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A unit of Lasting Forests…Sustained forests; sustained profits
evolving since March 30, 1999 and
Rural System…Creating a Lasting Superior Rural System
The Didactron
A Tale of Educators' Lives in a High-Tech Teaching-Learning Space ©
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10. Morrowspan
"Pray for the priests," he said. "Pray for the priests, " he whispered …and died. He had grown steadily ill; the futility of his life interpenetrated his healing systems. Immune responses slowed in the final weeks as he saw only pale glimpses of progress. The executioner's axe fell on Morrowspan.
The memorial plague with his name read only the year and Morrowspan. Within eighty years it, too, would be gone.
* * *
From an early 1980's start, Morrowspan began in a clandestine meeting in a mountain motel. The accommodations were poor, the excitement rich. A couple of the nine participants paced the room in stocking feet, others rolled up their sleeves, tried to find more comfortable places to sit on the beds, floor, or chairs; one griped as he limped along behind the group going to lunch because he could not get his shoe on quickly enough. The conversations continued over lunch and dinner and long into the night for two days.
"I appreciate you coming. I know the trip is a great expense to you but I knew that you would come because we can do something. We must treat each other seriously. I do not know how long this will take but we must work it out thoroughly and take as long as necessary. We can fail if we are not thorough.
"We have come here on a most important mission. We are going to create Morrowspan. I do not intend to listen to why we cannot do it. I cannot afford the time. I already know most of those reasons. All are large, but none are insurmountable. We are here to surmount them. You can leave at any time but I do not intend to leave … ever. I need you and your ideas and your energies.
Ted Henry had planned this meeting like a military raid. He had been an Army Ranger. He selected people who were independent but aware enough of higher goals to do team work. He was in charge, nearly a spectacle in higher education where 'equivocal' is expected, 'following' is the rule. He knew it, and so did everyone there and he wanted to be sure it stayed that way. Resources and time were so limited that almost any diversion or digression could result in failure. When resources are few and risks great, few people take action. Ted was among the few because he saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone, the chances for winning and the probable returns.
Years before in seminars he had worked himself into the narrow part of a conceptual funnel. Given that population and pollution problems are so great and the chances for their solution nearly zero, isn't it rational to drop out? He was well on the way out until he realized that he had not included the benefits in his nasty question. A rational person will play in a rigged, biased game if the payoff is a million dollars! It is the payoff -- for the children of tomorrow -- that makes almost any action worthwhile. He hadn't dropped out. Like a boxer working through the ranks to the big money, each event, the defeats more than the successes, had been learning experiences. He was now ready. He had chosen his group carefully over four years.They all flew into Port Nettle and his assistants had painlessly whisked them to their intimate conference.
"I need your good humor, but I do not need your academic bullshit. You are here because of your can-do attitude, not your rapier wit. We are going to do something, not just think something, not just talk about it. Remain skeptical if you must. Be suggestive -- but not antagonistic. When you have to fight, then you will know it is time to leave.
"Morrowspan is our code name. We need never mention it to anyone but ourselves. It is ours; and ours alone. I seek your dedication to its successes.
"As I explained to some of you, I have a list much too long that has caused me to take this unprecedented action. I suspect most of you agree with me: We have a subject field starting in the early 1900's still stating that it started in 1933.
"We have problems identical to those of 1905 without any appreciable change or techniques for their change.
"We revere and operate on erroneous or untested ideas that are 50 years old.
"We've advocated the management of non-game fauna for over 45 years. Moves were made in that direction in 1982 and not a trace of recognition or impact or relevance has occurred. With it has come outright hostility by some in the field called "wildlife management" and overt charlatanism by others.
"We have over 50 schools with hardly anyone teaching who has practiced what they preach. We have no school credentials. Our standards are Federal civil service, thus minimal. We have growing anti-hunter and anti-trapper movements; a growing bird watcher movement without a sign of managerial relevance within it other than 'feed the birds.'
"Whole populations of wildlife are disappearing in other countries while we debate the dimensions of bird feeders. Science involves itself with evolutionary roots of competition and the surprise that small populations differ from each other. The average biologist cannot name one interaction, two synergisms, three principles, or four values of wildlife on a bet. Few can define biodiversity and do not know whether to include within in it moths, mussels, or mosses.
