Leaving, on a Jet Plane
06/04/08 19:57
I leave for the UK
and India a week from today, flying about
two-thirds of the distance around the planet to
work on two rivers: the Thames in Britain and Ganga
(the Ganges in most of the rest of the world) on
the Indian subcontinent. Much of what I’ll be doing
in both places is just listening – hearing what
experts in each of these basins are afraid of, what
they hope for, what seems likely to happen, what is
happening. Listening is good work, and comforting
too. And it is very good to know and see people who
really “know” things.
My own body of knowledge is a bit more vague and amorphous. To use a term a friend made up as a joke, I have become a sort of meta-ecologist, talking about how ecology and conservation are changing at this point in their history. And in the brief periods in Surrey and Delhi when I will be talking, I will be in this meta-ecology mode of trying to describe my sense of how we must shift in our work in order to be successful. This is my “conservation philosophy” talk. Even these thoughts, though, are mostly intended to stir thinking in other people and to evoke their responses. So I can go back to listening again.
