My New Hampshire

The only wildlife I encountered regularly in my Brooklyn youth were pigeons, squirrels, and rats. I quickly learned not to look up when walking close to apartment buildings with fancy cornices where pigeons would roost, and we never knew if we would be greeted by beady eyes and whiskers when opening the dumbwaiter door. Thus you can probably well imagine the interest I brought to a fairly large tract of New Hampshire woodland that my family and I bought many years ago as a summer getaway and, as it turns out, an endless source of projects. Here was rich nature in a new setting ready to be engaged at a different level. But it also came with collapse themes at almost every turn, from broken electric lines to trees falling on the well house, crushed culverts under the access road, and the accumulated effects of over a century of snow and wind loads on a poorly designed building. An academic like myself can turn these experiences into fascinating learning opportunities and intellectual (and physical!) challenges, while at the same time gaining a rock-solid rooting in reality that's a good balance to too much time in university ivory towers. In this chapter I hope to tell you something that you may not already know about evolution and collapse, or at least something that you may not have thought about very much. It derives from this New Hampshire experience. But first a brief review of evolutionary principles.