An ecologist's eye

An ecologist walks through the world carrying a grid, constructed of a wood frame with wire or string for lines. It is much like a window divided into 16 or 25 panes, perhaps more. There is no glass in the squares, nothing to interfere with the scientist's raw and naked perception of things. He goes about the field or woods, laying this portal down on dark mould or dense grasses, trying to name everything he sees, and counting it. Naming and counting.

One August I spent several days like this on an abandoned air strip in Algonquin Park. There were four of us. Besides me there was Sharon with short-cropped blonde hair, a bright smile and a silent demeanour. We had dated briefly, several years before, but it quickly became uncomfortable for me. And there was Colleen. I had once been infatuated by her curly red hair and elfish Mia Farrow face. And Bette Ann, who eventually married someone Dutch Reformed like herself and became a missionary for the Mennonite Central Committee in Bangladesh.

Years afterward I met Bette Ann at Burger King. I had two children and she had four. Later over the phone I told her what had happened to my marriage, about my sexuality, about the decisions I had made or were made for me, and the consequences. She was one of the few conservative Christians I knew who offered acceptance.

"I know," she explained, indignant at my story of shame and ridicule. "I have a couple gay friends, and I know. You can't change it. Trying to change is harmful."

It is the insight of an ecologist that life is not simple (also the compassionate insight of a missionary who has seen the true and unanswerable evil of poverty). There are no easy answers. Even in nature there is rarely a black or a white. Where there is, it is hard to uncover and misconceptions blind the experts. In ecology, we must learn to live with greys and half answers.

A marine biology student once told me ecology is barely a science, it is so indefinite. It's hard to measure the relationship between whales and krill and cod and jellyfish and the concentration of magnesium ions in a litre of sea water.

But the ecologist tries. He floats in a submersible, counting sea nettles, or carries his grid through an apparently empty space in Central Ontario, looking for meaning in a barren landscape.

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