On the Recombinant Ecology of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Imagine a lake that was once never a lake. Then imagine an island on that lake that was once never an island. Imagine, finally, a forested hilltop on the island that is no longer a hilltop, and you may begin to form a reasonably good image of the magnificently ‘unnatural’ history of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island.

As this description begins to suggest, Barro Colorado Island occupies a paradoxical space. The island is covered by a seasonal tropical forest, parts of which are likely to be similar to those encountered by the first Spanish conquistadores in the early 16th century. It is fortunate, in this sense, that the island was transformed into a biological reserve in 1923, and that it is now a part of the world-renowned Barro Colorado Nature Monument.

And yet, the island lies next to—indeed exists thanks to—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes: the Panama Canal. Unsurprisingly, the Panama Canal Authority regards the Canal as Panama’s foremost industrial zone. A visit to the island indeed affords views of tropical forest, but also of the many container-laden behemoths that continually make their way past Barro Colorado. As one field agent for the Panama Pacific Line evocatively put it in a 1932 edition of the magazine Ocean Ferry,

‘An island where fierce black monkeys climb tall trees to shake their fists and howl defiance at passing airplanes; where animals nearly as big as bears pass their whole lives upside down, clinging to limbs, where there are 55 varieties of snakes, 33 of lizards and 47 of frogs and toads, where animals live on crab-meat—but why proceed? […] Such an island easily might be located in the land of fancy where men had but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead. It might be, but it is not; for it is in the Panama Canal Zone, and every passenger who goes through the Canal on a Panama Pacific liner passes close enough to its shores to toss a penny from the ship’s deck to the land, if so inclined’(1).

* * *

The origin of this paradoxical space may be explained with reference to the design of the Panama Canal. Prior to the construction of the Canal, Barro Colorado was a forested hilltop along the Chagres River Valley. The Chagres River rises in the Cordillera de San Blas and flows west-southwest until it reaches the present-day town of Gamboa. Until 1910, the river turned at this point and flowed in a northerly direction before draining into the Caribbean Sea. Before the Canal’s construction began, anyone climbing the tallest tree on Barro Colorado’s highest point would have been afforded a view of mostly unbroken tropical forest extending as far as the eye could see.

All of this changed when U.S. engineers decided to abandon the original French plans for a canal ‘à niveau’. Instead, the engineers opted for a canal that used gigantic locks to raise ships coming in from the Caribbean (or the Pacific) to an inland waterway that crossed the Panamanian isthmus. A further set of locks then lowered each ship to the ocean (or sea) on the opposite end of the canal. The required waterway was constructed by damming the Chagres River at a point close to its mouth on the Caribbean side of present canal. The resulting Gatun Lake—then the largest man-made lake in the world—replaced the views of forest with views of emerald waters even as it solved three problems for the Panama Canal’s engineers: first, and as I have just noted, the new lake’s waters served as a major part of the waterway that linked the locks on either end of the Canal. Second, it allowed the engineers to control the Chagres’ extraordinary force, a force that, during the raining season, wreaked havoc first on the French, and then on American efforts to build the canal. And third, the Gatun provided the extraordinary volumes of water required to fill the locks for each ship’s transit—estimated at some 98,500,000 litres (or 26,000,000 US gallons) per ship.

So it was that, in 1907, a massive dam began to be built close to the Chagres’ mouth. In 1910, the diversion channel that was used to enable the construction of this dam was blocked, and the lower reaches of the Chagres River Valley began to flood. The Gatun Lake began to form, and as its waters rose, the surrounding hills became shores. By 1913, the highest hilltop in the Gatun had become the lake’s largest island: the 1500-hectare Barro Colorado Island.

Today the island is part of a biological reserve that is the site of a tropical research station administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution. All that remains visible of the submerged forest is the odd tree stump that stands as a silent witness to the life that once surrounded the hilltop-turned-island. Actually, some of the stumps are rather noisy havens for colonies of chestnut-headed oropéndolas (Psarocolius wagleri). The birds have discovered that the stumps constitute the ultimate snake-proof nesting site: they are surrounded by water, but are located a stone’s throw from the island’s forested shores. The stumps may, in this sense, be regarded as a metaphor for the island as a whole; Barro Colorado’s circumscribed nature is part of what led the earliest naturalists to propose that it be set aside as a biological reserve, and to this day, that very nature is part of what protects it from the destruction that the mainland forests have suffered.

