I grew up on a cattle ranch about 15 miles due west of a small Texas town called Spur (pop. <<2000 and declining). My dad was born and raised on the ranch and has lived there most of his life. I guess I am compensating for his immobility (although the man drives all over Texas looking for cheap cattle to buy) as I have hardly been in any one place for more than a year since I graduated from high school.
My high school days were quite typical of small-town Texas: Friday night football, weekend drunken parties, driving slowly back and forth on the ‘drag’, hard-working summers on the ranch and a small circle of friends with whom I had grown up with since kindergarten. At the time, I hated it. But, now, looking back, growing up in Spur was fantastic and was a unique preparation for the things to follow. I have some great memories and it gave me a self-reliance and confidence that has carried me through many difficulties.
And it also got me into Harvard – I take tests well but my scores were not stratospheric. I just think that the Class of 1988 absolutely needed a country boy from West Texas who didn’t know Descartes from his ‘a la carte’. I can only thank the admission gods for choosing me because it changed my life, obviously. It was a wonderful new experience to be pushed to my limits. I loved the way my classmates took ideas and theories seriously. So cliché but my eyes were opened to a whole new world. And now that I am a parent, I admire my own parents’ trust and open-mindedness for sending me into such a foreign world, so disconnected from anything they knew personally.
The first big influence on me was Dr. Glynn Isaac, a small energetic man who worked in Africa on hominid evolution. I took a freshman seminar with him, just me and four other students. We met in his lab, a well-lived in, cozy space, and he gave us beer and talked to us as if we were adults. I was in awe, particularly as I read the assigned literature and there he is, the person who wrote this, and yeah, that professor who wrote this other conflicting idea said “Hello!” to me in the hallway the other day. It brought science alive for me. Instead of some dead thing you read in a textbook, where everything is completely figured out, here it was, actively being discovered and debated. I found my academic voice in those discussions.
Sadly, Dr. Isaac died suddenly of a mysterious illness during the summer of my freshman year. I had planned on following in his footsteps but now the path had vanished. Luckily, the next year, I took Dr. Mark Leighton’s course on primate evolutionary ecology and loved it. He was looking for field assistants to go work at his new research site in Indonesia. And, so instead of Kenya and archaeology, it was to be Borneo and tropical rain-forests. I took off the year between junior and senior years and volunteered as a full-time research assistant. We lived for most of that time at the Cabang Panti Research Station in the Gunung Palung National Park, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Four American students, two Indonesian students, and five or six local assistants, isolated upriver in a pristine rain-forest.
Looking back, it was the greatest privilege of my life, an experience that is now impossible in our over-connected world – if species are rapidly going extinction, there are a great number of human experiences which were previously common but have now become far too rare, virtually impossible to find in the wild anymore. We lived for months at a time in a place without doors or keys or money, surrounded by one of the greatest and most complex terrestrial ecological communities on the planet. Gibbons sang to us every morning and each day, over dinner, we told each other about the often amazing things we had seen in the forest.
I kept going back, year after year. First to assist Dr. Leighton and then on a small grant from the Conservation, Food and Health Foundation, Inc. to study the effects of selective logging in the production forest on the northern edge of the park. The results from this research were published in Science. I was not in a graduate program at the time of the research. Shows you what is possible if you just get out there and do something that no one has ever done before. The main finding is that selective logging is NOT deforestation, as many described it in the popular media. While it does do a great deal of damage to the forest and increases the potential for fire and further erosion of the forest margins, it is still forest and has a great deal of conservation value. Particularly as these secondary forests now dominate the landscape and the future of the primary forests will depend entirely on them.
Then after a bit of mucking about, I enrolled in Duke University as a PhD student in Botany. Durham, North Carolina is a great place to live and I have many fond memories of those years. We had a lot of great discussions and played some decent music. There were two main places that were particularly conducive to these activities – by a big fire next to the abandoned CO2 experimental station in Duke Forest or at the house of Rytas and Liz Vilgalys. Rytas knows how to put the ‘fun’ in fungi.
I was awarded a Boren Fellowship from the Agency for International Development in 1996 (luckily, the program was saved at the last minute by Senator Paul Simon – or else, my life would not have led me here!) and I spent 1.5 years as a research fellow in the Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation (IBEC) at the University of Malaysia in Sarawak (UNIMAS). I met my wife at that time too. She’s now switched over completely from human genetics to something much more interesting – tropical tree genomics! She has had a lot to do with me pushing for new applications of cutting edge technology in tropical biology.
During that time, I drove from Kuching to Kota Kinabalu two times in a beat-up old Toyota. We had some adventures, that car and me.
After getting my PhD, Paul Manos and I were awarded a NSF grant to study the Asian tropical oaks, basically continuing my dissertation. This kept me in Malaysia and Indonesia for another year. Somewhere in there, I spent several months working for the Nature Conservancy, conducting vegetation surveys of the Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, Indonesia. This eventually matured into a full-blown Ecoregional Conservation Assessment of the entire island. An amazing job, that took a great deal of effort, but again, an unforgettable experience. I think Sulawesi is probably the most under-appreciated island in the world. It contains mind-blowing diversity, in terms of species and human cultures. It is probably one of the most complex biogeographic regions in the world. It needs more attention from the scientific community and from international donors and granting agencies!
I joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University in 2003 as an Assistant Professor. Close to Spur, Texas and the ranch where I grew up. My wife and I bought a house near campus and settled into our adult lives. We still traveled to Malaysia quite often and I managed to sustain my research on the tropical oaks of Asia. With the collaboration of my wife, we started a project to develop DNA fingerprinting techniques to regulate the international trade in tropical timber – taking an endangered species as a case study. This project has moved forward in fits and starts but is now developing into a partnership with a company in Singapore – too early to tell what is going to happen – more on this later!!!
Although it was great to be back near the ranch and the country that I love so well, I think it was inevitable that I would wind up back in the Asian tropics. I would have never predicted China though! Before I visited Kunming and then Xishuangbanna back in 2006, I was not even aware there was a tropical forest in China. I was offered the opportunity to create a research group based on Ecological Evolution in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Yunnan. We took it and we moved here in July 2007 – it has been a very good decision. Things have been developing even better than I would dreamed. And living in the garden is as close to my idyll of Gunung Palung that I could hope for with a family and a rapidly growing research group.