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Excerpt from the Introduction
Mastery
This is a study of artists engaged in the creative act all professionals face, shaping a career. Each of the people we meet here either succeeded themselves or are observers of how others succeeded in shaping a natural resource career of meaning, purpose, and conservation achievement. The message is clear—successful natural resource professionals do this by intent but the process is one of improvisation—more like art than like engineering. As in art, materials, techniques, insight, and creativity are important. But art is not created without a willingness to commit ideas to canvas—to take action. The question is, how?
Gone is the traditional model of a natural resource career that begins with the study of a discipline like forestry, range management, wildlife biology, etc., followed by a real or implicit apprenticeship, usually as a junior grade biologist, forester, range manager, etc., followed by many relatively stable years of applying the tools of the trade to make fishing better, harvest trees, grow more cows on the range, or any number of other firm objectives. Over my 30 years working in a state fish and wildlife agency I saw radical change in the meaning of basic concepts like conservation, wise use, sustainability, professional expertise, and professional obligations. I’ve also seen society’s generally accepted agreement about the ‘right’ way to manage natural resources break down as we struggle to move away from a utilitarian philosophy that treats resources as commodities to something broader. Careers today are less about managing natural resources for the material benefit of human communities and more about managing human communities to lessen impacts on natural resources. In the short span of just my career there has been a profound shift from managing natural resource abundance to managing natural resource scarcity.
In my own career journey I’ve been an interested observer of colleagues who seemed to succeed more frequently than the rest of us. They approached their work as a creative act—a kind of improvisational art. These people had the education and apprenticeship foundation of a traditional natural resource career. But these professionals built from this foundation with an evolving exploration of the new and novel needed to cope with a rapidly changing world. They were curious about their work environment and why it behaved the way it did. Career as improvisational art seemed an apt metaphor for understanding how these colleagues successfully mastered their profession. This book looks at natural resource careers as this kind of creative act; one that acknowledges the realities of the work environment but moves beyond the traditional tools of the trade to improvise something new.
A good share of the success I
observed in the people I admired came from on-the-job leaning; lessons learned
by doing the work after their formal college educations were complete. When I
asked my colleagues, “What makes a good fish biologist?” they said, “A good
biologist picks up a lot of street smarts during their career.” By using peer
review and journal publications natural resource professions are good at passing
along the technical facets of their disciplines. Despite plenty of random
experimentation, however, professionals are poor at transferring street smarts.
These survive only when successive generations of professionals are verbally
taught or learn by observation and direct experience. This purpose of this book
is to write down some of the street smarts learned by the eight people
interviewed here who either mastered the art of being a natural resource
professional or observed others who did.