Daniel Botkin:
Although told scientists don't work outdoors anymore, he did — and wrote about it

His father, Benjamin A. Botkin, an expert on American folklore, wrote 25 books. "He and my mother would read aloud each page of book proof," recalls Botkin. "I sat and listened. My father said each word and piece of punctuation. When he said the punctuation words, like comma and period, his voice dropped and he sounded as if he was telling stories to two people named comma and period and their friends, semicolon, dash, and so forth. My house had 12,000 books and it seemed natural to write, and I grew to have a love of writing along with a love of science." In college Borkin worked on the school newspaper, writing articles about scientific research at his university and also was the theater critic.

Botkin earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Rochester in 1959. Although he liked science, he did not like being indoors, so he asked his professors what science he might do outdoors. They said "there isn't any science outdoors anymore." So he pursued his second passion, writing, and obtained a fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in scientific journalism. There he wrote articles on science for the University of Wisconsin News Service and in 1962, earned his master's in English literature with a minor in scientific journalism.

That year, he joined the Peace Corps, where he worked in the Philippines as chair of the department of English and chair of the physics department at the University of Mindanao.

After the Peace Corps, Botkin joined his father-in-Law, Herman Chase, a New Hampshire surveyor. Together they spent most of their time surveying forested lands, and it was then that he realized there was a science that could be done outside: studying forests. His sister sent him a book by Eugene Odum, the first modern textbook in ecology. He returned to college for a doctorate in biology, plant ecology from Rutgers University, which he earned in 1968.

While an assistant to associate professor at Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Botkin developed computer models of population dynamics of wildlife, endangered species and forest vegetation, including the sandhill crane and the whooping crane. Botkin developed the first successful computer simulation in ecology -- a computer model of forest growth that has developed into a subdiscipline in the field of environmental science, with more than 50 versions in use worldwide.

As associate scientist at the Ecosystem Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from 1976 to 1978, Botkin developed new approaches to the analysis of population dynamics of endangered species and to global environmental issues and the study of Earth as a life supporting system. He also developed a computer model of the population dynamics of the African elephant and of the social behavior of the sperm whale for use in conservation and management of these endangered species.

As professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1978 to 1993, Botkin served as chair of the environmental studies program for six years. While there he conducted research on endangered species and the effects of global warming on forest species. He also directed study of the ecological effects of water diversion from the Mono Lake Watershed on the Mono Lake Ecosystem of California.

From 1993 to 1999, Botkin was a professor of biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he led a new interdisciplinary program concerning major environmental issues; developed new curriculum linking fundamental environmental sciences to applied problems; and conducted research on the application of advanced computer techniques to environmental issues.

Botkin is now a research professor in the department of ecology, evolution and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also president and founder of The Center for the Study of the Environment, a non-profit research and educational corporation that provides independent, objective, science-based analysis of complex environmental issues.

Botkin said he is now in a place in his career where he is able to combine science and writing, returning to both of the things he loved to do. His research, he said, motivates him to write books so he can share the information he has gathered.

He has written 10 books and numerous professional journal articles. His latest book, No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature, was published in 2001 by Island Press. Botkin said he wrote this trade book because of the growing dissension people have about environmental issues. "In the 1970s and 80s, the environment seemed to have become mainstream, but now those for and against the environment are speaking and acting more extremely," he said. "Some extreme environmentalists propose that we must abandon western civilization to save the environment and all life; their opponents claim that they just want to destroy civilization." In No Man's Garden, Botkin uses Thoreau, who liked both civilization and nature, as a metaphor to explain how we can sustain both nature and civilization.

Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century, another tradebook, was published in 1990. It discusses how people's views of nature are affected by historical, cultural myths. "What I discovered is that to a large degree our environmental laws and policies are based on ancient Greek and Roman views of the balance of nature," said Botkin. The book gives examples of how people use these myths as the basis for environmental laws, policies and regulations, even when these contradict scientific information.

Botkin wrote two other tradebooks, Our Natural History: Lessons From Lewis and Clark, published by Putnum in 1995, and Passage of Discovery: American Rivers Travel Guide to The Missouri River of Lewis and Clark, published by Perigee Press in 1999.

Botkin has also written two textbooks, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, published by John Wiley, in its third edition in 1999; and The Blue Planet, published by also published by Wiley, in its first edition in 1999. Botkin wrote the first edition of Environmental Science, he said, because all of the other texts available were biased: "They told students what to think rather than how to think."

His environmental science text, coauthored by Edward.A. Keller, a professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and also an active scientist, helps students think for themselves, he said. "Very few teachers emphasize how to think," said Botkin. "I have found that there is a general decline in the attention span of the generation of students from the 80s and 90s. I think this is making teaching harder and harder." Other textbook authors are reacting to this change by making textbooks easier, he said: "One science textbook has cartoon balloons in it to tell students what a graph says so that they don't have to learn how to read them. But learning to read a graph is an important skill. If you learn this skill, you you can see all kinds of things in a graph you would not grasp otherwise."

The environmental science textbook is approved for AP high school use and many high school students have told Botkin that the book was "wonderful."

He gives this advice to other textbook authors: "It's a very hard time to write a textbook. You have to really want to write a textbook because you believe in it."

Botkin said he has never suffered from writer's block. He works mostly on a laptop computer and finds it "absolutely necessary" to read what he writes in print, rather than on the computer screen. His mind works best, he said, between 3 a.m. and 11 a.m. and often wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea and writes it down.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 2001