And in the beginning God created… and it was good

I was raised in a Jewish home and I have always followed Jewish law, but until one particular lesson my observance had been by rote.  It was the 11^th grade and I was sitting in Bible class, when I decided I truly wanted to live my life according to the precepts of Judaism.  I had not been on a quest for answers or meaning; they simply found me.  My epiphany was not profound; if anything it was quite mundane and always seems quite lame when I spell it out for others.  The teacher was lecturing about some minute, hidden meaning of the Bible in a mixture of Hebrew and English that I simply could not keep straight.  Around me my friends were studiously taking notes, unaware of the orange and black butterfly fluttering just outside the window.  As I attempted to recreate the path the butterfly was flying upon the blank page of my notebook, I heard the teacher mention the biblical source for the law forbidding meat and milk to be eaten within the same meal.  My attention was redirected to class (where it should have been the entire time), even if only for a little while. 

“You shall not cook a tender young animal in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19). Once again unaware of my teacher’s lesson, I wondered about the nuances in the wording of the commandment, its specific decree and the broad, overarching law (not to eat milk and meat together at all) the Rabbis learned from it.  Why would it matter whose milk a baby animal was cooked in?  So what?  Well, I thought to myself, if a mother and her child are killed on the same day then two generations are decimated at once.  In today’s society the notion that people must be careful to ensure the propagation of species is quite obvious (even if it is ignored).  More and more wildlife is becoming endangered and then extinct as people carelessly use nature to satiate their hunger for more.  Yet thousands of years ago when the bible was given to mankind (regardless of its source), our population was too small and our technological innovations too minor to cause any great impact on nature.  Only a divine, all-knowing source could know that humankind would one day be able to so easily impact nature.  So, there was a commandment warning us to carefully use the bounty around us.  If we take and take without giving nature enough time to replenish, than our lives will become unsustainable and destructive. 

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Religion has always played a huge part in my life; actually, religion affects every aspect of my life.  Science is a means of understanding God for me.  As a student of ecology, I want to learn about the intricate connections between “everything”.  I then want to use the knowledge gained to help steady the disrupted state nature is currently in.  It is not only my desire, but, I believe, also my duty to rectify the wrongs done to God’s beautiful creations.  I pray that in the near future we will properly care for our environment and in return nature will benefit us as God intended it to. 

The Study of Everything

When asked what ecology is (which happens pretty often since it is my major), I find it hard to define in a concise sentence.  Ecology is the study of “living relations”.  It is the study of animals, plants, and the entire environment.  Ecology can be extremely specific or all-encompassing.  Often I find myself defining ecology as the study of everything (the world), how we influence and are influenced by our surroundings and our actions.  That is not the most precise answer but I believe it is correct all the same. 

Science is thought of as a very precise study of an aspect of the universe.  Physics is a study of the laws of nature; defining movement, time, matter, and space.  Yet physics was not always such a clear science.  Physics was once a very philosophical field and it evolved into the precise science it is today.   I believe ecology is too young a science to have definitive borders.  Many aspects of ecology fit within the margins of countless other sciences.  As long as a scientist (no matter his/her field) is studying an aspect of life within the context of its surroundings, he/she may very well be studying ecology. 

The reality that ecology may be studied within many disciplines is very positive.  It is well known that the many systems (climate, topography, ecosystems…) of the world are all interconnected.  So, it is a wonderful perk to be able to use the expertise of a geologist and biologist as one tries to understand the migration patterns of a species.  Ecology as a field of study is able to grow immensely in a short amount of time due to the data pouring in from so many sources.  As the science of ecology continues to grow and the interactions between the systems of our world are better understood, ecology will become a more precise science.  Every ecologist’s discovery will help identify the scope of this field. 

I hope that I will be a part of the process of defining ecology.  The fact that ecology fits within the scope of nearly every science is one of the main reasons it is my favorite science.  I want to understand the workings of the world and the only way to come close to accomplishing that is to combine all the disciplines of science in an attempt to understand how they relate to each other.  In the end, that is how I define ecology, the study of everything.