#misopossum

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Hi Rebecca! I'm a recent(ish) graduated student interested in pursuing a career (or any other form of involvement) in environmental education. I was curious how you built your writing portfolio, especially writing for other sites/organizations? What first steps would recommend someone take (particularly if they're already graduated) to get into environmental education and scicomm? Thanks so much, love all your writing!!

Hi there, @misopossum! So I am a pretty atypical case. I have a BA in English, but I mainly used it for technical writing/editing (and personal journaling) for a number of years.

Most of the scicomm folks I know are either A) scientists who also have good writing and interpretation chops, or B) are science journalists who went through a formal journalism program in college/grad school. You haven't mentioned what your area of study was, but your department may have some resources to draw on if you haven't already spoken with them. Check with related departments as well, as they may have ideas too. You're a recent grad, but that doesn't mean that you can't still make use of those connections if they exist.

If you want to go a more traditional scicomm route, good places to start are The Open Notebook and the National Association of Science Writers. ScienceBites may be a good spot for you to start pitching a short article here and there to build up your portfolio, too. And this article from CrossTalk is a pretty good summary on how to get started with science writing.

Other people get involved with environmental education programs like forest schools, summer camps, and the like; some conservation nonprofits also may run these, and you can even check with state and federal parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and other governmental entities who may be in need of volunteers (or occasionally seasonal staff) for environmental ed programs.

You didn't mention where you are, but here in the PNW US there are a lot of these, especially in the Portland and Seattle areas. Depending on what your education level is you may not find the pay to be what you expected, and a lot of these programs are primarily in summertime. But if you can at least get in as a side gig, that will get some experience started.

A lot of what I do is meant for a general audience and not just specific to one locality. I do a lot of blogging online, to include articles on my website, plus some shorter form commentary on various news articles I find online that I think are worth exploring, and I have my quarterly chapbooks that let me dive deeper into various topics. These get me a pretty broad audience, beyond just my local area.

But I really got my start as a nature writer several years ago by writing pieces for the nonprofit Friends of Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, from Facebook posts to 2-3 minute radio segments for their Willapa Nature Notes segment on our local public radio station. I've also helped with other scicomm efforts they've run, from our 4th grade environmental education program in local schools, to giving talks and tours at our annual Wings Over Willapa birding and nature festival. And later this track record helped me get in as a regular columnist with the Coast Weekend paper (and occasionally a longer piece for related publications.) These are all incredibly local to where I am in the Columbia-Pacific region, but they've been good experience and they've helped me get my footing in my local community, which has helped me to facilitate other regional efforts like my independent guided tours.

I think the best choice I made overall was teaching non-credit community education classes through various community colleges, as well as municipal parks and recreation departments and libraries. It's a great way to connect with people who aren't pursuing a degree, but just learning for the fun of it. You do need some credentials of some sort, but expertise counts if you can show that you know your stuff--for example, the people teaching art classes don't all have art degrees, but they may have X number of decades' experience in their art medium. I don't have a degree in the natural sciences because my math skills are terrible, but I am a certified Oregon Master Naturalist and I also have a lifetime of experience of exploring nature and learning how to identify the living beings around me. It doesn't pay a lot, but it's a lot of fun and I get to meet a lot of new students every semester.

Be aware that people like me who take a more unorthodox route usually end up doing like eight different things for a living, rather than having one (1) career path. If you are going to do more of a "professional potpourri" like I am, you're going to need to seek out multiple niches, and perhaps create a few yourself. You're likely going to be very busy, and there's not going to be a lot of payoff immediately (as opposed to a regular job, where you start at a particular rate immediately and hopefully gets raises as things go along.)

On the bright side, having multiple professional directions means that if one of them isn't really active, I can often put more time toward another to make up for it. For example, I'd like to expand to writing for more varied venues that aren't just based in the PNW; it's just a matter of making the time to prep some cold pitches to publications and websites. This time of year I'm really busy with the tours business, so writing tends to be emphasized more in the off season. And either way you slice it, I'm still very much in the "building" process.

Aaaaanyway. That is my very long, rambling answer to your question. Please feel free to let me know if I can clarify anything for you, or if you have further questions.

[wrenhavenriver]

the "there's a hole in the world" line really gets me too!! I can't pin down why, it just conveys this sense of melancholy that dishonored is so resplendent with to me. do you have any personal interpretations about the line?

