Questions from Fred Swanson

From Fred Swanson, H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest:

I was asked to write an essay to be one of six in a set to appear in Ecosphere (ESA on-line journal) for next year's ESA centennial. Title something like: "Ecology, the Arts, and Humanities: Confluences at Sites of Long-Term, Place-Based Inquiry" (too long, but gives the scope). It's not a book. I'm not an expert, but have been involved with colleagues in pushing the cause in some circles for quite a few years and tracked some of the OBFS action via our Andrews OBFS representative Mark Schulze. I've been working mainly in the LTER and USFS Exp. Forests and Ranges networks because of tighter personal fit in them.

Recent interactions with Art and Mike Lannoo got me wondering about status of the FSMLs - about how many (what fraction of the 270 OBFS sites in round numbers - same for the 120 NAMLs - are these numbers right?) have some arts/humanities action? is there a rough sense of the class vs. residency split (if there is such a thing)? I get the picture that practical motivations of class and student numbers are prime, but just the pleasure and inspiration of it is important too. ??

The paper prep has me viewing the situation as one of lots of highly dispersed action at the ecology-arts-humanities confluence happening at many dozens of sites of long-term inquiry, but it is quite cryptic - not easily located on many site/program webpages, I know of only one webpage that tries to show profiles of many sites (www.ecologicalreflections.com - it's simple, poorly kept-up, incomplete), and there is no overarching system of communication - there's some emerging, grassroots communication in LTER (workshops at the 3-yr All Scientists Meetings) and FSML (the blog you just turned me onto - thank you). Do you see it that way too?...