Hello, Internet.
Much like our friend the olm, Consider Nature has been pretty inactive lately and (I hope) some of you are wondering why. This hiatus is because I have started the first year of my PhD at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. Over the summer, I moved from Baltimore to Buffalo and began the new program at the end of August. The experience has been like sticking my brain directly in the path of a fire hose. You never know how much you don’t know until you start learning, and I have a lot to learn. Those of you who have undergone graduate education in the past know it’s a bit of a slow motion car crash. It’s extremely time consuming, labor-intensive, and mentally-exhausting. This has made it much more difficult for me to write articles that live up to my standards for research and writing quality. Thus, the lack of new work.
All that being said, I have always taken a great deal of pride in my work with Consider Nature and I miss doing it. Writing here is one of the few things I’ve had the privilege to do on a daily basis that really feels like it makes a difference in the world. By advocating for these bizarre and beautiful little freaks, I think I’ve succeeded in raising awareness of their plights and directing people towards ways they can change their behaviors to make this world a better, more ecologically-diverse place. I hope that there are more of these species in the world because of the work I’ve done here, and I hope that I have helped my readers to recognize that they share this planet with amazing species that deserve to continue existing.
There’s also the matter of politics. Conservation biology is political by its very nature; governments create and enforce policies that either support or destroy the natural ecosystems in their borders, and the lives of the species who live there hang in the balance. In that light, it should surprise absolutely none of you that I think Donald J Trump is a vile, worthless, inhuman, feebleminded, predatory, psychotic, low-life, dirt-eating, cock-sucking, dickless, brainless, heartless nepo baby sack of regurgitated elephant shit unfit for the gullets of even the most unscrupulous of dung beetle. Already he has pulled the U.S.A. out of the Paris Climate Agreement and has begun to scrub mentions of the climate crisis from government websites so that he can continue to sensually deepthroat the pipeline of the fossil fuel industry.
In the context of a hyper-conservative evil government coming to power in the country where I live, it feels more important than ever to advocate for species conservation. I can’t just sit here and watch this slow-motion car crash unfold. I probably can’t change the minds of Republican lawmakers, but doing something feels better than doing nothing. In the next few days, I’ll be posting a more formal open letter regarding the ways in which the Administration has censored scientific work (i.e. I won’t call anyone a sack of regurgitated elephant shit).
So, what is the future of Consider Nature? For now, I will continue writing here for as long as I can, albeit with a much slower upload schedule. As silly as this blog seems at times, I take the work I do here seriously, and I love sharing what I’ve learned with my readers. In the meanwhile, hang in there, keep advocating for the environment, and hopefully you’ll hear from me again soon.
Best Wishes,
Stephen
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