Behind (for) a good cause

This year has been the most spectacular sequence of missed deadlines and unanswered emails. Life turned what I intended to be a deliberate deceleration into a focused flurry of new projects and ventures. The current state of my life (and my inbox) brings me consternation, and I do hope to soon pare down my commitments. However, I take great consolation that my behindness is because of what I believe to be needed and meaningful projects.

January 2021 

After a year of COVID-19, I was pretty caught up. I’d finished a couple of long-simmering research projects and was starting to feel on top of this whole professor thing. Then the environmental science capstone class that I was teaching decided to do their group project on rapid decarbonization pathways. Because fossil fuel combustion is fueling both air pollution and climate change, this is a really important topic. It’s also totally different than my typical ecological research. The students really dug in, and it grew into a major project with collaborators in Germany, Finland, and across the U.S. It also took much longer than a semester, and we are just now getting ready to submit the findings for peer review. One of the students even made this awesome poster with our slogan.

July 2021 

During a meeting of our Utah Lake monitoring project, one of our collaborators mentioned that the proposal to build artificial islands on Utah Lake had reared its head again. We learned that the island developers had taken the legislature out to lunch in April and presented their two-hour dog and pony show about how the real way to restore Utah Lake was to destroy it. I was still working on the renewable energy project and supervising a team in Alaska, but this islands proposal is level-11 crazy. In 2018, they convinced the legislature to pass a law that would allow the state to give the lakebed of Utah Lake to a private corporation. In 2020, they weaseled a $10 million loan guarantee slipped into the state budget. We went into full emergency mode and organized a symposium to bring researchers, managers, lawmakers, and concerned citizens together to discuss the lake. In just a few weeks the plans and funding came together, and 500 people gathered at UVU and virtually to participate in the Utah Lake Symposium. It led to ongoing talks with the legislature and will hopefully conclude with the permanent protection of this unique and important water body.

Since then, a half-dozen other “side projects” and opportunities have kept me from feeling on top of things. However, I am honestly deeply grateful for the chance to contribute, even in a small way, to issues that go beyond my personal professional development. We are living in a period of extreme change, and there isn’t time for career building and navel gazing. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling really ragged and resentful about not having the time to watch the newest True Facts video.