Earth.  (TNS workshop, 2016)

Raymond Lindeman’s 1942 diagram of a freshwater food web. Lindeman pioneered the concept of quantifying energy flux in food webs. He tested this approach in a Minnesota bog. We do that kind of thing at TNS.

“In this lake, where competitions are fierce and continuous beyond any parallel in the worst periods of human history; where they take hold not on the goods of life, merely, but always upon life itself; were mercy and charity and sympathy and magnanimity and all the virtues are utterly unknown…even here…an equilibrium has been reached and is steadily maintained that actually accomplishes for all the parties involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit.”—Stephen Forbes, The Lake as a Microcosm, 1887.

Stephen Forbes and Raymond Lindeman found something beautiful and magnificent in wet and wild places that knew nothing of humanity. Yet we find beauty in nature and in human nature when we find ourselves in good company high on a prairie ridge or deep in the woods or up to our knees in green muck. That’s what happens at The Naturalist School. Wear boots with us.  Click here.