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Madhu is an evolutionary ecologist studying the response of other organisms to human-driven changes in the environment. Growing up near the mega-city of Bombay, it took him a while to discover wilderness. When he did, it led to his becoming an ecologist chasing after vanishing wildernesses until he realized that ecology, like charity, begins at home. So Madhu’s now back full circle as an urban ecologist applying the tools of evolutionary ecology to understanding and managing biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes.

In addition to Reconciliation Ecology, you can find his other social networking sites listed in Madhu’s Google profile. You can read more about his journey to a life of science in his blog post, “Why I became a scientist.”

Madhu, why do you blog?

I have been involved in online conversations since my graduate school years, in the dark ages of command lines and Pine email, well before the WWW! This was probably driven by my being a student from India in the US, with most of my social connections half a world away. So I participated in usenet groups and listservs, even helping start one for naturalists from the Indian region: Nathistory-India which is still very active in its 15th year. So online media and social networking have always been of interest to me. When blogs came along, I was initially a passive consumer, with occasional commenting, especially on science and nature blogs.

The transition to active blogging happened after I started my tenure-track faculty job, and started wondering about new ways to reach and engage students. I started the Reconciliation Ecology blog in Jan 2007 (followed a short while later by what is now the Darwin’s Bulldogs blog) as an online companion to my eponymous graduate course at CSU-Fresno.

I started the blog as a means to keep track of readings on the web that were relevant to the course, and as a place to share links and my own thoughts with students outside of the classroom. I also encouraged the students to contribute summaries of class discussions and write-ups on projects. The blog unexpectedly found a larger audience when someone (not from the class and unknown to any of us) submitted a post by a student to an ecology blog carnival! After that, the blog took on a life of its own, attracting readers from all over the world in relatively small but steady and significant numbers.

I have continued blogging as an ongoing experiment both in pedagogy, especially communicating science (I am a teacher after all), and in self-expression, for developing my non-academic writing. Positive feedback from readers and other bloggers is what keeps me going.

What do you like most and least about blogging?

For me, the best thing about blogging is that it takes me out of the domain of day-to-day concerns and worries and helps me think about the broader context of the natural world. It’s a means for capturing and articulating my own thinking about these bigger questions, and for ruminating upon and digesting what others have written. Blogging is a productive channel of escapism and a good tool for structured procrastination!

One of the other things I like about blogging is the immediacy of communication. It’s possible to share thoughts on new discoveries, new papers, and new ideas, and generate some level of collective action when needed (although I don’t do much activism on my blogs).

Ironically, the thing I dislike most about blogging is the immediacy of communication! This may be a limitation of my own perception, but often I find myself too busy to write about some new discovery/paper/event when first seen. By the time I have a free moment the blogosphere seems to have moved on, so I lose my motivation!

Thinking more about this, here’s what I’ve come up with: there are (at least) two ways to blog: 1) generate a quick, often brief, response to new developments and move on, blogging at high frequency, sort of like a hummingbird; or, 2) think about and properly digest ideas and evidence, and write more comprehensive well thought-out (and longer) blog posts – sort of like a python! These are really extremes of a spectrum of how people blog, and I can’t say that I’ve found a stable balance between them myself!

Has blogging changed how you think about nature? or how you write?

I’m not sure if blogging has by itself changed my thinking about nature so much as it has helped me articulate my thinking and hone my writing skills. Often, the process of articulating thoughts, of putting them into words, helps clarify my thinking, which one might argue is also a way to change one’s thinking.

How do you promote your blog and attract readers?

These days I primarily use Twitter and Facebook’s Networked Blogs application, and Flickr to a lesser extent. I have not done a lot of work to promote my blog, but I do occasionally submit posts to blog carnivals, and reference them on listservs like Nathistory-India and Ecolog, which gets me more readers.

Is there a story behind the name of your blog?

I first heard the term “Reconciliation Ecology” from the great evolutionary ecologist Michael Rosenzweig of the University of Arizona, who was writing a book by that title (a title that unfortunately was changed to Win-win Ecology in the publication process). He suggested it as a new approach to nature conservation, the third and most significant “R” of the field after “Reservation” and “Restoration” which have dominated thinking for decades. He defined reconciliation ecology as “the science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play.” I like to expand that a little, and think of reconciliation ecology as applied evolutionary ecology: the study of ecological and evolutionary processes in human dominated systems with the goal of helping us manage those systems in ways that reconcile biodiversity conservation with human development.

Given that I was teaching a course in the subject, it seemed a good choice for the blog name!

Do you feel you’re part of a community with other nature bloggers?

Yes, I certainly feel part of a community through blogging! I have made a number of new friends through blogging, many of whom I communicate with regularly (via blog, twitter, facebook, email) even though we’ve never met in person. In general, I find the nature blogging community very supportive and nurturing, despite the occasional agonistic interactions among some bloggers.

Any words of wisdom for new nature bloggers?

If there is one enduring inherent principle / property / value of nature, especially of the living world, it is diversity. Evolutionary biology and the sheer diversity of organisms produced by evolution teach us that there are many different ways of doing the same thing, many pathways towards the same goal. Bring that same principle to the blogosphere: find your own way to write about things in nature that catch your eye, that really excite you, or that you care about deeply – and the readers will come!

And of course: give my blog some link-love!

Thank you, Madhu.