Yes, it's absolutely a melancholy line. It evokes a very specific flavor of despair for me - that realization of "this world is held together by rubber bands and chewing gum" that comes from seeing all the entrenched injustices and senseless cruelties and uncontrolled disasters recurring day in and day out. It's that semi-hysterical moment of sinking realization that maybe nobody really is flying the plane, so to speak, and that things are terribly, dangerously wrong.

But that despair isn't an endpoint. The full wording of the quote as it appears in the first Dishonored--"You wanted me to decide. You asked me to do it. There's a hole in the world," scrawled on the floor of Granny Rags's old apartment, possibly written by her--also speaks to me of someone being cornered into a certain life and given an ultimatum to conform or fall in line, being told that that's just how the world is, how things are, so it's how things always have to be. And that person then looking at that decision that's been made for them and saying, actually, you're full of shit, everything that you tell me is set in stone--these rules and roles--are arbitrary and changeable and rotten, and I don't have to participate in them. Or, as the Outsider describes: "I watched her consider [her suitors], measure their worth, and find them wanting. Then she made a different choice"--in essence, she chose a different life than the one that was meant/allowed for her. If there's a hole in the world, in the very fabric of reality, how could something as petty as a society’s prescribed mores and roles and systems of power, however entrenched, be exempt, immutable? Again, as the Outsider says, “eventually all bridges [must] tumble down.” This conversation between two guests at Lady Boyle's party--the same mission you find Granny Rags' apartment and the "there's a hole in the world" graffiti--also sums this up quite neatly:

Guest One: We found out what the whales could do and it made us an Empire. This is the beginning of a golden age! Guest Two: Do you know they've found the ruins of another city under this one? Before the Overseers, before anything. I bet they thought they were living in a golden age, too.

And while Granny “Slackjaw Soup Potager” Rags isn't exactly a, uh, benevolent character, she's hardly the only example of a person staring down the role that has been assigned to them and realizing that there’s a choice to be made, one that certain people are very invested in them not realizing they have at all. Because honestly the game as a whole is built on that premise. Corvo experiences some of the most acute suffering the world has to offer (the love of his life is murdered in front of him, his young daughter is kidnapped, and he's publicly blamed for both things and then imprisoned and tortured daily for months), and then Havelock hands him a blade and tells him that "Assassination is dark business, but sometimes good men have to do bad things to make the world right," when Corvo’s whole adult life until now has been about protecting people, not killing them. And, to be clear, you can kill all those targets--so long as you aren’t unnecessarily brutal about it on the way, you can do so and still get the best ending for the city and keep your allies’ esteem--but that’s also what the main loyalist trio, and to an extent the world as a whole, expects of Corvo and assumes he will do, what he will want. You’ve suffered this pain and that loss and that violence, so of course you’ll want to kill persons A B and C (and doesn’t that align so nicely with my goals...).

But the Outsider, for one, isn’t all that impressed with you if you do. For all that he plays up the “impartial observer, just here for the show” vibe, his language in high chaos shrine speeches is often less than favorable (a very lukewarm/unconvinced “I suppose I should thank you” for killing Campbell in mission 2, a sarcastic “what [other] choice did you have?” for a lethal mission 5, questioning if Corvo even knows why he killed Daud in mission 7). Because, after all, that is the expected route, the way the world “works,” the exact thing the Outsider’s had a front row seat to for thousands of years. It’s when Corvo ignores those expectations and takes the route that hasn’t been planned out for him by someone else that the Outsider--among others--is most impressed. It’s what sparks the Outsider’s delighted “You fascinate me” and the quiet awe of Daud’s “And you choose mercy. Extraordinary.” It’s Callista’s relief and joy that a man who was meant to be an assassin on a single-minded mission took the time and trouble to save a life--her uncle’s--on the way to possibly taking someone else’s. It’s even Pendleton’s mitigated grief at the possibility of seeing his brothers again and the remaining Boyle sisters’ thanks for having a family left at all.

tl;dr: uhhhhhhhhh it's about despair and societal injustice and that feeling you get sitting on the toilet at 2 in the morning when you can’t sleep because the world seems to be collapsing but it’s also about autonomy and hope and saying fuck you to people who say that things have to be this way because they want to control you for their own ends, and how existence is fundamentally chaotic and full of suffering but the fact that it’s all a bunch of made up bullshit means that you’re free to make things less bullshit, yes this post represents ten years of overthinking about this game where are you going

tl;dr for the tl;dr: