ENHS Nature Trails October 2005 Article 2

President's Message

On the first day of class for Field Botany at the University of Oregon summer school this past July I passed out press boards to the students. I explained to them that I was proud that the press boards they were issued were cut and sanded from plywood sheet left-overs and salvage that I had stored in my shed and backyard. I had no need to buy new sheets of plywood to make the 24 sets of boards required for this class.

I explained, This is a demonstration of Wagner's Second Law of Frugalism. "Never buy new when you can make do." In this case, it means "making do" with scraps and salvage.

One of the students asked, "Shouldn't this be the First Law of Frugalism?"

"No," I replied, "the First Law of Frugalism is 'Never throw anything away!'"

There was a good laugh after this exchange. I did hope that, at least for some in the class, there was a valuable lesson to be learned. Being frugal is a moral aspect of learning about nature. Moral aspects are a guarded, even subversive side of teaching science.

My job in teaching Field Botany is to train students how to identify the plants they come across in their contacts with the natural world. Students pay good money to learn this valuable and technical skill; It is a basic tool of natural science. Student scientists (and mature scientists) need to know how to put a name on the organisms they investigate when probing the interaction between nature and ourselves. What a thing is--its name--tells you its relationships: ecological, genetical, evolutionary, and thereby even economical. And in the realm of natural resource economy, frugalism is a moral force.

So, how does a specialist in natural history express his frugalism? A frugalist is a person who believes that waste is a moral disorder. If Frugalism were a religion, waste would be the grossest sin. I do not think Frugalism will ever qualify as a religion. I do believe it qualifies as a high virtue in most religious world views.

So I practice a frugal approach to my teaching of field botany. I avoid excessive copying from textbooks and keep handouts to a minimum. I tell the students to pay attention to what I say and draw on the board, and don't expect to be able to ignore the lecture because it might be covered in handouts. Study the specimens I bring to lab: Listen, look, and learn.

I do not send the students out to gather everything they see to bring into class for study. I know what each lesson requires and I bring in exactly what is appropriate. I never pull up a whole plant for a demonstration when a single flower or leaf will do. The Third Law of Frugalism is, "Don't take what you don't need."

Understanding the natural world means having access to the natural world. To preserve the natural world we love to explore and enjoy as students of natural history, we need to be conservative about how we exploit our natural resources. To waste is to destroy the source of those resources. To be frugal with our natural resources is the highest moral stand.

It astounds me that in the political realm today, the people who strive to conserve our natural resources for public benefit are called "liberals" and those who would exploit our natural resources for private gain are called the "conservatives." Where is the moral compass in this nomenclature?

David Wagner

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