Asking the pikas politely…
This project will continue conducting historical research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), a high-altitude biological field station located on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. The Lab was built on the site of an old silver mining town, Gothic, which flourished briefly in the early 1880s. In their anthology The Ecology of Place, editors Ian Billick and Mary Price argue that the power of place often motivates ecologists in the field, and that citizens and scientists could work more collaboratively to solve environmental problems if built upon ?a sense of place that sees humans as part of the ecological system, not separate from it.? This project explicitly investigates this more place-based scientific inquiry developing over time, in a place where perennially returning scientists themselves are becoming nearly ?indigenous,? spending entire careers conducting summer field work to understand the dynamics of specific ecosystems or species.