The meaning of grass.
I’ve now been in Inner Mongolia for almost 3 weeks, and I think if I spent another 3 months here, I might get to the bottom of the meaning of grass. I’m here as an envoy of my professor, who is collaborating with a group of other American and Chinese researchers to figure out (for once and for all), how it is that the structure of biological communities determines the way that whole ecosystems function. There’s some pretty big ideas here, e.g., what’s the meaning of life? Why are there so many species, why are they where they are, and what are they all doing?
But to get to this, we first have to figure out the meaning of grass.
So I’ve been hanging out at this field station, here, spending time in sheep pastures and our big experiment, and scheming a way use blades of grass to explain massive fluxes of carbon in and out of the Asian steppe.
The station is a set of basic buildings full of graduate students, workers, and the occasional foreigner. I enjoy a special status, being both the only American, and the only foreigner who can really converse in Chinese. I do not deny that I enjoy this status; in fact, I pretty much revel in it. It also makes actually getting work done much easier; I can tell the drivers which field to let me off in, and talk to the students about what they’re up to, how they really feel about their advisors (basically the same as any graduate student feels about his or her advisor), and what part of the big experiment they’re working on.
The meaning of grass, for my purposes, has to do with how plants defend themselves against the onslaught of herbivores, and how the number of species in a plant community alters the way both plants and herbivores behave. Yes, plants have behavior. See for yourself.
I first made friends with some of the Chinese students here by lending some of them my camera for a day – it was a big hit, not because they’ve never seen a digital camera or anything (I mean, they’re all made in China anyways), but because their field work was made much less boring by goofing off in front of a lens for a few hours. They filled up a 2Gb card!
In return, they took me out to dinner last night, a raucous affair at the only restaurant around, a 20 minute drive away. We joked around and everyone raised glasses to everyone else, the guys taking it to a competitive level (if you’ve ever been to a Chinese banquet, you know what I mean). I think I made some promises to correct the English on some theses.
Now I’m packing to leave, with my box of grass already sealed. I get to spend the next few months grinding and analyzing it, and then come back next year hopefully a few steps closer to the meaning, really, of grass.
