Island Press Field Notes

Copenhagen, a city of networks.

Originally posted at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law's Environmental Dispute Resolution blog.

When I was in grade school, my mother was a graduate student in philosophy, and I learned from her about the categorical imperative. What I grasped at that impressionable age was that if you are thinking about doing something, you should imagine that everyone around you, even everyone on earth, will do the same thing. Because if you have the right to do it, then, of course, so does everyone else. I immediately saw that I should not throw my gum wrapper out the car window. If everyone did that the air would be thick, the ground covered, with foil and paper.

Aníbal Pauchard and I argued in Observation and Ecology that despite the great advances information technology has helped us make in complex fields like ecology, the increasing time both children and adults spend in front of screens instead of out in nature will erode our abilities to deal with complexity. Our argument was experiential—our years of working in the field with many students showed us that those with the best abilities to discern patterns were those who spent abundant time as children just wandering around observing natu