a "daily
routine" than I ever had previously. I wake up and go to bed at pretty
much the same time every day – even weekends. I swim every afternoon after work
as long as the ocean conditions abide.
Every day, I go to lunch at
the Clipper House at 11:35 am. On Sundays I have made it part of my routine
to break with my daily routine and just try to do things different. I could go
on more but it would be very boring and I think you get the point. What I will
say though is that I find this kind of habitual lifestyle to be pretty
satisfying overall. It's always seemed to me that as people get older they tend
to be more set in their ways and I wonder if life on Midway is easier to adapt
to now that I'm past the half-century mark.
Living so far from family and my close friends has certainly
been one of the biggest challenges of this assignment and I am grateful that my
wife, Andie Lueders, has been so supportive of the whole thing. Midway,
however, is a much more social place than most people would imagine. The number
of people living here (there are about 45 as I write this) is just big enough
to make it work and the fact that nearly everyone here is far from home and
family and living in what is basically a small, self-contained village makes it
feel like a real community. The highly skewed sex ratio (of the 45 about 6 are
female and most of those are under the age of 30) and the fact that over half
of the residents are from Thailand creates some interesting and odd dynamics; as
a guy I've often felt utterly ignored by most of the long-term male residents
though I am not sure all of the attention given to those of the opposite sex
would be preferable. Already having a good friend working here on Midway before
I arrived also has made things much easier for me and thank god I haven't
pissed her off too badly yet. Not only has Ann Humphrey been a solid friend but
she has also served as my ambassador to the greater Midway community and makes
sure I know about all of the social events and other activities. The Thai men have also been very kind and
welcoming and despite some language difficulties I have made some good friends.
The Aree house – a residence that is home to several Thai men but also serves, informally,
as a "hang out/party/karaoke spot" -- plays a tremendous role in
maintaining a fun and social atmosphere here. To its residents, who put up with
the parties even when sometimes they'd probably rather be sleeping, I extend a most
sincere ขอขอบคุณ ! Sports
– especially ping pong and pickleball – have also helped me stay busy and make
friends.
Friends old and new (Apiwat Juethong and Ann Humphrey) |
Adding significant spice to Midway's social scene are also the
cohorts of Fish and Wildlife volunteers that arrive every six months as well as
the visiting workers (which include everything from marine biologists and archeologists
to engineers to filmmakers). Although I think the majority of people I have met
during my life are interesting to some degree, the typical Midway visitor is of
a special breed and I've enjoyed many fascinating and informative
conversations, some revealing extraordinary personal connections. I may have
even made one or two new lifelong friends. This is not to say I don't miss my
good friends from home and even find myself sometimes feeling nostalgic for
acquaintances I only ran into occasionally. You might think that in an age
where we can communicate so easily by phone or email that I'd keep in better
touch with friends, but I get surprisingly few emails and even fewer phone
calls. I'm not sure if this is a reflection of the sorry state of my social life
or just that most folks today have replaced direct, personal, communication with
Facebook and other forms of social media. On the rare occasion when I receive a
letter or package in the mail it is a genuine treat – many thanks to those of you
who have been so thoughtful!
Every "care package" is photographically documented before being consumed! |
I wasn't sure how I would deal with the isolation of being
here and the hundreds of "extra hours" of time that I'd have to
myself. I have not filled my idle hours
reading the classics or becoming an accomplished painter though I have read a
few books and created a few childish-looking drawings. I've heard that one of
the things missing people's lives today, when a smartphone can be turned to
during moments of boredom, is time to reflect. Here at Midway we certainly
don't have that option and I think I've benefited from having more time to think
about the things that make me happy and how I want to spend the rest of my
professional and personal life. Writing this blog has been an important part of
that. I had not actually planned to write a blog prior to coming here but quickly
realized how exceptional and strange a place Midway is and felt compelled to
share my thoughts and experiences. Like a lot of people, I find writing,
especially when I know I'm going to put it out there in public, difficult and
the final edits always makes me a little queasy. Although I wish I was mature
enough to not care what other people think, I guess I still do. Thank you to those
who have taken an interest and shared your reactions, positive or otherwise (my
Fish and Wildlife Service colleague Lonnie recently informed me that I'd
mistakenly referred to a "short-footed albatross' in my last post!). I have just six months still to go on this
assignment but dozens of things that I'm interested in writing about. I hope you keep on reading!