One of my pet peeves in science communication is when a drastic claim lacks any sense of scale. “Mosses contain 14,000 species,” for example, is a line I wrote in an essay for this magazine that was ultimately scrapped. So what? That sounds like a lot. Is it? The number is lost on its own. Fourteen thousand is a lot when compared to the 1,000 global species of gymnosperms. It’s not very much at all when compared to the 300,000 species of flowering plants. How about: “Grasslands store more than a metric ton of carbon per acre per year.” Great. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot, but it might be nothing, at scale.

The job of a field naturalist is not to funnel facts and figures into your eyeballs and ear holes. Your phone can do that for you. Our job is to synthesize these befuddling numbers into something that can fit into the human brain, armed with context.

That’s a difficult job. Permit me to make the grandiose claim that life usually feels either loaded with meaning or devoid of it – sometimes from one day to the next. Assembling meaning from something that doesn’t immediately beget it is no small task. In science that requires the use of both sides of the human brain. We might be the only Master of Science program in the United States that makes its students take a creative writing class, for example. In these pages are essays by us, as well as by Field Naturalist alumni and other talented practitioners who have shown us the way, each one carefully assembling meaning.

Veronica Magner escapes the present into deep time Utah. Steve Root reduces our biophilia to the smallest scale possible. Rachel Goland takes on the New England megafauna: bears. Hayley Kolding reincarnates; Keith Meldahl stacks geologic eras all the way to Buffalo; Jason Mazurowski collapses the Pleistocene. Each of these essays captures long, short, large and small things in their own ways. These ideas – be they on weird smells, pesticides, or diatoms – will be warped, shrunk, reimagined, rebuilt, redestroyed, set against a universal fabric, decorated and undecorated, confected and deconstructed, and finally set on the scale to be weighed.

We hope you enjoy them.

Robert Langellier (Cohort AN '25)