Jason Hamilton

On teaching ecology

“I think that my passion, really, is that I want to work to make the world a better place. . . . I felt that I was a good communicator and that I had the potential to be a good teacher, and that I also had the potential as a good primary data collector, as a natural scientist. I just felt then that those things went together to, kind of, point me where I should put my efforts. And my favorite part about teaching is everything, in some sense. . . . But if you’re really going to ask me about what my favorite part about teaching, I would say my favorite part about teaching is building relationships with my students. Exploring how their journey in this area is changing their relationship with themselves and with other people and with the natural world.”

“I was a global change biologist, and I studied the effects of elevated CO2 in the atmosphere on forest function and on agricultural production. So a very technical area. And I was an ecologist so I was teaching ecology in the biology department, and at that time I was really struggling because I thought ecology was just the coolest subject in the world, and a lot of the students I was teaching started off the class – before I even spoke – thinking that it was going to be a terrible experience. They were already predisposed not to like it. So I was really trying to figure out how you take people who were expecting not to like it or who are having to take it as a required class so they are already somewhat irritated and who don’t see this as important for their own personal goals -- and see how to take that group of people, make them think this is the coolest subject in the world also. One day I was taking a group of students up to a lab we were going to do in the woods. I don’t even remember what the lab was anymore, and I walked by a shrub that had some berries on it, and I had just recently learned that shrub had edible berries. Again, at this point, this was like 15 years ago. But I just kind of absentmindedly reached out, took a berry and just, kind of, said to the world, “Oh, you know, you can eat these,” and just ate it. I didn’t mean anything. It was just this absentminded, kind of, action as we were going off to go do some real science. And at the end of the semester, in the course evaluations, it turns out that turned out to be one of the most powerful moments of the entire class for a significant number of the students. They thought that this was just the most amazing thing that they had seen -- That you could just reach out and grab a berry off a bush and eat it. And it was amazing enough to them that in questions like, “What is your favorite thing about this class?” just seeing me eat a berry was coming up.”

“And I thought that must be the key to teaching ecology to people -- figuring out ways to make immediate, intimate relationships --  and eating is an immediate and intimate relationship because you are taking something from the natural world and incorporating it right into your own body tissues. So that got me, kind of, on this path that I am now where, eventually, through lots of twists and turns, I went to herbalism school and now I teach herbalism. I ended up going to tracking school to learn animal tracking because that was, kind of, the mammal equivalent in some sense of eating a berry. Being able to look at a track and knowing who was here. And so that re-launched a whole new direction of teaching. Now, I am not a global change biologist anymore. I’m not in biology anymore. I’m now in environmental studies and sciences. That was really a pivotal point, and the pivotal point of it came about because of this strong impact on people’s feelings about the natural world.”

On sustainability

“So this goes back again to these concepts like climate change or interdisciplinary thinking, which is that maybe the problem is in the ways we have our education and our thinking, and our government set up -- we are dividing things up into categories that can’t be divided into categories. Now you can’t just study everything all at once because our brains just don’t work like that. So we need some sort of organizing principle that is going to allow us to combine knowledge, approaches, how to focus limited resources like time and money --  and sustainability turns out to be a really handy way to do that. At some point you have to decide what that means. What is a better place? So there has to be some sort of analysis of what does a better place even look like. And that’s really what sustainability is all about. Thinking from a systems point of view. What really is a better kind of place? And I think that is what gives the organizing principle to things like environmental studies, physics, or whatever or being a plumber, or a garbage man, or a farmer, or raising children -- how are we going to, as a group, get together, work out what a better place does look like. To me, that’s really what sustainability is. It’s that conversation. What does a better place look like?”

On taking chances

“I think my career is a good example that every step of the way, I did things that I didn’t even knew existed until shortly before. When I became a chemistry major, for example, I thought I was going to become an industrial chemist. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as computational quantum mechanics. So I could have never planned to be one because I had never heard of it. When I made the switch from quantum mechanics to eco-physiology – again I had never heard of eco-physiology – so I couldn’t have planned to be that. I discovered it later. And every step along the way, when I became a sustainability scientist or I went into Non-Timber Forest Products, I’d never heard of any of these things before. So I think that, if at least if my path is any sort of model, I guess one lesson would be to try to train yourself for something that you have never even heard of before. How do you do such a thing? Well I think one way is by not specializing too soon. Another thing is that you allow yourself the intellectual freedom to say, “Even though I don’t know how to do that, I’m going to do it anyway,” rather than saying, “Since I don’t know how to do that, I better not try.” If you just declare that you are going to do it, then you probably will. And if you aren’t successful, you’ll discover something else new along the way that you never heard of before and it’s probably going to be just as cool or even better than the thing that you were trying in the first place.”