The Death of Natural History

I read with interest the post Natural History is Dying, and We Are All the Losers by Jennifer Frazer. This is a topic I've written about several times as well and the general thrust of the article mirrors the experience of my life almost perfectly. I originally went into science wanting to study natural history: I liked catching snakes when I was a kid. When I got to be about a junior in college, I discovered that pursuing a career in the life sciences had basically come to mean studying some molecule in some membrane somewhere and spending your whole life chasing funding to keep your lab afloat. And I said "no thanks" and turned aside.

I still get to do some natural history. I have my students do natural history projects for my writing class. We've mapped the locations of patches of garlic mustard and checked "potential vernal pools" identified by the state GIS system and, last fall, performed a survey of local terrestrial gastropods. Currently, I'm planning to have my students study balanced aquaria this coming fall.

I'm not even the only one in my department. There are a handful of faculty, mostly non-tenure-system faculty, who still engage in some natural history work. But mostly not.

Where I believe the article misses the mark is somehow attributing the decline in natural history to a lack of respect or appreciation of natural history as a topic of study. That's not really what's happened. What really happened was a strangling of the funding for basic science and the conversion of faculty effort and evaluation from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of funding.

This is simply another aspect of the neoliberal framing and capture of our society. Knowledge is no longer valued as an end in itself, but only in terms of its return in dollars. Natural history isn't worth anything unless people are willing to pay for it.

It's the same framing that makes global climate change not worth understanding: as long as the profits (from oil sales, etc) can be privatized and the costs (drowned cities and devastated coastlines) can be commonized, the neoliberal overlords who dole out the dollars have no use for natural history. Indeed, when people care about natural history, they want to conserve nature and stop habitat destruction. How inconvenient!

So painting the issue as merely a sad happenstance completely misses what we need to fix about our society if we hope to fight back against these trends.