There are caves and buildings, bushes and brushpiles, and they are all called "cover." Wildlife are said, by one paradigm, to be managed by working with food and cover. To get wildlife, usually game species, the managers increase food and cover. Cover is many things, but it is never discussed as much as food. I am of the view, based in part on Seth Diamond's modeling studies of pre-settlement people (Chapter 8) that for many large animals (resident birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians), cover is more important than food. (More or less is a silly question for ecologists, akin to a Shakespearean "Which pound of flesh?") During periods of stress, cooling or preventing body heat loss is absolutely critical. It is so important and so unlikely that some animals "shut down" completely. They hibernate; they turn off metabolism to the lowest level possible.

Nighttime is profound cover. It is not the cover that a nice cozy woodpecker hole might provide a squirrel in winter. It is not a brushpile that provides a rabbit escape from a fox. It is the omnipresent dark that provides escape cover for many animals from most predators. Hiding and sensing the environment are energy costly. Think of a deer: always looking, listening, turning, never taking more than a bite or two, then raising its head - and sensing - eyes, ears, nose working, working. Costly energy.

The white-footed mouse comes out at night. Its "bug eyes" are giant light collectors, photo receptors. Its long whiskers protect it, especially its protruding eyes, for they too sense the night environment when the eyes fail. Moles stay underground in complete cover. Their eyes are minuscule, hardly needed. Why devote energy to scarcely-used structures? The mole (Scalopus) invests in the olfactory sense, the nose, powerful digging "hands," and slick hair, frictionless.

Every strategy begets another. The night creatures benefit from night as their cover. The woods are alive at night. The good times didn't last long. Enter the owls, evolutionary stage-left. If the resource is available, respond to it. "Get energy" is the rule. They feed at night, mostly upon mice. Over the fields they take the meadow vole, Microtus. In the woods, the white-footed mouse is prey, Peromyscus. "Microtine" or "peromycine" are the ugly sounding words describing the general base of the food supply of the predators. These are the coin of the predator manager's realm.

In my small mammal studies in Ohio, I, like many others, tried to relate success of our live-traps taking Peromyscus to the moon phase. We knew there were differences. Hundreds of traps over 40 acres caught many mice one night, few the next. What was the cause? What type of night should I sample to get the most mice and yet reduce my trapping efforts? (I needed to know the number of mice because I hypothesized that spraying a large forest area with an insecticide would reduce this number.) I found no correlation with moon phase.

Over the years I've remained perplexed. Given another life or more effectiveness at selling ideas of research, I'd work on lunar forces. I picked "moon phase." It is so gross, I now am embarrassed to admit I used it. There are dozens of lunar measures I would now use. I still believe the activity of creatures at night is profoundly affected by moon measures like luminescence, percent of "full," angle, and distance from Earth.

There are Earth tides. I've only recently learned of them. Like ocean tides, water in wells fluctuates. Water in springs does too, thus crayfish and other creatures are affected by depths. Some may have to move to vulnerable locations once an orbit. Raccoons, night-time foragers, crayfish or crawdad junkies, know this. Insects are very responsible to lunar conditions, some fish migrate and breed conspicuously (I suspect, therefore, other do also, less conspicuously). As I watch the fire at Peculiar Manor, I am pulled to the power of the energy model for wildlife and other wildland management. Outside, the moon bedazzles a cloud above the rim of Fort Lewis Mountain. The sun is in charge of biological Rule No.1, "get energy," but the moon over Havens (and maybe a few other places) reins over Rules 2 and 3; "store energy, prevent its loss," and "reproduce." The night world has secrets; lunar forces at work. They raise the hair on the neck of the objective scientist when, standing in moon shadow, the screech owl gives its plaintive wavering call close by and a great horned owl hoots up within the hemlocks.