"We've gone through international earth day and subsequent commemorations of it and there are no more than one or two wildlifers in that group of leaders. We have allowed ourselves to be dropped from U.S. Department of Interior concerns; the Fish and Wildlife Service has been so involved internally that it has lost its way and has been crippled; the Refuge System and its 90 million acres has never found its identity. We have no effective spokes-people; no power. A cancerous movement, conservation biology, consumes our organization and turns staff inward, to esoteric, endangered and rare topics. We see ourselves serving 10% of the population -- an ineffective and almost irrelevant voting block. We profess to be broad ecologists but align narrowly with the most apolitical, primitive, self-interested group of people in modern society -- the hunter, trapper, and angler. We have few female leaders in our ranks; fewer African Americans.
"We have resource concern, but can always find a reason or scapegoat for our every failure. Someone won't let us -- or we do not control the habitat, or …a thousand excuses are always on our tongue. We are the most ineffective of people. We are of a mentality of carburetor mechanics -- and complain when our cars do not win the race. There is always someone or something else to blame -- the driver, the tires, the suspension. A perfect part -- in an imperfect system -- is part of a machine that won't work. Gentlemen, the race is the thing. There is a race to be won, not just car repairs to be made. Morrowspan is to win the race.
"The race to be won is for an environment fit for humans. I don't want to keep using the same metaphor, for they all break down, as you well know.
"We have problems, but these are mere statements of the gap between where we are now and where we want to be -- the gap between the present condition and objectives. The objectives are many, but they group around an idea of a sustaining, humanizing environment -- the creation of environmental systems that rarely constrain people, that provide them with the freedoms and resources to explore and discover who they can become. Of course it is the professional wild faunal system manager upon whom we focus, but the field is all encompassing when it is true to itself.
"Morrowspan is Machiavellian, in the earlier sense. The ends are so important, eroding so fast, and counter forces seem so unalterable, that the means are justified.
"The end is a rich, full, sustaining environment for animals - wild and human.
"Morrowspan is to educate 50 leaders in natural resource management and to see that they are securely positioned in 11 years. We have one year to prepare, one year to recruit, five years to educate and four years to move people into the places of power."
His analysis was presented with the crispness of a mission for pilots raiding enemy territory.
"We must recruit 100 superior people. We shall expect 50 survivors. Those leaving us will not be wasted. Our loss rate will be less than the current 30 percent of average university freshmen.
"We shall recruit internationally from superior, highly motivated high school level graduates. The program will begin in July in two years," he said.
"The first summer will be spent at a mountain camp where we will develop the group bonds and motivations. The structured program in this first three months will be physical conditioning and comprehensive health development; leadership training; speed-reading; Spanish; and study skills. Later we shall live and dine together in our own dormitory. The key processes will be to take an exam on every possible class of interest in the university. Tutors will be provided for this purpose. When teachers treat courses cheaply, then we shall get out of them cheaply and move on to the substantive materials and processes of our design. We shall be aided by a rich resource of self-teaching, branching TV materials, many with compressed speech. We already know we can hear and think four times faster than we talk. We will tape our tutoring sessions and compress them, becoming progressively our own best teachers.
"The steps of our process for students:
"Then we shall engage in a planned field school in which we will learn the major Families of the world plants. These will be in total emersion sessions. Four hours per day. Then we shall have field work that includes every reasonable use of muscle and field equipment. The emphasis will be on shaping and moving water and earth. Every day starts with introduction via TV to land and water manipulation. Every day concludes with cultural analyses of a biome. Every evening there are presentations and exercises in group leadership and management. Conversational Spanish lessons continue both in the field and along educational trails where exercise is combined with key linguistic steps.
"Of course other people and groups have had these elements of their programs," said Ted, having handed out the lists on opposite sides of a small plastic-covered card. "Few will have had them all or applied them as we shall in so narrow a field. "
"Introduction to French begins in the second year. In the second year emphases are on maximal use of high-priced physical facilities of existing university laboratories, e.g. chemistry and physics, then extensive use of superior, edited TV programs. "Test out; test out" is our slogan. The dormitory meals are special celebrations of accomplishment and rewards, of bond building, and of becoming familiar with the international personalities with whom the people of Morrowspan must deal.
"Little time is to be spent in what is now commonly called extra curricular work. The pressures will be too intense. Morrowspan will be so rich it will encompass the "extra" of the extra curricula. The pleasures will be too great in-house; the variety and diversity sufficient to meet anyone's needs.
"Part of the substantive difference in our group will be mutual support. No one gets stuck. There is and will remain a framework, a network of support within the group. Everyone's strengths are built; everyone's weaknesses are worked on but acknowledged and every genuine weakness is paired with at least two people with strengths in an area.
"Do you remember in the 'Ugly American' the vivid accounts of the long diplomatic training received by some ambassadors. And how, by contrast, we have none within this realm. Other countries took diplomacy seriously. Morrowspan is an effort to take renewable natural resource management very, very seriously. Wild fauna status is a way to "keep score" just as profits are a way to keep score on industrial performance.
"I need your help. The environment for billions of people for a century are dependent upon our success."
He was taking a little longer than intended. Several stirred. All were frowning thoughtfully and two cautiously raised a finger to get his attention for interrupting.
"Let me continue so that you seen the intended structure.
"After the second year - half in the basics, half in the resource area, comes the summer of change. During this period are stressed (1) conditioning, (2) language, (3) work with computer simulation models of increasing complex systems, and (4) group processes including use of all of the educational and related media. Students will work in a space that looks like a small NASA mission control center, a part of The Didactron.
"The computer models will include an endocrine system, then the deer, then a deer population, then a soil, then a watershed, then a deer in a watershed, then a 10-species group of animals in a forested watershed, then dairy goats in a multi-watershed county, then management of five resources of a multi-county region. The process flows. The machine is kind. As students learn and play against it's knowledge and computations, it may say 'try again,' but eventually it says 'incredibly silly; 'get help' and ultimately 'there is no more help available; sacrifice a goat.'
"During the third year, two months are to be spent in independent work in a studio creating a presentation to be judged by a team of examiners - half unknown and not within the school. A large monetary prize will be awarded. Part of an entire management plan for an area is developed to achieve a set of pre-stated objectives. These presentations are to be a major public event and may eventually become the basis for national competition -- replacing the kiddy-show quiz trivia and irrelevant teacher-student tete-a-tete of the wildlife students 'conclaves' that started in the mid-70's,
"The large, illuminated, displays of managerial areas will have required synthesis of much of what had been learned and they will have required thoughtful integration, goal-oriented problem-solving, as well as presentation skills.
"In the early spring of the third year a national field trip will be conducted. Lectures will be made along the trip and it must be carefully planned so as not to waste one minute of it. We must see great people, visit key areas, and comprehend this country -- from a deep mine to an ocean ship. We will slog in a marsh, kick sand in a desert, and lay on our backs in the mossy wilderness of a Pacific forest. The trip must include language, conditioning, lectures and group processes.
"In the fall of the third year, a trip will be made to Paris (France), Moscow (Russia), Rome (Italy), El Anin (Spanish Sahara), Ouagadougou (Upper Volta), Nairobi (Kenya), Katmandu (Nepal), Harbin (China), and Mexico City (Mexico).
"Graduation will occur in June of the fourth year with students having equivalents of master degrees. Employment opportunities for them will have been carefully sought out and well known skills of positioning graduates used.
"The key strategies are to get graduates located where they can influence the most acres with the most valued wildlife, where law or policy can be set to exercise the power of the decision pen, where critically-scarce nitrogen or phosphorous is controlled, where information systems and models converge, where nominal leaders can be taught, and where special schools can be created. We need people where trails, demonstration areas, test areas, war-rooms, computer simulations, high technology random-access video discs and compressed speech can be used to expedite the passage of information to those who are hungry for it.
"Morrowspan creates superb generalists; but each with a specialty. Each one will also have their own personal international staff of 50 colleagues, all of us, pledged to mutual assistance. The natural leanings, interests, and talents of each will be known and shared regularly by computer. Electronic mail and the Internet will unify them. Their correspondence and books are a mere Internet link or diskette away. They are helper and helped, bound in a vast conceptual and electronic network spanning the world.
"They, as a group, sense the urgency of the resource issues - but know the meaning of the China wall and the Roman aquaducts and at least they get started."
* * *
In the first year the plan had gone well. The camaraderie had been very high - higher than expected. People deliver much when much is expected. Tutoring and group help had gone well but had run aground on a well-meaning but anachronistic student honor system. Because the educational work was highly interactive, students were fearful of being accused of violations and their fears slowed the progress. Within two years the legal and policy issues had been resolved, but it became clear that the unit should move to the Didactron.
Ted had been almost exhausted in the first year by litigation over the death of one student due to bee stings. Hers was a hyper-allergenic response and she had been stung by five bees at one exercise point along a trail. There had been a suit by her parents. It was won by the school, but it was expensive and caused new lines in Ted's face.
Claims of elitism from the university had grown like weeds and the staff had countered with … "certainly …and "on purpose." There is an elite problem facing us!"
Unequal education was countered with 'already unequal! Note the football squad! Already unequal -- note the public costs and personal returns of the veterinary student compared to the English major!'
"Trade school" claimed others.
"Compare the courses; arrange a competition. Morrowspan graduates will stand for any liberal arts competition."
"There is no time for contemplation; assimilation."
"There is planned time in the program. It is enforced; there are assimilation and synthesis aids. There is required public speaking, debate, and extensive writing -- the greatest aids for synthesis. Assimilation in the present system is only hoped for. No one asserts that it now occurs or in what frequency or amount. Morrowspan students are tested for the assimilation that has occurred. Where else is the university in this dared?"
"There is evil intent -- this is counter intelligence; a CIA tactic -- it is subversion."
The counter was "You will have to prove evil intent. Our objectives are singular and often stated -- a fit environment for people …that includes desirable populations of wild fauna …well-aware of their costs as well as benefits. We believe it will not ''just happen.' We feel it is too important to bet our human existence on the random workings of 2000 variously educated or trained natural resource agents, in various stages of out-datedness, led by ill-informed, and selfish people intent upon agency-building. Agencies can neither sustain their budgets nor populations dependent upon sophisticated management. There is little surety that they will lead us to a fit, high quality environment for all people over the next 150 years. That is too big a gamble.
"Morrowspan is self consciously subversive, for we are seeking to enter (infiltrate if necessary) the ranks of agencies, corporations, and organizations and create new ones as needed to cause the desired changes and create the new situations in which these environments will be shaped."
Costs for the trips, apparently enormous to the group in that first meeting, were worked out within the Didactron with agencies, foundations, and professionals around the world. In all cases minimal accommodations were used; long-term contracts with transport systems were arranged; and costs were well known by all being recruited. There were only a few travel scholarships but these were beginning to increase as the program gained convincing status. The Morrowspan Foundation assisted students. The costs seemed high but the time required was much less than for current programs and for far superior outcomes.
After the first graduates emerged, two of them had developed commercial educational tours for agency leaders along the same lines as the Morrowspan tours. One even used the same route at a slightly different time. Ten graduates were working in a co-authorship 'cell' or working group. They created a 'paper factory.' They would do the preliminaries, do general research, cite the past work, sketch the outlines, and would become junior authors for people in the field doing lab and field. The scientific papers rolled out onto the Internet and the authors gained the recognition for moving up in the ranks where they could gain power.
The power they provided went directly to one group of three graduates who together developed a consulting firm to reduce wild animal problems at refugee camps and developing communities. The net gains for people had been learned well. Another group specialized in security for national parks and forests for they were being taken over by urban gangs. Poaching, timber trespass, and drug-plant growing was evidently increasing and recreational hunting and fishing were decreasing, partially out of fear of encountering such people. Another graduate group worked with the large predators that were also causing decreased wild land use by people. They held that wolves, for example as in Europe, do attack people and rapidly evolve a fear of people with guns (as in early U.S. history). That significant fear of armed people does not exist in newly-introduced wolf populations. Regaining that fear within wolves was imperative to avoid losing access to the wild country, but the means for doing so were anathema for a small vocal group collectively representing a desire for 'more wolves in more places,' 'no guns (illegal in National Parks),' and 'kill no animals.'
Four others were producing general purpose resource images. These were things of beauty and when local images were interspersed with them, the audiences responded well. The popularity of their colleagues using the images grew among an expanding urban audience.
Computer programs were widely circulated. A common set of programs were available on the Internet for ready access worldwide and it was growing. Units were available for down-loading to pocket equipment. Not caught up in the tedium of hardware maintenance or interface changes with their terminals, they ran circles around the group still thinking they were in the "computer revolution" that slowly started in the 1960's.
