Within the last 3 years, I have grown tremendously as both a person and a student of Biology, yet I am find that I am still intrigued and affected by even the smallest things. This first week of classes at Lewis & Clark College has proven exactly this.
An ENVS assignment earlier this week required students to search the various academic journals available online for an article, our goal to scrutinize the presence of “place” and its application in the chosen article. As a student who has, up to this point, focused most of my scientific interest in ornithology, I naturally gravitated towards articles concerning the avian world, but my year away from school exposed me to firsthand accounts of other conservation issues, namely fire management, bark beetles, changing climates, and fisheries management. As I scrolled through the endless article list, I spotted works concerning all of these topics, but an earlier experience that occurred in Alaska with wild salmon not a month ago pulled my attention to a review on sustainable aquaculture. I knew instantly from reading the abstract that this was something that I could bury my hands into, and by the citations, I had found a new branch of sustainability and conservation that piqued my academic interests. I’m excited how this fits into the ENVS concentration along with my other ideas.