Solar

Aaron Moen taught me about the importance of energy in a workshop years ago. Roy Kirkpatrick taught me more about its role in the diet and behavior of animals. Tom Odum's articles and books teach and beckon me to fuller understanding. I only sense what I do not know about solar radiation (fancy for "sunlight") and energy in the system of people. I know it is greater than what I do now. I've come to understand that if you follow a life pathway, as if in the night, and shine a "flashlight" or electric torch on everything as you go, to see, understand, avoid danger, then the best light will be "energy." Maybe this is a useful image for the word "paradigm" or the phrase "systems approach" which is a paradigm. The symbolism of using a flashlight along a trail at night includes the ideas that other things are seen at the edges of the beam. There are sounds and smells, spider webs and fog-mist, but the light is dominant, main.

Everyone knows, I once thought, that the only energy on Earth is from the sun. Sure, plants collect it, but even hydro-electricity comes from a solar-evaporation system that lifts water back into the sky and then drops it again to flow over turbines. [Tide-energy systems may be an exception.] There just is no energy supply of great significant for millions of people except that from the sun. Oil and gas are old energy, that collected in plants. They were following the second rule: "store energy," and were trapped while doing it. We now benefit. I despair, because I see no one who understands that the available supply of oil and gas are limited. My view of limits is my Mongolian campers here 9,000 years ago, burning the fir broken by hand because there were no axes. My view is a mere 500 years since a European was said to have landed, only 300 since colonization. The estimates I see say we'll use up all readily available supplies in less than 100 years.

As I look at my arrow points on the fireside table, it dawns on me that these periods displayed are what soon (less than a mere 100 years) will be happening here ... again. These are the best of times ... then radical change for the worst. How very, very sad. My grandchildren will live through the wind-down pain of the period. It will be the period in which we used up all of our fossil energy. There may be some technological advances as in so many other fields, but these typically are alternative ways to use energy, usually more if it. We can gain hope only if we can find a new way (or the same way as plants now use) to trap energy. The key is photosynthesis. Without it, energy is lost, un-recyclable, always heading for cosmic otherness.

The sun shines on the black roadway in front of Peculiar Manor. It absorbs energy during the day, radiates it at night. Snakes and cold-blooded creatures use it to gain their warmth, their energy when they experience a shortage. Otherwise they get it from the fat of the animals they eat, prey calories. The roadway is a simple system - input and output; no feedback. The beauty of biology is feedback. From one perspective, that's what it has that nothing else has - the ability to capture energy (which the roadway has) but also to store it and prevent its loss.

Energy, like some nervous guest, is always leaving. The tendency is called entropy and in natural systems is viewed as dispersion or the movement to randomness. The dead mouse at the back door is decomposing, undergoing entropy. The chunk of redbud I just threw into the fire is burning, the state of near-maximum dispersion when the atomic structure is separated from its energy.

Energy is so precious. All of the energy required to produce honey makes me want to lick dry every spoon used to dip it. The enormous amounts of sunlight that passes to plants to bees to hive to honey. In this stuff - sugar - is the bound energy holding carbon and hydrogen and oxygen together in a special, beautiful yellow way. When I eat it, I "get energy;" I break the chemical bonds (read: "digest") and re-combine some of it into my body, but I lose some of it. That's the law! Whenever anyone ... plant, animal, or fireside watcher - changes energy from one form to another then energy is lost. That is called the second law of thermodynamics. It just means that we can always expect entropy. The survivors learn to live with it; the survivors learn (read: "mutate") how to transform it efficiently and how to capture it before all is lost ... at least for a little while. Alas, all is lost, eventually. Entropy wins.

The fireplace at Peculiar Manor is large and simple. Put in wood and burn it. Most of the time smoke behaves as it should. An occasional slow fire and outside wind will send dry clouds around the mantle. Energy in, energy out. No dampers, no nothing. As straight a line as in a bear or snail. No convolutions to grab extra energy (or as in the bear or snail, nutrients and calories). Modern wood stoves send heat through pipes and chambers, even water radiators, to absorb the heat before it leaves the chimney complete with smoke waving a good-bye as energy continues on its cosmic voyage. A straight simple chimney befits a log cabin. No electric blowers, no glass doors. To have these would be like putting a telescope on a muzzleloader. My dad put one on a saddle rifle ... poor thing ... like a 60-year old in a miniskirt. Some people don't understand how I feel about that gun and the explanation is not worth the trouble or they can't understand anyway. I feel the same way about archery. I want to perfect a hand-thrown small spear, perhaps with a throwing stone. That was the way the small group at the spring out back did it. They were good at it. So were later groups, off and on, good or learning over and over again. Even then, some never got the message. The long bow was efficient, but only in the hands of patient hunters who had good eyesight and hearing. The others were lost. Life expectancy was 30 or less. The bow, as now, was for short-range food gathering. It was a technological invention that reduced the energy of the chase, reduced the disgusting and disease-producing meals of carrion (which were once the only source of human meat), and gained energy and protein in sufficient amounts. The modern bow with multiple joints, wheels, sights, etc., etc. is a technological wonder. It bears so little resemblance to the bow and arrow of the former people of my camp that I hardly want to call its use "archery." Using these instruments is a new sport with a hint of origin among primitive people. The compound bow is as far removed from the first bow and arrow use as the commercial feathered and belled "native American" dancing at a rodeo is from the pre-settlement dancer on the ridge, describing how he watched a courting turkey gobbler, then shot it with his newly pared point. I can hear the laughter from 5,000 years ago on quiet nights. That guy had the feathers all stuck in two twisted vines around his waist. They all stuck out behind and he carried both wings in this hands. He circled, making the same moves as the old bird, very serious, exact. Then a feather caught on fire! Everyone rolled over in the leaves with laughter.

Dancing, story telling, growing-up together, feeding and foraging together. These are anti-entropy forces in human groups. Modern people call it negentropy. I sit alone before the fire.

Smokechasing

Forty years ago I was a smokechaser. That is a forest fire fighter who doesn't jump out of airplanes, the smoke jumper. I was in a group trained at a Deschutes forest area in Oregon; we then worked our respective areas. The fire season being delayed by rain, we become trail builders. We dug out a trail for hikers and horses on Mule Mountain, but as it turned out, for use by a mule string on my mountain. There was a fire lookout cabin on a rocky pinnacle on the top of Mule Mountain. It was to be my home for several months. Not far away on a lesser point was a "crow's nest," a platform in a tree top where I really spent my summer. The mules were to bring all of the structures to replace my tree perch. Every few days for weeks, the mules would arrive carrying boxes of metal fasteners and beams, one on each side, lashing two mules together.

Those days in Oregon are crystal clear as I sit by the fire thinking of the good times. The time was right. I was deeply involved in school. I was going to be a forester of some type. I yearned for the experience (I do not recall ever using the phrase "need the experience" and I never heard of a resume, the construction of which now begins in the freshman year). The trail crew lived in a bunkhouse. I remember the old man who would get up early, fail to use his hearing aid, and would noisily (to him soundlessly) creep around moving books, throwing out bottles, clearing the sink and doing other quiet chores.

I learned that mules only understood cussing and swearing. The evil veneer of such language seen from my churchly upbringing soon disappeared. Behind it, like so many other layers, social as well "things we know that are not so," was a man of intellect and caring ... especially for mules and horses, less so for people.

By the fire, I am arm-weary from building trails around the place. There are now several miles of them on the contour. I learned about trails, their proper steepness, cutbacks of trees and branches, and surface. What I really learned was that they, the forest staff, more consciously or otherwise was getting me to build trails was getting me in shape to carry a pack for miles alone into the forest using a compass to find and put out alone fires produced by lighting strikes.

From my perch or cabin, I called in sightings on "smokes" in the forest. Other smoke chasers went after these. When they were relatively close by, I went after them.

I learned that trails are needed if land is to be used by people ... a mountain side seen from a distance is pretty, nice, confidence building, but meaningless to most people. They cannot get to it, get into it; they cannot enjoy, use, or otherwise benefit from it. Trails provide opportunity.

The ecologist, Margalef, commented in some text that trails are energy devices. I related to them, with his help, as from the old saying, "A penny saved is a penny earned." A penny is like a calorie. You can either save one (not spend it) or go and work to get one. If a trail saves an elk or other animal a thousand calories, this is a thousand calories that does not have to be pulled from bushes, ground, and digested. A trail provides for energy budgeting, for balancing. A trail is never considered animal "cover," they are exposed on them. However, they perform the same in reducing the need for taking in calories as a dense grove of conifers provides an animal for getting out of the wind. Energy saved from loss - emptied from the body by entropy - is the same as that needed to be taken in. Once taken in, there is enormous loss (the second-law principle). Trails, for people or beasts, are wonderful things. They are found or made by animals but people can create better ones that are long lasting and have less erosion than those made by deer or elk. Nature does not know best.

A trail to deer is like a paradigm to a scientist. Once on it, the risks are reduced. A trail is visible; if only one creature had walked this way, there would be no path - it would have been killed, fallen, etc., etc. Trails suggest "good," conditions that are risk-free. It is hard not to use a trail. To go off the trail means stumbling, falling, dangers of all types - but you see things others miss ... sometimes. Tired days are trail days; off the trial is not worth the effort (energy) or risk.

Before the fire your thoughts are as variable as the colors and shapes of the flames, but the fire is constant. I think wildland managers must somehow deal with deer and elk, trails and wilderness, lightning and fire, energy in food and energy not related to conventional cover. It is all flame-like, still the fire.

I learned about trails, but I learned the most about the smell of work, mules, Douglas fir, deep soil. I learned of rolling rocks into place and the joy of work together. Daily visible progress was very, very satisfying. I long for it again, for it is rarely seen among students, semi-complete journal papers, interdisciplinary research efforts, and academic committees. We never reach the top as in building a trail. Rarely do we even know our destination.

Your own private fire in the forest is nothing like that in the Peculiar Manor fireplace. Without training or youthful willingness to reject odds, none of these fires would be put out. By the time you hike to these places, you can have a big fire going, a few trees and a half-acre or so. You prepare to spend time to sleep with the enemy until it is "out" and even longer because they are rarely out, just entropy in waiting. Rarely near water (you carry a collapsed water bag with a hand spray pump), you dig a fire line, throw dirt to suppress the flames and chop down trees to stop the sparkler-like-spread of new fires. You seek out water after it is under control, then you pamper it, cleaning and scraping every branch, caressing each black limb to assure no spark remains. After 20 non-stop hours, you sleep after eating a can of food, it too in your heavy pack. The short-handled shovel is an amazing tool, good for everything. The other, dear evil incarnate, is the Pulaski. It is a double-bitted axe with one "bit" turned sideways into a sharp grubbing hoe. Maybe it is a hoe with an axe attached. Perspective! I built trails with one. One day, a day's-ride into the wilds, I was working on repairing an old trail. I was using the Pulaski when my feet slipped away. Spread out, stomach to the sliding tallus, I slid down the bank. My unfailing Pulaski partner came with me, sliced into my thumb and, with me, slid to rest at the bottom. The intricate details of trail building, saws binding in down logs, and stream crossings, were nothing compared to the logistical problems of getting a one-handed person to a doctor for stitches and leaving a too-small crew to continue work. Shortly afterwards, I was sent to the mountain, where, alone in the Mule Mountain cabin, I read, studied, read, watched and learned by telephone about other tower guards, the woods, coyotes, birds, lightning, volcanic soils, persistent snow-drifts, and carrying water for all needs from far down the mountain. I was collecting parts, laying out pieces for a structure to be built. There was no blueprint; parts would never be used. I'll not label them wasted.

I know nothing of building but I can imagine the work required for a skyscraper in a crowded inner-city. The plans are needed, not only for the total, but the sequence with which the parts must be brought in and assembled to assure space is available for the next parts, in transit from all parts of the world. It is an amazing image for me. I hold that it can (and should) be used for people building. Too easily rejected, the image at least ought to be used for something as important as a natural resource system, at least as complex as a skyscraper.

Landscape Ecology

There are so many scientific words and phrases being promoted by scientists these days to cast doubt on science. Diversity has multiple meanings. Multiple-use, forever in difficulty, was replaced by new perspectives, quickly rescued by ecosystem management, also in trouble as a non-definition, a denotation of a thing without substance. Landscape ecology is a simple invention but it will persist like other things with just enough good to make them tolerable. Landscapes are hard to define. I prefer pointing: "From here, all that you can see," or "Everything inside of the green line there on the map." Ecology, once the study of relations of plants and animals, now means no more than a vague suggestion that there are cause-effect relations wherever you look. Outdoors, not indoors, and over a large area (several square miles at least and probably more than 20,000 acres) are the distinctive aspects of most work called landscape ecology. Beyond this, people address the array of topics over the years: edge, patterns, contiguity, mathematical distribution, the importance of spatial effects, whole watershed or basin management. The emphasis, the deeply-held, nearly-religious belief that there is more here than meets the eye, is enough to sustain the field of inquiry. Perhaps there is. Whatever it is called, "Topic X," there is, said Richard Forman, a recurring topic in conferences and publications of many very different groups. Large area, spatial analyses, pattern detection, displaced cause and effect, the similarity of small processes, also at large scales ...these are the sketched boundaries. There is something worthy of study and articulate. How can we understand, comprehend whole regions? Are there processes there that do not exist elsewhere? Can we see phenomena at the regional scale not seen when working with individual animals or small groups and within forest stands? If so, maybe we have missed noticing them in the past.

I am angry with those who named the creation. If the name is so poor, how can success be assured. I feel the same way about ecosystem management even wildlife management. After getting over anger, like that temporarily felt to a loving wife, or the surprise of the high nasal voice of a beautiful female writer, then its contribution might be received. I await, trying to suspend anger and surprise. Perhaps adding additional questions and their conservative influence on land use decisions may justify its existence and academic pursuit. Suggesting that land managers need to think at a larger scale is not very new but needed emphasis. It will be a long time before the millions spent on salaries, academic time, and direct funds pay off in statistically significantly different improvements in land use decisions. I'm old enough and tenured so that I can admit skepticism. Few young professors can risk coming out. I shall be pleased to be shown to be wrong. There will be little pleasure in the pain I know that will be felt by others if I am right. By analogy, I just wish they'd stop calling football "golf!"

Rangers

I completed training as a U.S. Army ranger in 1959. My tab is on the fireplace mantle. It was a step on the path to becoming a competent second lieutenant, confidence I did not feel after Reserve Officers Training Courses.

There are tales, long ones, to be told of that experience. By the fire, I remember the principle more than the practice. Their mission at the time was to infiltrate the Reserves and improve combat readiness. I struggle with the educational concepts I encountered in that experience now that I am past warrior age (but not ability). This was the best of military education in our years in the university and months in the officers' course. I yearn for how I might be involved in such education in the university. Where is the Ranger-force in wildland education? I have doubts, for maybe we were not educated, but trained. Maybe the intensive, realistic, challenging program with high drop-out rate is not what agencies or tuition-paying parents want or will tolerate.

Computer simulations of real things and situations likely to be encountered are helpful in classes, but I imagine better. I recall a demonstration in a Ranger class in a wooded amphitheater, a soldier "mouthing off" and refusing an order and ... then the exercise stopped. An instructor asked class members what they would do, then quickly game the "school solution." There were options as well as a best possible answer. The situation picked up again, then stopped. More questions, more answers. Involvement without interminable groundless, uninformed opinions ... no awards for idiots to keep talking, keeping the verbal ball bouncing, never going for a win.

There might emerge some day a Ranger-force attitude in some university, but I doubt it. It will probably occur in a private company that will provide guaranteed competencies and greater behavioral change per dollar than any university. The competency is largely in selection, team unity and synergistic action, superior training, superior equipment, great "intelligence" about a situation, a willingness to take risks, and clear leadership toward a stated objective.

Recent military failures, saying nothing about resource failures, have been due to ambiguous or non-stated objectives. That may prevent the Ranger-force in wildland resource work from every emerging. Beside the fire, I have such fun imagining what my 20 Ranger-like wildland warriors, backed by computers, knowledge base, and support staff, would do to natural resource management throughout the world. The effect would be conspicuous in three years. We are trapped by educational convention, in a century-old rut Once a person gets onto a fine trail, superior people seem to get a superior education. The remainder "get a degree," graduate, and exist in the agency. The Army saw the need for Rangers - the standard, military ways were not working. We now have a hundred excuses but few reasons to change our educational procedures. So did the Army. There may be opportunities for change. I suspect so. Somehow the need, the crises, the importance, is not yet seen by enough people. When it is seen by a few people with decision power, then it will change. The "general public" is imaginary and, if not, in a democracy, about half of them will vote against conditions for their self-betterment.

The Level

My back is so tired I despair of standing upright. I've created trails throughout the area, stoneworm tracks. I've built terraces for daffodils, and every branch or fallen tree of moveable size, I've placed level, on the contour. This is a sandy mountain on the move. The goats that were herded over it, as if by Heidi on a Swiss mountain, destroyed much of its vegetation. I worked to reclaim its stability. I mowed grass on the contour, gardened the contour, put wooden pallets in gullies in stair steps, make meanderers in the intermittent stream by the cabin, stair-stepped its upper oozings. It worked!

My stream banks erode. I see silt in the water, so natural. Now as a landowner paying high taxes on my land, I see pennies and nickels in the water as my banks fall in and are washed away to my neighbor, who cares not and loses more than I. A foot a year from a stream bank chewed away over 100 feet is a loss of 100 square feet, no, 300 cubic feet, about 11 cubic yards. I just paid a lot of money to buy a load of rocks to stop that soil loss. As a taxpayer, I pay the Corps of Engineers to scoop silt out of the bays of the Eastern U.S., about a dollar a cubic yard. My stream bank, now silt and sand, goes into the Smith Mountain Lake Reservoir so I feel no less badly about the loss of effectiveness of the lake in flood control, power production, or recreation. I'll pay. I'll lose along 100 feet of my stream a whole acre in 436 years. Too long to be realistic! I have 1,200 feet of stream, 2 sides. I'll lose the equivalent of an acre of land at this rate of erosion, at least top soil, every 18 years! I cannot afford it. No person, no society can, either in direct on-site loss, losses along the way, or costs of clean-up, scooped out later on. My notion of time is not 18 years, but the changes since my post-Pleistocene campers walked beside the stream. If an inch of soil washed off the top of my garden for 9,000 years, back then, my garden would have been 250 yards above my head. It was! These are old mountains, and even though forested, there was active soil movement. Some say that over millions of years, not thousands, these mountains were as high as the Himalayas - five miles above sea level. I find thinking of 9,000 years difficult, but now easier because I have a collection of points to which I can relate. I now believe that studying geology is not about rocks, minerals, strata, or fossils, but about time¹.

In China I saw some of the work done on the level. Not only is there beauty in the work, but there is extra beauty because of the work that people who work appreciate. I believe I was observing what we will some day learn, or re-learn, about tending the land and growing plants on it. You must retain the moisture and the nutrients. That must be done on the level. The human body has feedback operations, resisting entropy. When the people in the landscape develop feedback options, then they will have met the other profound enemy ... gravity. The very definition of energy, however, involves the work that is required to lift an object, to overcome gravity. We must lift water, haul fertilizer up the hill. All is energy cost and loss; the soldier in entropy's army is gravity. A society that builds structure, resists erosion, operates and thinks "on the level" will out-survive a similar one that does not.

Sequential

Not long ago, a reviewer commented on another of my manuscripts and suggested I not use a "stream of conscious" style. By the fire, that is the way thoughts seem to progress. There is no progression, only a flow, more gaseous than liquid.

One of my students once complained to a parent, "He thinks sideways." I took it as a nice compliment.

In education we use paper and blackboards. We are rutted. We can only think linearly 1, 2, 3. I use a tetrahedron in many classes. Students often see the form, not the principle or function. Form will not, as architects claim, follow function. I use the regular tetrahedron, the completely triangulated, 4-sided volume to suggest a new order, non-linear, non-sequential. If an idea was located at each vertex and all were equally related (symbolized by the lines connecting them), then the thing can be tossed onto a table and, at random, a new idea will be on top and there will be a 3-idea base. The ideas are of equal importance. Maybe they should be laid out in a lie, on the contour, but the one at the left edge seems, due to culture, the most important. We could put them in a circle, but the closest will seem important, emphasized. the intent is to temporarily, just for the moment, suspend common practice and think of how four ideas can be placed equidistant, then at the flash of a hand or in some biochemical nanosecond, have another in its rightful place, replacing an equal idea in its rightful place. The physical model of the tetrahedron fails me. It may be a beginning. We need to think of things all at once. I admit to now believing that doing so is impossible.

I prefer the dynamic chemical model of water, it too is a tetrahedron of activity, hydrogen in the center, two oxygen atoms flipping wildly into place at the four corners of the tetrahedron, exchanging with adjacent molecules. (The surfaces of the tetrahedrons cast special light in ice crystals.)

Everything is sequential, but very fast. There are no interactions in nature, only actions, fast ones. There are no interrelations, only relations, fast cause-effect sequences as we learned in the first-courses but seem to have forgotten. If this is true, then there is little to "ecology" since it is defined by some as the study of interactions.

There are seven deer outside. If a poacher takes two of them, a computer model will subtract two, then divide the food supply among the remaining five. Then, since the better fed does are more healthy, they will produce more young than before, so next year there will be eight deer. There are feedback loops such as this one in nature. They are sequential events, some fast, some slow ... just one thing right after another.

Ackoff (1962) described research differences as sequential or simultaneous. Sequential research is tedious, pathway work, building step-by-step with confidence. "First the foundation" is the rule. It is of low risk, long duration, and has few wastes. Simultaneous research is preferred by some or for some situations. "Fund five teams and see which one achieves an answer first" may be the background. It reduces risks, shortens the time, but there may be large waste. There is no best answer; each situation is unique. As for research, there is no best answer for how to learn, how to teach, how to build a knowledge base about a resource area. Some proceed sequentially, some simultaneously. As usual, the answer to a leading question of "best" is: both." Just do it.

Ideas

I don't know where ideas come from. Since I see few really new things, I suspect that most of them come from two or more things converging in the brain. These things I visualize as within an airframe (the triangulated metal works in the ceilings of modern hotels, warehouses, and shopping malls). Perhaps the mind-flow is completely triangulated, tetrahedron wed to tetrahedron. The pathways to any node, that is a thing known, an observation, a bit of knowledge, are thus very numerous. The creative people seem to have bits of knowledge - nodes - but they are especially well wired. In them the pathways to all nodes that exist are built and open. I don't know how a protein-pathway is "closed-down" but fear or fear of embarrassment is a kind of closure of a brain pathway that prevents a bit of knowledge being retrieved (as for a test) or used (as when mulling over an idea, looking for alternatives, new fits, or special perspectives).

Some people say I have lots of ideas. I know many people who have more than I, so I ignore the comment. It is embarrassing; their measure is so shallow. I try to have ideas. It is a game, a pastime for me. It is also a sickness, for I developed somewhere along the line a cerebral infection, I think from my grandfather. It was that I should get good ideas. Good was like a virus that was transmuted into "practical" and "functional." An idea that is never used or doesn't work is not a good idea! Oh the sickness! You get 50 ideas and only have time to carry out 5. You get a great idea but do not have the resources to develop it. Dozens of times I've been "scooped," ideas presented as accomplished by someone soon after I have gotten the idea ... whatever the process of "gotten."

I have resorted to an Idea for Development file. It is within my 4-inch by 6-inch card file that I use for everything. Whenever I get an idea I write it, date it, and eventually file it. It stays at about 2 inches thick because I scan it occasionally and clean out items that are old, worked, discovered-by-someone-else, duplicates, or just junk. Ideas are hard to have. They are often fleeting. As dreams are hard to recount in the morning, so ideas are rarely possible to restate even 12 hours later. I take notes. A note pad is in the bathroom, bedside stand, and reading stand. There is no reason to let such prizes escape. I see the two black eyes of each idea, like deer mice, ready to hide. I rarely have the energy for seeking. I take notes to avoid trying to retrace the proteinaceous pathways hoping to get a duplicate image by an encounter in the mental labyrinth.

I work at getting ideas. I use "like ... or as" the simile. For example, "This situation is like - in which X worked. Thus, I think I'll try X... modified a little." I read a lot and try to relate it as I go along to wildlife management. In going to lectures, plays, etc., I am usually working, doing the same thing. Of course I'm "preoccupied," dull.

I use metaphors or models. The tetrahedron is a favorite. I use checklists. The fundamental one for me is the parts of the general system (Figure 1). If all of the parts are not included or described, then my work can begin because the new system has not been well described. It has been amazing how many things seem to be new when feedback and feedforward components are added to not-very-new solutions.

As I departed Ohio State University with a Ph.D. nearly underarm, I decided to interview 6 great people in the university. I called, got appointments, and went for a chat with each. It is one of the better things I did while there. In one discussion we talked about creativity. The Ph.D. requirements in most schools usually suggest needs for a "contribution to knowledge," "uniqueness," and other notions of creativity. We agreed; there is very little new, only the arrangement of things.

In working for ideas, for creativity, I try to arrange things. I use a technique of maxi-mini. I try to think of the greatest possible and the least possible. Often I discover that people will give a relationship that is unreal if something in nature is less than zero. Temperature is one such thing where less-than-zero is possible (Figure 2), but there are no negative nuts, nuthatches, or nightfalls. It usually means that an equation needs to be adjusted and in the adjustment is the newness. Students laugh when I require them to count the deer on an acre when deer are side-by-side, nose to tail. This just proves that equations suggesting an infinite number of deer are silly It also suggests an outside limit that suggests other limits. Why is this silly? Well - you have to have food, etc., etc. and so the real number is less than Z1 and less than Z2 and obviously more than zero, so the number must be Z! At least between Z1 and Z2. Most equations that are used in estimating populations rarely give better limits to their estimate. I call this "backing in" and I have used it to estimate potential poachers in a state. You start with: you can't have more poachers than people! The procedure almost appeared as an article in 1990 in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, but a second editor said it wasn't realistic or practical. I stuck it in another publication.

People being the "devil's advocate" has always bothered me in groups. They usually announce it as if they expect credit for it. The devil needs no help. Creative skepticism is a powerful creator. "I don't believe that" or "on what is that assumption based?" seem useful questions or points of view if they are rooted in a genuine or sincere willingness to find out, not just to be destructive. With Mike Patterson (now a Ph.D.), I pursued the notion that ecological succession starts with mosses and lichen, then proceeds to grasses, forbs, then shrubs and pines, then on to mature forests. The notion is in all of the textbooks. It starts, however, counter to reports, with entrapped dust! Any barrier (a pebble, a stick, a crevice, even a spot where a droplet of water left its ring) will have built beside it dust from "the source." It evidently is blown there. Some is brought in precipitation of all types. Some (and I think more than realized) is assembled by electromagnetic forces. (The ecological world is not limited to the world as seen by human eyes.) In this stuff the community starts. Afterwards comes rock dissolution, frost heave, organic acids, etc. This is not really new, but it gave us a feeling of discovery, of challenging the known, investigating the literature, and even putting out plots on roads on the hill overlooking Peculiar Manor and at Explore Park.

Is a good idea only one that has been tested or implemented? I don't know. I live with the virus that says yes. I know otherwise just like I know I cannot feed the world's hungry but I feel some guilt for not trying. A good plan is said to be one that has been implemented. I reject this, though I understand the argument, on the grounds that there are too many decision-makers, too many changes possible between the time a plan is begun and delivered. An excellent plan for condition A may not be good for the new condition B. Was the plan for A good? It was never implemented! Thus, no good! Planners deserve more than the implementation albatross.

I can never live with my ideas. They are like little children, zygotes, needing care, nourishment, building. I cannot find the time or resources. At least I do not kill them; I have a file, my orphanage. Ideas on cards stand like starving children. I select one now, another later, any one that suits me. Now I am old and my idea file grown. Now I not only produce more, but I subject fewer to the tests. I am old, and someday someone will say "interesting" and "quaint" and my ideas and cards will become recycled into comic book pulp or a carton in which to carry hard tomatoes.