Primitive resources
There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources.
There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources.
When poet William Blake wrote of "dark satanic mills", he couldn't have been looking at a steel mill because there were none in 1804. Nevertheless, when I visit a steel mill, Blake's phrase always comes to mind. With the heat and the pounding noise, the dust and smoke, and the red glow against the night sky, it's hard not to see these places as infernal. And yet the process of making steel also produces some of the most hauntingly beautiful images found anywhere in the world of industry.
A big hole in the ground: This is where most of the raw materials of an industrial society come from. To appreciate the scale of this excavation, note that the bright blue object on a shelf near the center of the image is a Porta Potti.
A dragline is the largest of the machines used to strip away the overburden and mine the ore layer at an open-cast mine. A bucketload for this particular dragline, one of the world's largest, is 220 cubic yards. Note the school bus, which would easily fit in the bucket.
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
I recently started a field notebook assignment for my upper-level Ecology class at the University of Montana. I asked my students to pick one “thing” and observe it carefully over the entire semester.
In addition to their field notebooks, the students also had to suggest at least ten research questions inspired by their observations.
Most of my colleagues who conduct laboratory research not only keep extremely thorough and complete lab notebooks, but they teach their students how and why to keep data in them. Some labs even have friendly competitions in which prizes for the best-kept notebooks are awarded.
In stark contrast to the vibrant culture of keeping lab notebooks in molecular biology, my informal polling suggested a lack of interest in notebooks in field biology.
“I have a GPS for that.”
“My data are in a spreadsheet.”
“I write things down when I get home.”
“I have a computer.”The general consensus seemed to be that field notebooks are quaint, archaic, and obsolete in field biology.
The most useful and interesting notebooks of field biology are hybrids; as well as recording details and data of field research, they record the observations, thoughts, musings, and peregrinations of the author.
Another value of field notebooks is their ability to serve as an incredibly fertile incubator for your ideas and observations. By jotting down interesting observations, questions, and miscellaneous ideas, your field notebook can serve as a powerful catalyst for new experiments and projects.
- Use a hardbound notebook.
- Keep your contact information in a prominent location.
- Write for yourself and for posterity.
- Write pertinent field information with every new entry. You should enter the date, time, and location at the top of every page.
- Add information on your location.
- Record your methods.
- Make backup copies.
- If you use abbreviations, make sure there is a key in your field notebook.
- Don’t leave home without it.
- Form a writing habit. Thomas Jefferson was such an inveterate chronicler of daily events in his notebooks that he even took the time to record the weather four times on the day he helped write the Declaration of Independence. So unless you have something far more pressing than writing the Declaration of Independence, you have no excuse for avoiding your field notebook!
- Set up a structure for your field notebook.
- Create an index.
- Treat your field notebook like a scrapbook. You should view your field notebook as a central clearinghouse for miscellaneous information that is relevant to your research project. If there are related bits of information that you will find useful later on, sketch them, write them down, photocopy them, and staple or tape them in your notebook.