The Four Seasons

I always loved animals and the natural world. So it's a life journey, not just a career journey. I always had pets, went birding, camping, fishing, and learned bird-banding, and so on. In college, I majored in environmental science. There I met professors involved in bird work, and I got temporary jobs re-introducing peregrine falcons and studying seabirds called terns. After that, I got a job with the New Jersey Dept of Environmental Protection finding illegal toxic chemical dumps, and a year later—through connections I made volunteering—got a job with the National Audubon Society. I studied terns for the next ten years and got a master's and PhD doing that. Because I was on the water a lot with the terns, and fishing a lot, I could see that fish were being depleted by overfishing. So I switched my work and focused on changing federal fisheries law and also working internationally to protect bluefin tuna and sharks. We succeeded in getting fishing quotas reduced and in writing and getting through Congress the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996. The follow-through with that was writing my first book, Song for the Blue Ocean, and I've been writing books and articles and speaking ever since. Now I also teach.

I was very far from confident. But the goals were very precisely articulated and the campaigns very targeted. When I was motivated to involve myself I had no idea what to do. How does one end overfishing? But I was very proactive and realized that I had a surprising hidden talent for networking and organizing. I also realized that policy is not mainly science; it's people, it's law, it's very much politics. My main ability turned out to be writing, and I wrote articles about how fisheries policies were failing and how to fix the laws. I linked up with environmental lawyers who knew how to get things into Congress.

Practice. Learning by doing. Doing a lot of it. Networking with people who knew things I did not know about how to get things done. Working with them. Learning how to get grants from foundations for conservation policy work.

My love and concern for the natural world and other species, for wild things and wild places, is the central driver of my life. I am good about balancing work and enjoyment of wild things. The writer E. B. White said, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." That pretty much sums it up for me.

Well, there is an overwhelming need. Silence is the same as complicity. The biggest threat to anything is the people who say nothing. That's how bad people win. With science and reason and democracy under assault from within, this is not a time to be silent. Your own work won't be anything when all the science funding is cut.

No one can do everything. Everyone can do something. Do something.

Keep working. But don't ignore what's happening. Use your voice. And be patient, because the worst people always topple.

Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez.

What comes to mind right away are Laysan Island and Palau. But I have been so fortunate to have visited every continent from the Arctic to Antarctic and across the tropics. My life has turned out much better and more interesting than I ever thought possible. When I was in college, I wasn't sure I'd ever get to go anywhere or do anything that mattered. I am glad I was wrong about myself.

I have this very long standing research project involving sign language that I've been working on for about 25 years. About 30 years ago, a visitor from Israel convinced me that sign language had properties that would interest me. We came across a sign language that had emerged in a Bedouin village in the desert in Israel, and we spent about a dozen years studying what it meant to create a new language.

I'm also looking at new ways of forming words in English—words like 'combo' for 'combination.' And I've been working on an online asynchronous version of the introductory linguistics course. I think that really is one aspect of the future of education.

I have this interest in written language versus spoken language. Linguists learn that language is basically spoken and that written language is secondary. But that's not what you learn at school—the first thing you learn is reading and writing. I've worked with psychologists and computer scientists. Their interests are different, but by working together, we can figure out things that we're both interested in.

The more you know, the less you know. People see that language is much more complex than they ever thought. A great advance in the last 50 years is the acceptance of sign language. When I was growing up, people thought sign language wasn't really language. That's changed a lot. People have also become much more accepting of different varieties of English—you can hear people talking all different kinds of ways on TV ads now.

If you ask what humans do that nothing else does, the answer is language. Every human community has a language. And nowadays, what's the biggest hot topic? Artificial intelligence. And what is AI about? It's actually about language. There's an interesting question about whether the way AI understands language is helpful—children need very small amounts of language to learn, but computers need vast amounts of data. As long as there are people, the study of language will be important.

Two things. First, that there's a right way and a wrong way of talking—there is no intrinsically right or wrong way. Second, people think of language as written, but most languages are not written. Written language is only about 5,000 years old, while the human species is at least a quarter of a million years old.

Take my linguistics 101 course that we're going to put online. And what I would say to everybody is you need to know something about computing. People will not be able to negotiate in any academic discipline without being able to use computers in various ways.