They saw their colleagues burdened with personal computers as people in an undeveloped country still doing their laundry by pounding it on a rock. There was no sense of superiority… or pity…only the positive sense of opportunity for a giant step forward. They had -- and used -- somewhat selfishly -- the power of the computer.
More moves to accredit wildlife schools began to emerge, not for positive reasons but partially to suppress Morrowspan. More meetings … more litigation … more defense… less time spent on creative education and strategic planning and continuing to add to and strengthen the strands of the web that was beginning to span the world.
The first signs that a post-graduation school could be created were evident. The returning Morrowspan graduates would gain the latest developments, work through the educational units, share with students, and contribute to a growing foundation devoted to supporting the development of educational technology and field trips. A skillful tax deduction strategy allowed each graduate to make contributions very easily. There was no net personal loss to them and great gains for the foundation.
After the third group of Morrowspan graduates, a research and development team was formed and Morrowspan apprentices found their contributions more than matched by the rate at which "experience" opened doors for them in the agencies and organizations.
Because of a centralized data base that had been created over the years by students and others, every graduate had access to more data and related models than was available in any agency or corporation. Working from the concept of megafactors -- area, elevation, and location -- they usually could produce for themselves (and others if tactically sound) the key tools of the resource manager -- an array of complex, decision-aiding maps. The discrimination possible with seven maps, a knowledge 'chunk,' is more than the average, human mind can deal with effectively. It is more than the average mapping system can depict. They lined up on the foundation - information is power.
Information is energy-equivalent but the power which is fossil energy in oil could never be overcome by Morrowspan. Only limited penetrations of Morrowspan people could be made into the oil companies.
Only a few graduates reached the energy-use regulatory agencies. Several become key figures in energy conservation education but they were overpowered by the dominance of oil at the turn of the century. Phosphate fertilizer prices had just become limiting and reduced use was effecting crop production. Graduates were truly in key positions, but Morrowspan had been started too late. The world energy flame-out proceeded apace and Ted Henry's hope lay ahead in the managing the resources of the new world that would not be fossil-fuel driven.
He was tired. Living in the energy-stressed world made him very tired. He despaired because his late, pitiful actions had not even slowed the problem. People he knew that were active professionally were dead now and their children suffered more than he had ever dreamed.
Having run aground on the borders of several academic departments, the school had early-on picked up and moved to the Didactron. There it encountered lasting debates over where it should be located, the philosophical differences with conventional faculty, the intense territoriality over subject matter -- all led to the demise of Morrowspan. The agencies didn't know what competence or talent they wanted in employers. They only specified an academic degree. The university only gave the degree, they could never agree on the meaning of a modern education. Accreditation of departments within schools was finally accomplished. It was a rounding process and cut off the low-performing schools but also cut Morrowspan because all of its graduates had to make costly, delaying appeals, explaining their program and the advantages of their intense, planned synergistic education. Accreditation tightened the noose at great expense and no observable change (other than to make the walls higher and the existence of Morrowspan more difficult). A concept and program does not live alone. It must be fed, protected, and cared for like an infant. Many more die than live. There can be no rest for the parent. A good life is possible when there are at least two parents.
Ted sought to have two other 'parents' of different ages -- partially as a failsafe mechanism, partially to assure gradual succession of leadership -- like a mixed-age forest.
An effort to move out of the university to escape the brutal turf battles and consequent impediments caused one of these leaders to be lost. A new, mindless, Civil Service group tightened the requirements, partially due to a recently-released accreditation report. The hope of achieving Morrowspan objectives began to wane. No one opposed the "experimental approach" when it started. When it became more than that - a looming, powerful reality - it became evident it was a competitor and an intolerable threat, evident threat to a nationwide, tax-supported network of resource-education programs.
Enough Morrowspan graduates could not be gotten into the ranks of the professors of the voting schools quickly enough to create a viable voting block or influential group. One day it was ambushed at the budgetary pass and within six months its faculty reassigned, some moved out, and students were allowed to enter various conventional programs.
At his bedside a few heard Ted say, "They are hallowed things. Resources are sacred. They are so sacred that they must be handled with reverence. They are rich, fundamental, eternal. They must be handled as other sacred things in an orderly, caring, careful way. They need to be guarded, tended, and touched only by the priests. The priests, the priests -- where are they?"
"Pray for the priests," he whispered, and the spanner died. He could not hear the words of one of his students.
"The priests are gathering."
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Last revision January, 2008.