* * *

Many if not most contemporary accounts of Barro Colorado emphasize the continuity between the island’s contemporary forest and its ancient forebear. In fact, a strong case can be made that today’s forest is both very similar to, and very different from the one encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Very similar: paleobotanical research conducted by Dolores Piperno in a central area of the island known as the 50-Hectare Plot suggests that the forest in this part of the island is at least four to five hundred years old; that before the Spanish conquest, it was not subject to agricultural slash and burn techniques; and that even though some areas were cleared for human settlement between 400 and 1500 AD, an ancient forest continued to exist around such settlements. As Piperno puts it, a ‘mosaic-like image’ emerges from the paleobotanical register, with areas of forest and of clearing. The clearings corresponded to primary ‘residential zones’, while some of the forest around these clearings appears to have been left relatively undisturbed (2).

Very different: the Spanish conquistadores would not, of course, have reached today’s island-which-was-not-an-island by boat. Nor would they have walked along the trails that now crisscross the island. Even if the region’s aboriginal groups had some of their own trails, Balboa and the rest of the Spanish explorers that arrived in the region in the 1510s would not have seen the hundreds of artifacts associated with today’s research projects, and which are found along the contemporary trails. Indeed a walk along parts of the present trails can be something of a surreal experience; even as one appreciates the striking beauty of the forest, many of the trees and plants in the understory have fluorescently coloured ribbons that mark the places where scientists have conducted experiments. By the Smithsonian’s own account, Barro Colorado Island is probably the most intensively researched tropical forest on Earth. One doesn’t have to believe in the fabled ‘butterfly effect’ posited by chaos theorists to suggest that the hubbub of scientific activity is itself likely to have had significant effects on a number of aspects of the island’s ecology. For example, the trails made for the scientists are also used by some of the non-human mammals, and this may have directly or indirectly affected the distribution of these species, if not of those they feed on. The more intensive presence of scientists working in some areas of the island may well have led some species to either vacate those areas, or on the contrary, to seek food or shelter there. Last but not least, if parts of the island had already been modified by a modern human presence when the Canal was built, the very effort to erase such a presence would have had an effect, however benevolently conceived, on the surrounding forest. From this perspective, the question is not whether the scientists and modern culture more generally have had an effect, but the precise nature and extent of that effect.

* * *

In the report that I am currently writing about my research on Barro Colorado, I employ the notion of a recombinant ecology to refer to the interaction of any such transformations with what are likely to be the much longer durations of most evolutionary dynamics on the island. Readers familiar with the second part of ‘Showing to Save: A Critique of Natural History Documentaries’ may recall that I defined such an ecology as ‘the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. This definition, which I borrowed from Sarah Whatmore and Steven Hinchcliffe(3), is hardly suitable for the ecology of Barro Colorado. In some respects, the island is almost as far removed from Panama’s urbanity as is the forest along the Colombian border. And yet, as noted by W.H. Allee, one of the island’s earlier naturalists, ‘One can commute from civilization at Ancon and spend from 9:15 to 3:30 on Barro Colorado’, and ‘Probably the greatest value of this new station for biological research lies in its ready accessability and its nearness to the highly civilized cities of the Canal Zone’(4).

It is not just the location of the island that begins to transform it into a rather modern setting. Anyone who visits the island’s impressive science laboratory, and finds out about its remarkable research projects may well come away with the sense that the island is the site, if not for a conurbation, then certainly for an utterly modern set of activities. Amongst other aspects, the use of sophisticated communications facilities and the wonders of radio telemetry mean that an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or indeed a bee traveling through the forest can be monitored from an office in Princeton University. In this sense if not in others, Barro Colorado seems every bit as wired up as a modern city, where any mobile phone user’s location can be precisely pinpointed by way of an analogous system. From this perspective, the island’s ecology is best regarded as a monument to a remarkable interaction between that most modern of projects—engaging in the scientific study of an object, from afar—and a habitat which has managed to survive, apparently relatively undisturbed, in the face of extraordinarily complex, powerful, and extraneous forces. The notion of a ‘recombinant’ or ‘hybrid’ ecology may and must be adapted to refer to such interactions away from urban spaces, sensu stricto.

When one begins to think about Barro Colorado in this way, it becomes apparent that the island’s history, as much as its present, is steeped in such hybridity. As will have been evident from my earlier account of the Canal’s construction, the island’s very existence as an island is the result of a modern project, par excellence. The construction of the Panama Canal was not only one of the great engineering feats of the early 20th century, but also one of several 19th century projects (the Canal began to be built by the French in the late 19th century) that signaled a quintessentially modern impatience, not to say intolerance with ancient physical barriers. In the first half of the 19th century, it was horses that were the victims of this impatience. As noted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

‘As long as the conquest of space was tied to animal power, it had to proceed within the limits of the animals’ physical capabilities. One way of gaining an immediate perception of the distance travelled was to observe the exhaustion of the draught animals … Steam power, inexhaustible and capable of infinite acceleration, reversed the relationship between recalcitrant nature (i.e. spatial distance) and locomotive engine. Nature (i.e., spatial distance) … now succumbed to the new mechanical locomotive engine of the railroad that, in a frequently used metaphor, “shoots right through like a bullet”. “Annihilation of time and space” was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation … Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality’(5).

The building first of the Suez Canal and then of the Panama Canal arguably signaled an even more ambitious determination to use mechanical power to confound the constraints posed by natural space. If steam locomotives in the first half of the 19th century displaced horse power, the building of the Panama Canal showed a willingness to displace an entire continent: at a stroke, the Canal obviated the need to sail around the treacherous Straight of Magellan.

I say ‘at a stroke’, but in this as in so many other contexts, the modern quest for speed took a terrible toll: tens of thousands of people died building first the French and then the American versions of the Canal. The homes and livelihoods of the inhabitants of dozens of villages along the flooded Chagres River Valley were destroyed, and beneath the Gatun Lake’s 425 square kilometres there lies the remnant of a vast forest, most of whose inhabitants were slowly transformed into lifeless bottom dwellers when the Chagres was stopped in 1910. From this perspective, Barro Colorado is something akin to the tip of a tropical iceberg of destruction, a tip, like so many other similar tips across the world, that serves as a reminder of a nature that once was.

* * *

It might be inferred from this account that the most significant transformations stopped when the building of the Canal ended. In fact, a case can be made that far-reaching changes were to continue long after the Gatun reached its present level. If in the first years the island became a veritable Noah’s Ark, with a possible superabundance of species of animals capable of climbing or flying onto the island, this would presumably have had short-, medium- and long-term effects on the distribution of many of the island’s plant species. By contrast, in time some of the species (plant or animal) would have found it difficult to survive in what might well be regarded as a forest fragment. There is evidence, for example, that the number of bird species on the island has declined since the island became an island (6). While some animal species have shown a surprising ability to establish their own migratory channels to and from the mainland, others are incapable of swimming or even flying across a comparatively short stretch of open water. To these transformations we must add, as I began to suggest earlier, those generated by the activities of the island’s contemporary human dwellers.

Even as the mentioned transformations have taken place, small and large ships have navigated almost continuously past the island. Anyone standing at the end of the Fairchild Trail on a trade wind-blown day will have wondered how if at all decades of diesel smoke (and before that the soot of steamers) might have affected this corner of the island. In 2007, scientists from the Smithsonian expressed their concern at the rather larger scale effects that the looming enlargement of the Canal might have not just on the Barro Colorado Nature Monument itself, but on the biological exchange that has long taken place in the Panamanian isthmus. For some 3 million years, the Panamanian isthmus has been a kind of biological bridge between North and South America. Might the growing Canal, or rather the adjacent Canal development zone, block that bridge?

* * *

I have emphasized the discontinuity between today’s Barro Colorado, and the ancient forest. But anyone who visits the forest and is willing to look past the fluorescent ribbons is likely to be awed by the permanence of a world that, however transformed by modernity, continues to provide evidence of dynamics that existed long before the first Spanish conquistadores made their way across the isthmus. Every morning, the ‘dawn chorus’ is sung as much by birds as it is by howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). A walk along the Smithsonian’s immaculately kept campus is as likely to provide vistas of giant ships as it is of creatures that treat the concrete paths and buildings as yet another natural structure upon which to carry on with the battle for survival: here the leaf-cutter ants (Atta colombica or Atta cephalotes) file busily along the walkways, there a vested anteater (Tamandua mexicana) snuffles along the storm drains looking for other insects. A small group of Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans (Rhamphastos swainsonii) swoops by even as a boat’s horn announces the last ferry’s departure. In the evening the fishing bats (Noctilio leporinus) make their runs along the edge of the research station’s piers, and the male Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) begin to call out for mates. The continued presence of such animals and their complex inter-relations, let alone the growth of the island’s magnificent trees, act as a warning to any cultural theorist inclined to dismiss the notion of nature as no more than an artifact of a Western imagination.

That said, I have begun to explain why the opposite tendency—to focus entirely on the ‘natural’ nature of nature, with little or no regard for the influence of humankind—is equally problematic and must also be avoided. The predominant popular representation of scientific inquiry continues to try to hold onto the myth of a science that has no influence whatsoever on the objects that it studies. In fact, in Barro Colorado as in other parts of the world, many if not most of the scientists intervene as enthusiastically in the lives of a variety of plants and animals as many of the plants and animals intervene in the epidermises of the scientists. The point is not to deny that aspects of the forest continue to be structured by relationships that have hardly been modified by the activities of Homo sapiens v. barro coloradensis. Rather, the point is to suggest that the overarching narrative that establishes a neat opposition between nature and culture, researched object and researching subject, urbanity and wilderness is perhaps even more difficult to sustain on Barro Colorado than it is in other biological reserves. From this perspective, the fascination of the island, at least for this (social) scientist, lies as much in everything that appears not to have changed, as in everything that has changed, and continues to change thanks to the extraordinary juxtaposition of the spaces and times of an ancient forest, and the spaces and times of modern culture.

References

(1) Winfield M. Thompson (1932), ‘Isle of Upside Down is Barro Colorado’ in Ocean Ferry, Dec. 1932, pp. 5-6, 13.
(2) Piperno, D. (1990) ‘Fitolitos, arqueología y cambios prehistóricos de la vegetación en un lote de cincuenta hectáreas de la isla de Barro Colorado’ in E. Leigh, A. Stanley Rand, D. Windsor (Eds) Ecología de un Bosque Tropical: Ciclos estacionales y cambios a largo plazo. Panama: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, p. 156. Translation from the Spanish by the author of this post.
(3) Whatmore, S. & Hinchcliffe, S. (2002) ‘Living Cities: Making Space for Urban Nature’, in Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture. No. 22.
(4) W.C. Allee (1924) ‘The Barro Colorado Laboratory’, Science, 59:1, pp. 521-522
(5) W. Schivelbusch (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Lemington Spa: Berg Publishers.
(6) See for example, W.D. Robinson (1999) ‘Long-term changes in the avifauna of a tropical forest isolate, Barro Colorado Island, Panama’, in Conservation Biology 13:85-97.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

The Peter Scott Debate: is it really ‘animals vs. people’?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

On Tuesday 21st October, the Great Hall in Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building hosted the 2008 Peter Scott Debate. Organised by the Wildscreen Festival and Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, the debate considered the motion that ‘People must be kept away from endangered animals’. Those arguing the case for the motion were Valmik Thapar, an author and tiger conservationist, and Will Travers, CEO of the Born Free Foundation. Those against the motion were Mary Mavanza, of the Goodall Institute, and Professor Bill Adams, of Cambridge University. Each of the participants had the opportunity to make the case for or against, and then the large audience was able to ask questions. A ‘verbal vote’ was taken on entry to the hall, and members of the audience were given a chance to vote with slips at the end of the debate.

The motion was so flawed that it should have been easy for Adams and Mavanza to win over the audience. Indeed, a majority of those who gave their ‘verbal vote’ at the beginning of the debate were reportedly against the motion. But alas, Thapar and Travers won the debate. Thapar made the plausible argument that tigers had to be kept separate not just for their own safety, but for the safety of local inhabitants. He also suggested that in India, business entrepreneurs would exploit any weakening of the boundary to colonise the remaining wildlife sanctuaries. By contrast, Will Travers adopted a more hegemonic stance when he argued that endangered animals could be kept separate so long as, in effect, local communities were paid (via jobs and public services) to support the wildlife havens.

Given these arguments, Mary Mavanza and Bill Adams should have had a field day deconstructing the politics of each of their oponents’ arguments. The ‘people vs. animals’ frame given by the organizers of Wildscreen—and promoted quite explicitly by Thapar— set up an opposition that, as Adams noted, was patently false, if not absurd. People are, of course animals—a point that sociobiologists quoted by natural history documentaries are always particularly keen to make. But even the most policed game reservations do not really segregate ‘people and endangered animals’: they segregate some people from the animals. It is seldom if ever really a question, in this sense, of creating a true ‘no go zone’ for people—the problem is often to exclude people whose forebears have inhabited newly formed parklands for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In many such cases, people who have been ‘local inhabitants’ have suddenly found themselves reclassified as ‘poachers’. As Adams and Mavanza noted, successful conservation requires local inhabitants not just to be ‘included’ in conservationist enterprises, but to be the architects, managers, and protectors of biological reserves. To do otherwise is to return to the colonial or post-colonial institutions that have long haunted Africa. It is also to reproduce, however tacitly, the kind of nature/culture opposition that is arguably at the heart of the environmental crisis.

How, and why then did Thapar and Travers win the day? I suggest that at least four aspects played a role in the victory.

First, Wildscreen (and presumably the co-organisers, Bristol Festival of Ideas) succeeded in framing the event in such a manner that Adams and Mavanza had to argue against what was a negative proposition, but which was transformed linguistically into a kind of ‘false positive’: people should be kept away from endangered animals (the proposition might alternatively have been formulated as ‘endangered animals cannot be segregated from people’). I am reminded, in this sense, of the insightful analyses offered by Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge (see for example, the second edition of their Language as Ideology, Routledge 1993) and other critical discourse analysts.

If the formulation of the motion began to set a certain discursive train in motion, other aspects of the debate gave the train further momentum. Thapar proved to be a formidable orator. His arguments rang out like pistol shots, and he did a superb job of combining a sense of moral outrage—how could anybody suggest anything but the separation of people and endangered animals—with bona fide arguments in favour of keeping tiger sanctuaries. Most convincing was his argument that to do otherwise would be to give carte blanche to rapacious developers, who would be only too happy to take over the existing sanctuaries in India. The combination of moral outrage and pragmatism probably helped to mobilize a powerful ‘structure of feeling’ (I use the term coined by Raymond Williams); and this in turn may have led members of the audience to overlook the issues which I noted earlier—for example, no one seems to have really dwelled on the issue of generalisation. Such is, of course, the nature of the peculiar genre of the debate, for which often what matters most is not the quality of the argument, but the manner in which it is performed.

If Thapar’s performance was strong, Adams’ and Mavanza’s was, by contrast, rather weak. In fairness, both faced an uphill task for the reasons mentioned earlier. But they also faced the difficult task of critiquing a politics that has only recently begun to be questioned beyond academic, or near-academic contexts. It is, nonetheless, a shame that Mavanza and Adams did not mobilize equally powerful rhetorical devices to undermine the arguments in favour of separation. Either participant might, for example, have begun by referring to the incredibly problematic history of virtually any of the major parks or game lodges in Southern Africa.

I would speculate, finally, that a fourth factor may have involved at least a part of the audience’s ideological affiliation. I am assuming that a significant proportion of the attendees were delegates to the Wildscreen Festival, a biennial natural history filmmaking jamboree in which the producers of wildlife documentaries come together to talk shop. Since the 1960s, the documentaries’ aesthetic has depended on creating the illusion of a wilderness without humans; would the filmmakers really have voted against their own aesthetic? In this field as in others, an aesthetic is never ‘just’ an aesthetic; a case might well be made that the entire industry effectively both reproduces, and relies on the ideological opposition of human and non-human animals. It is, in this sense, no coincidence that Thapar himself is a producer and presenter of documentaries for the BBC and other nature media, and that his specialism lies in the conservation of what is arguably the most charismatic of the endangered predators.

For all of the above reasons, the debate was an opportunity created—credit goes to the organizers—but also missed.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

Building a New Nature Trail

Some problems with the PUS model of science communication

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Let us imagine the following scenario: a not-for-profit organisation that manages a biological reserve wants to develop a new trail. The reserve could be in a temperate or a tropical forest, on the edge of a desert or in a wetland, in the Arctic or in an Andean páramo; in this post we will deliberately ignore these and other equally important contextual elements in order to focus on some problems regarding what arguably remains the predominant model of science communication, or what I describe below as the PUS model of science communication (PUS stands for ‘Public Understanding of Science’).

I will return to this model in a moment. First let us add gravel, so to speak, to the fictional trail. In building the new trail, the organisation has several aims: on the one hand, the reserve must be visited by more ecotourists in order to raise much needed revenue. On the other hand, its managers are keen to avoid putting additional pressure on the more fragile parts of the reserve, which are already being visited by many thousands of people each year. The new trail should thus work to ameliorate the pressure of tourism on the rest of the reserve.

In keeping with this environmentally responsible approach, the managers have decided that the new trail should act as a space for informal science education. In contrast with the older trails, which rely entirely on the mediation of guides, or on the knowledge of the visitors themselves, the new trail is to provide an opportunity for scientists and visitors to communicate about science—especially about the science produced by internationally-renowned researchers working in the biological reserve.

An area for the new trail is designated in a part of the biological reserve that is less sensitive to the pressures of tourism. Plans are drawn up for a trail that combines walking through the designated area, and stopping at a succession of information stands. Each of the stands is to be devoted to a single science topic which will be represented with interpretation boards and panels; the texts for these will be written by scientists working on the biological reserve. Where possible, each stand will be located next to one of the phenomena that the scientists have studied. At the end of the trail, visitors will find a shop and café.

At first glance, this may sound like an eminently sensible way of building a new trail. Hundreds, if not thousands of nature reserves face similar challenges across the world, and many might well seek to develop a trail of the kind just outlined. The question to be explored in this post is, would such a trail engage in a successful form of science education?

It might well do so. The success of trails depends on many factors, not least their location, and a host of other proximal and distal elements of context. The following paragraphs focus on a series of problems that are likely to be pertinent to anyone who conceives a nature trail on the basis of what I described earlier as the PUS model of science communication. This model has a long, and not very distinguished history in the UK and other parts of the world. The following essay describes aspect of the model by deconstructing some of its key assumptions, or ‘ways of doing’ as they might pertain to a nature trail such as has just been described.

Problem 1: ‘Science communication = scientists communicating about science’

In the fictional trail scenario that I’ve just sketched, it is the scientists that are to produce the ‘contents’ of interpretation boards. This is in keeping with what is perhaps the fundamental assumption of the PUS approach, an assumption that shapes its entire discourse: the notion that if science is something that is done by scientists, then scientists must be centrally involved in the communication of science.

At first glance, this premise appears to be so obviously commonsensical as to not require any further consideration. Science communication is communication about science, ergo, the people who know the science best will also be its best communicators.

The first problem with this premise is that no scientist—no professional in any field—is necessarily adept at communicating about his/her own work, even within the context of her/his own field. Many people have difficulty expressing their own ideas even to those who are very familiar with that work. This does not automatically disqualify someone from being a good scientist, but it does mean that no scientist is necessarily a good ‘science communicator’, howsoever one defines this practice.

The second problem, and the problem that is more pertinent to the context being considered, is that those who are good at communicating their ideas to people in their own field(s) of interaction are not necessarily good at communicating with people who don’t share their own everyday understandings of that field. It is worth spelling out how and why this might be the case.

A scientist who communicates with other scientists in her/his own field can usually build on a chain of spoken and unspoken understandings. In such a context, certain theories, certain ways of doing, and indeed certain ways of communicating about the theories and the ways of doing can be taken for granted. Unless some aspect of the field is being critiqued, chances are that most of the contextual elements will remain tacit, and will be evoked, if they are evoked at all, by way of a kind of shorthand: for example the use of certain concepts, references to certain names, theories, procedures, and so forth.

When a scientific discourse is taken out of such a context, and relocated in a different context, a host of transformations are likely to take place. Depending on the new context, some or all of the fundamental assumptions that guide practice in the original context may no longer be taken for granted by all of those involved in the communications process. While a particularly clear exposition or a degree of simplification may help to bridge some of the gaps, this is not always the case. For example, some of the recipients of the information may not be familiar with even ‘basic’ aspects of the hypothetico-deductive method. Even if some or all of the recipients are familiar with this method, there may be concepts, theories, or even structures of scientific feeling—I use the last term quite deliberately—which are wholly unknown to a majority of the addressees of interpretation panels and other media.

Equally if not more importantly, some visitors may expect to be offered information that is guided by a logic that contradicts the spirit with which much research in the biological sciences is conducted: for example, they may wish to obtain information that is quite explicitly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, or information in which spectacular fact displaces any focus on subtle or complex relationships.

Engaging with this process may be described as a form of translation, but the metaphor of translation is not a good one if by this one assumes that all or most of the own meanings can be replaced by equivalent terms. ‘Translation’ in the context of a trail such as the one described above involves not just individual terms, but entire chains and interconnections of discourse. If we are to stick to the metaphor of translation, science communication in a nature trail is probably best compared to the translation of an essay into a poem, or vice-versa. A set of statements must be translated into an entirely different form, an entirely different genre.

Of course, some scientists can engage in this kind of translation, or in time they may learn how to do so. There are many examples of superb science communication produced by former or practicing scientists. But this should not lead to the fallacious conclusion that all scientists can engage in the practice of popular science communication, or indeed, should be able to do so, simply because they themselves are scientists. A more critical approach suggests that the people best able to communicate about science are the people that can engage effectively with whatever genre of science communication is being deployed. Doing so is bound to require an understanding of the science being communicated; but that is different from saying that the communicators themselves must be scientists.

Problem 2: ‘The public needs to know more about science’

I have deliberately postponed the specification of the kind of visitors that the organisation in our fictional park managers want to engage with. One reason for doing so is that many scientists tend to conceive publics according to one of two equally problematic models. One model is that of the ‘ignorant’ public that knows nothing. The opposite model is one of a public that is very much like the scientist her/himself. Whatever the case, the public in question tends to be regarded as ‘the public’, and as a public that is, or should be, interested in science.

Each of these assumptions is inherently problematic. On the one hand, strictly speaking there is no such thing as ‘the public’. Anyone who gives serious consideration to the term quickly realises that it constitutes an unhelpful instance of what Raymond Williams once described as an abstract singular, that is to say, a term that accords a single, universal, essential quality or character to an otherwise diverse group of elements. It can, and perhaps should be argued that language cannot do without such terms, and my own writing doubtless provides evidence of the verity of this point. However, some abstract singulars are less helpful, and indeed more problematic, than others. Furthermore, some efforts to reduce the abstract singularity of terms are less successful than others. For example, efforts to reduce the category of ‘the public’ to more manageable subcategories such as ‘ABC1s’ are likely to involve only slightly less sweeping generalizations, and may be premised on what continue to be uncritical classifications of people.

On the other hand, for a scientist to say, as a matter of general principle, that ‘the public wants to know more science’, or worse, that ‘the public needs to know more science’ is as contentious as a priest saying that ‘the public wants to know more about God’, or ‘the public needs to know more about God’. In both cases, a convenient entity (‘the public’) is fashioned in accordance with the interests of the speaker, and this probably on the basis little more than a moralising sense that a) what one has to say is important; and b) that ‘the public’ understands, or can be made to understand, that it is indeed important. We might all agree, for example, the more people should know more about global warming. But if this stance determines a priori a certain tone for one’s efforts to communicate about global warming, and if this tone is more or less condescending, then the scene is likely to be set for the kind of top-down mode of communication that has long characterised the PUS approach.

Problem 3: ‘The best way to communicate about science in a biological reserve is via clearly written, and informative interpretation boards or panels’

Important scientific findings tend to be communicated via the written word. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that many scientists are particularly keen on using interpretation panels to communicate about their own work. In the trail scenario described above, the proposal was to set up some stands with lots of written text.

My own research suggests that panels with a lot of written text frequently stand ignored in national parks, or indeed in zoos, botanic gardens or even museums. More often than not, only a relatively small minority of fairly highly educated, or highly motivated visitors really tend to read at least the longer texts. To be sure, anyone who engages in a close study of the way in which even the shorter texts are used may be in for some big surprises.

Faced with these challenges, some informal science educators have devoted their lives to finding the ‘ideal sign’ that does everything for everyone. Others have become part of a veritable movement ‘against interpretation’, i.e. doing away with the signage in order to ‘let the visitor interpret nature as s/he pleases’. The first stance is a species of logocentrism, viz., an irrational faith in the power of the written word. The second stance is a species of populism, that is to say an effort, however un-self-conscious, to dissimulate the own interests by deferring to an allegedly popular will.

My own concern with the matter is that any prospective sign user should recognise the strengths and weaknesses of different media and genres of communication, but this vis-à-vis different visiting groups, and their practices in situ, that is to say, in context. For example, a panel with a detailed account of research about, say, a species of leaf-cutter ant might be fascinating to certain visitors, e.g. visitors unfamiliar with the ecology of such ants, and who like to read field guides or encyclopaedic entries. But if such a panel is shown to children aged between three and seven, the only interesting bits are likely to be the pictures, and not necessarily the pictures that seem most realistic or appropriate to many adults. Then again, if any of the above visitors have to stop in a tropical forest to read about the ants for more than about 30 seconds, it is quite likely that they themselves will start to be ‘read’ by flying insects, if not by the ants themselves. Under such circumstances, it will be very tempting to run away after swatting the first mosquito, or finishing the second or the third sentence (whichever comes first). I mention a tropical context, but analogous problems would doubtless be faced in the blistering heat of the Sonoran Desert, or in the freezing wind of the Magellanic moorland. Context is, if not all, then certainly a hugely important dimension of the interpretive process.

Problems on the level of what I describe as the pragmatics of science communication are likely to be compounded if visitors come away with a sense that the information is boring, or a convenient way of ‘dealing’ with visitors. The reader will recall that, in the sample trail, the information stands (and indeed the entire new trail) were to ameliorate the pressure of tourism on the more sensitive parts of the biological reserve. If, however, the visitors in a new trail are first shown the ‘real’ biological reserve and then get taken to a less interesting area that is full of signs, then the new trail may well generate sharp complaints. ‘I didn’t travel half-way around the world to be shown a bunch of panels with information that I could have read in a book’ or ‘I paid a hefty entrance fee to see nature, not to read about it’.

If, furthermore, that information comes across as being overly didactic, and if there is even a whiff of a sense that visitors are being ‘talked down to’, then we have a recipe for the kind of scenario that I witnessed unfolding once at a zoo. One family was so sensitive to didacticism that they even objected to seeing a building that had the label ‘Education Department’ on it. ‘We didn’t come to the zoo in order to go back to school’, one visitor growled.

Problem 4: ‘If in doubt, conduct some in-house visitor research’

One way of addressing the aforementioned problems is to conduct visitor research. But some forms of visitor research may compound the problems. For example, some years ago, some British zoos asked a biologist to conduct a survey of visitor awareness of the zoos’ efforts to communicate about endangered species. The biologist designed what was arguably a kind of pop-quiz that tested whether visitors at the zoos had ‘got the message’. In so doing, the survey effectively transformed visitors into students who hadn’t studied for a test. Even those managers whose zoos got relatively good results were left uncertain as to whether the targeted visitors already knew the answers before arriving at the zoo, or if they learned the answers to the survey questions in the course of their visits.

Unfortunately—some might say fortunately—we live in a time when it is no longer enough to create trails or generate displays that look attractive, or seem informative. If any aspect of the trail has been produced thanks to public funding, chances are that the park will be required to specify ‘deliverables’, and to then prove that the deliverables are just that.

While aspects of this trend may be welcome, others are not. Few things are likely to be riskier than a display or trail that is entirely the result of the subjective whim of one or a couple of uninformed individuals. But it is easy to fall for the trap of thinking that it is possible to quantify outcomes of nature trails in the same way that one can count, say, the number of Ford motor cars sold in one year. I would make the case that many aspects of a visit to a nature park not only can’t be quantified, but shouldn’t be quantified. There should always be room for an imaginative process both on the level of the production, and the reception of the trail.

It is also tempting to think that all that’s involved in social scientific research is the production of surveys. Positivism has its advantages, and surveys can of course address some issues. But if the resulting approach subjects visitors to the equivalent of a pop quiz, and if complex issues are framed by simplistic questions with multiple-choice answers, then it is probably best to avoid such research in its entirety.

This post is not the place in which to explain how one should do visitor research. It suffices to note that visitor research (or its analogon, audience research) can provide useful insights especially when it is conducted in a manner that is not driven by an instrumental logic, i.e. if the research does not simply set out to test whether or not a trail has achieved this or that quantifiable objective, or ‘hit’ this or that visiting group. And while it is always possible to conduct visitor research ‘a posteriori’, i.e. after a trail has been completed, it is usually far better to involve researchers in the earliest stages of a new trail’s planning process.

There are three reasons for this. First, and most generally, if public money is employed, and the trail has to be evaluated, then the evaluation process should be an integral aspect of the design, and not just something that is tacked on. A visitor researcher that fully understands both the explicit and more tacit aspects of a particular design is more likely to do a better job of assessing its outcomes once the trail is built.

Second, an experienced visitor researcher is likely to be able to provide significant insights to the design team from the start. For example, any designer that claims that a new trail will transform visitors’ understandings of this or that species is likely to be asked, ‘what exactly do you mean by “transform”?’ This is not as facetious a question as it might seem: if the trail is to be successful, and successfully evaluated, then it must start out with, or at least arrive at, very clear and precise objectives. If the designer further claims that the trail will transform the ‘behaviour’ of visitors (what anthropologists now describe as people’s practices), the visitor researcher should be able to alert the designer about the pitfalls of such an ambitious proposal. If some 20 years of environmental activism haven’t succeeded in changing most people’s practices, why should a trail manage to do this?

A third reason for involving a visitor researcher from the start is that the actual construction of a trail nearly always results in significant changes to the original plans. It may be difficult for someone completely subsumed by this process to stand back, and critically assess the extent to which a seemingly minor design change might lead to significant changes in the visiting experience, or in the dynamic of assessment.

What I have described as the Public Understanding of Science approach to science communication (and science education) has its roots in a desire by some scientific institutions to manage public relations to their own advantage. In the UK, much of this movement’s history was a response to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to cut the funding of scientific institutions. Little wonder that in a report published in 1985, the Royal Society thundered that ‘…our most direct and urgent message must be to the scientists themselves: Learn to communicate with the public [sic], be willing to do so and consider it your duty to do so’. Anyone wishing to learn about a more up-to-date way of conceiving science communication may wish to visit the website of the ESRC’s Science in Society programme (www.sci-soc.net). The projects which this programme funded were premised on a far more complex conception of science communication, and indeed, of science itself.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved