Both scientific and poetic forms of writing require attention to parsimony and precision with words, yet people regard them very differently, so combining both in a single course led us to explore interesting territory. Ecology based science writing and poetry attempt to do something similar in their best forms. They attempt to provide unique insight into the natural world. Both encourage new thinking about the human and non-human world. However, doing both scientific writing and poetry at the same time can be rewarding and challenging. Both forms of writing require crossing a vast crevasse between the seemingly objective bedrock of science and the presumably personal and intimate realms of poetry. We discovered that the personal and intimate can infuse science writing with new life and a new audience as Creative Nonfiction. Poets discovered the strength in objectivity about emotion, in real-world images to give form to abstraction, in an orderly, scientific method of self-examination. Science writing, poetry and creative nonfiction helped us to explore the entire range of writing from nature and to reach multiple audiences with our work.

Throughout our ten interdisciplinary weeks together, the class came to bond personally through work, songs around the camp-fire, arguments, agreements, tragedy, and sharing of our most personal writing. The singer songwriter Greg Brown has said that to build community “you gotta’ really need each other.” We debated ecological study designs late into the 20 degree nights; we huddled against the cold together sipping tea while we deciphered our poetry from ragged field books; the wind howled across our collective faces, and the rain sometimes cleared off and left a tease of a vista; we pulled our shoes off to walk barefoot through streams. Sleepless nights, exhausted days, plenty of awkward moments, and honest efforts produced some really good work. This group came to need each other’s voices, laughter, and writing to feel whole. That intellectual symbiosis should be reflected in the writing pulled together for this anthology.

The last poem in this anthology asks what you see when left alone in a wild place, with no direction. All the contributors in this anthology have felt alone during the arduous task of compiling the anthology, writing, or living through the experiences that produced their work. While studying the natural world, we have all felt directionless. These wilderness experiences depicted are real, but the alone part is questionable. Although every contributor to this anthology certainly felt alone at some point during the production, a thorough reading demonstrates that no contributor is utterly and wholly alone. In fact, all are in good company.

Our goal for this work (and class) was to produce a document that could show scientific writing and more personal forms of writing from nature side by side. We formed a series of field studies in remote locations including Utah scrub-desert, glacial-fed rivers on Mount Rainier, western Washington prairies, and finally our own Evergreen State College campus forest. In each location we divided into groups that only had a matter of hours to form workable study designs for novel ecological questions. Then, at most a day later, we implemented their field studies. Students looked with steely-eyed clarity at the natural world to find sources of variation that proved both interesting and testable in the scientific sense. Furthermore, for many students this was their first exposure to science or to ecology. This task would comprise half of their entire evaluation and credit for the class. Despite breakdowns, tragedies, upsets, snow-fall, collapses in group dynamics, and limited prior experience in the sciences (let alone this business of designing and carrying out an entire study within only a few days) all groups pulled through. The final products of their studies are represented by the scientific papers in this anthology. Once these studies were completed, all data were analyzed and written up within the course of three days. Their methods were written and peer-reviewed one day, the results sections were completed and peer-reviewed the next day (complete with statistical analysis and figures), and the following day they wrote and reviewed introduction and discussions sections. The brevity of these papers reflects these time limitations. Readers should be surprised and impressed to learn how quickly these final studies progressed, and the authors should be proud of the immense accomplishment of completing these studies in such limited time. This style of applied field ecology has earned the moniker “Rambo-Ecology”. These studies also provided the muse for other creative works in the anthology.

Nature writers, poets, editors and publishers brought their expertise to our classroom to provide insights into translating the wonder of nature to non-scientific audiences. They learned that their writing was strongest when based in the senses—one interpretation of “Wild Writing”—and enriched with description anchored in active verbs. Scientific writing asks for systematic observation and summary; creative writing asks for systematic observation and scene. Nature studies help poets to focus and to hone description; poetry helps ecologists pass important information to people who don’t read scientific journals. Ezra Pound insisted, “Poetry is news that stays news.”

Tom Jay, visiting author of the creative nonfiction piece “Salmon of the Heart,” asked us to consider seriously the etymology of the words we use. The word wilderness has some interesting etymological roots. From the old English word "wildeornes," the word derives from "wildeor," meaning wild or un-tamed beast, and “-ness” (meaning condition, or place of), and literally translates to “the place of wild beasts”. This view of wilderness as a somewhat raw, untamed, and unkempt home to wild things permeates Euro-American culture today. If our original goal in this anthology was achieved, the content will be somewhat raw. The poetry, science, and creative writing pieces all have a freshness about them that represents first encounters with new intellectual or physical territory. Although each piece has undergone review and revision, this process took place over a very short time, and may have resulted in wild final outcomes; this group of individuals is not a tamed bunch. So enjoy this sample of wild writing from a fantastic group of students who have worked ten hard weeks to complete field studies and to pour their souls and thoughts onto these pages, which they also designed, laid out, edited, copyedited, typeset and printed. What you have before you comes straight from nature, somewhat raw, un-kempt, untamed, and most certainly wild.

Bill Ransom and Dylan Fischer

Members of the Faculty, The Evergreen State College

Olympia, WA

June 4^th, 2007