“None of it is important or all of it is”: Steinbeck, Ricketts, Ecology, and Identity

Interdisciplinarity emerges as a strong theme from the Log from the Sea of Cortez, based on the shared experience of Steinbeck and Ricketts and their influence on one another’s thinking and writing. This article reflects inquiry based on personal experiences as a contemporary marine scientist. It discusses the role and importance of scientific outreach, in particular the role of popularizers in connecting with audiences from diverse backgrounds and education levels. These concepts are explored in relation to an interdisciplinary reading group held as part of the Steinbeck Festival in Northern Ireland that was designed to build common language, to create discourse between the arts and science, and to understand the marine environment and our place within it. It explores issues of identity, systems of classification, and ways of understanding complex systems such as the environment and ecology as related to the personal and the sense of self. All these themes are explored in the Log to varying degrees and work in a complementary way. Technology and development are important and inextricably linked, from communications to methods of interrogation for the environment. As the technology improves, our ability to understand the environment changes, but “common” resources are then subject to market demands. We contrast the speed and efficacy of contemporary marine science with the contemplative Darwinian pace of the Western Flyer in the Log, and suggest that there is value in both approaches. The industrial scale and pace of modern scientific expeditions can present obstacles to the intimacy of experience within the environment, and there is much value to the bucket and spade approaches to build this rapport and affinity with the subject. This has an inherent value of its own and is worth conserving. The article concludes that for interdisciplinarity to succeed, it is essential to recognize that it is relationships between individuals that really gets things done--developing common language, a mutual appreciation, a spirit of cooperation, and the value of a shared endeavor.