what’s your life’s large picture?
If
you want to be a manager, there is a management school, if you want to
be a doctor, go to med school. But the thing with being interested in
environment is that there is actually no school for it. How to clean
the air? How to keep the ecology? How to reduce global warming? There
is no clear department for those. Most probably because nobody really
knows how.
We
can only study a tiny small part of environment at once. Take my major
for instance; Forestry division is a small part of the great school of Agriculture.
Inside Forestry, there are soil scientists who deal with soil
nutrition; alchemists who deal with pesticides implications;
hydrologists who deal with irrigations and river conservations; etc.
Look
at it this way, in the beginning of your ‘environmental’ study; you are
given a large painting. I’d like to imagine that painting as scenery of
green mountains, blue skies, animals, plants, people and their money,
politics, and technology ‘living’ together in a harmony.
Yet, every
single day you are forced to rip that painting into half, simply
because now your painting is ‘too’ big.
So, one piece becomes two and
then four and then sixteen, and so on,
to the smallest piece possible.
At one point, you are forced to choose one small piece and concentrate
on that one small piece only. Get to know that piece, the shape, the
color, the weight, the ridges, the smell, everything.
Of
course this can make you forget the original large painting. Even
worse, you could end up having a tunnel vision; a depth of knowledge
instead of the width. Unfortunately, this is often inevitable in the
world of natural science, you are expected to know exactly what is
going on with your ‘small piece’, and this is why it is called an exact
science.
Some
of us study it for the love of the science, some for the love of the
environment. Although that might seem vague, scientists and
environmentalists have clear difference in terms of their roles in this
world. Natural scientists are not environmentalists, and vice versa. A
scientist is there to provide the base of the words that comes out from
the mouth of an environmentalist.
I do not
want to forget the large painting I was given before. I will share bits
of my pieces in any way I can, because ‘teaching’ is the best way to learn.
I am
holding a very important small piece in my hands and so is the person
who sits next to me in the classroom, or the person who writes my
school books or my teachers or my seniors, or you. I am taking care of
my piece and dedicating myself to it, and I know that you are too.
And
I hope you and everyone else will be there when it is time to put our
pieces together.
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