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End of a long, hot, quiet week in Jerusalem. The "hamsin" broke a couple days ago and we had a cool European front move in with more moisture and lower temperatures. The last two mornings I woke to heavy fog in the valleys below my mountaintop cottage, a pretty sight with peaks marching down to the sea and soft grey mist concealing the valleys in between them, with an occasional minaret or house poking up through the clouds. My cats spend the early part of the night outside, but I wake to find them curled up around me as the night got cold and they came in to warm up.
The next month will be a quiet slog through lots of data. I am trying to make sense of the patterns in species distributions from our spring work in the desert, connecting biodiversity with habitat types. It gives me a chance to go back to the old work we did at Cornell with beta diversity (species turnover in the landscape). "Whittaker's beta diversity index" originated in 1960 but I find it still in use, even an item in wikipedia on it. In these matters, my late husband and mentor R.H. Whittaker formed my brain and it is probably the most precious inheritance I have from him. Now it is time to pass it on to the next generation.....
It's nostalgic in a way to return to the subjects that occupied me as a graduate student, and still not quite resolved! Now I'll tackle beta and gamma diversity with Rob Jongman at Wageningen, in the Netherlands. It's fitting, since the torch passed to Wageningen when Bob Whittaker died in 1980, and they developed the work further for another twenty years. Rob Jongman is one of the best; I have three copies of his book on "Multivariate Analysis in Landscape and Community Ecology" because my students keep walking off with them. We will meet in Sweden in September and already have a jam session planned when I am on vacation in the Netherlands in October.
It's fitting to come full circle like this at the end of a long career, back to the subjects I studied as a young ecologist, after a lot of detours here and there. It's also gratifying to get notes of appreciation from the leadership on the project for our hard work here on the subject. The EBONE project stands or falls on its ability to link habitat with biodiversity, and the biodiversity work was stalled and stuck for two years. We may have made a breakthrough, and they know it. Feels very nice to make that breakthrough with ordination and "Whittaker's Beta index", and nice to know I still have the knack to figure out how to solve scientific problems in a creative way. Government work didn't numb my brain, but these outside project sure keep it from becoming so.
As you can imagine, I spent the last week in a somewhat dreamlike state as my brain came to grips with this biodiversity work. Scientific problems like this go into the subconscious and cook steadily, meanwhile the rest of me is wandering around like the village idiot until the computation is finished and the subconscious spits out its results. They know this at work; when I am pacing the halls it means I am working on something and they leave me alone....I look at people as I pass and I look right through them. You wouldn't believe how that spooks the secretaries, who usually have little more on their minds than what to make for lunch or whether their bra strap matches their nail polish. I've had the same boss for 17 years, and he has seen this process before; watches it with some amused interest, waiting for my inner computer to burp.
So there isn't much to report from the past week; if we had a war raging I wouldn't have noticed it very much as I was bumping around and thinking. We didn't have a war; Israel seems to go on with the aftermath of the flotilla fiasco with commissions of enquiry poking into the question of who screwed up. The usual, it seems, inadequate planning, just dived in with the faith that we could improvise on the spot, same as usual. Didn't work, and the Turks had us for lunch. (The Turks are methodical as Germans and of course planned the whole gambit well in advance. You have to admire that even if it left us covered with the feces that hit the fan. If the tables had been turned and we had sprung a trap like that, we'd be crowing from the rooftops.)
Bulldozers go on relentlessly around my house from 6:30 until nightfall, building the 'security fence' that winds around us and loops around neighboring Waledjah, making the landscape look like a plate of spaghetti. Here the security value is questionable. This is simply marking turf for Israel when the final land allocation between Israel and Palestine is made. Jerusalem wants to incorporate Har Gilo and everything in between, so this is the usual "facts on the ground" process in action. Jerusalem has to expand and has probed for the weakest oppositon; Waledjah is very, very weak, so they move in like jackals on an abandoned calf. It's the brutal way of the Middle East; the strong eat the weak, usually belly first.
One has to adjust to this way of life. The Middle East is home to the world's most ancient civilizations, yet is savage and brutal. People speak of justice but also devour each other, and only the strong can withstand the aggression. It's always been this way; mercy is a European idea that never really took root here even though the three monotheistic religions that originated here make a big deal out of being compassionate even as God/Allah/Yahweh is compassionate. Maybe the religions emphasized it because it is so lacking in normal life. Even now, if you show kindness or compassion, it is perceived as weakness and you are considered a sucker........
How do I cope with it? Well, I seem as tough as anyone here, and can face off the aggressions that hit me. I have an intimidating presence which gives me freedom to be kind without being seen as weak. I don't know how long that will keep up in old age, but I'm really grateful for the dragon lady reputation which has saved me quite a lot of hassle.
Meanwhile, the sun shines, the grapes are ripening in the vines, the melons are at their peak, and the evenings are pleasant even when the days are hot. The land itself is very pleasant, even when the people are not. So it is time to enjoy the land.
shabbat shalom
Linda
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