Beginning of journaling path
Always when people ask me what is my career about, I have to take a deep breath and rethink what I'm gonna say, its true my career is titled Forest Engineering, but people don't quite associate trees and math, also is more than trees, its an ecosystem, is the system that holds us, is all the dynamic and communication within the living beings on earth at least discover so far until now.
that happened just recently in the last training which happened in Madison - WI, the attendants were mostly educators at different levels from primary school teachers, to informal educators (artists, community leaders, advocates), so for them is easy to respond to who they teach, is either kids between 0 -3 years old or kids from the city of some country living in this determined territory.
For us, the forest scholars are a pretty wide population you can influence and that's why I consider our profession so inspiring. Just as an example, we go do some research fieldwork, and some of the direct contact people you need to go safely into the forest, are the local transportation, food source and the field guide person, all of them probably are gonna be from the same town, they will know each other and probably all the community in around 20 hectares would know you are coming to stay some time with them.
In the Colombian context, people in the rural areas tent to be kind, welcoming and curious/shy, so they would wanna share more than the strict, work related time and knowledge, some of them will invite you to take a firewood fresh-made coffee, or invite you to get some lunch with the resources they have available, so you end up meeting half or the whole town and all the human context around them, sometimes they don't know what a plotting sample area is or the scientific therms and names we have given to all, but something I can assure you is , if you can translate you petty and discriminatory scientific language into their language they will teach you more than you went to look for in the first place and your research will have an added value, its a very anthropological exercise to do science in the forests, its fulfilling and for that reason, I consider essential, to give back some learning and results to this communities in order to appreciate what our rural people does for us, is more than food, oxygen, clean water, and all the resources we are familiar with directly because we used them every day, they have though me about the most complex concepts in ecology, genetics, functionality and facilitation that our nature envinroment need in order to remain and evolve, so we still exist for some other time in healthy conditions on earth.
I expect this journal to be a little piece of the cake I want to take back to every single one of the communities and forests I have been to (some of which I am still in touch with from at least 9 years ago, and surprisingly they still remember most of what we did and talked about), all as a gratitude of all the learning, love and experiences that made me who I am, like a neuron with a lot of information that still connected to the source.
Comments
Add a Comment