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My experience has not been limited to land based ecology because Jack a close friend of mine is one of the earliest marine biologist-ecologists-environmentalists. Like most other ecologists he started as a collector and still does marine collecting for his company. I keep my sailboat at times moored on his “Living Dock” which is one of the titles of many marine environmental books that he has written. He and his wife Ann own Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories. http://www.gulfspecimen.org/ Of course other people helped found the fields of ecology and fire ecology as well, but these friends and family steadfastly dedicated their lives to ecology. These early ecologists started out as museum collectors and evolved into ecologists, something the early taxonomists who worked with the collectors were not able to do. To understand ecology one must spend a lot of time outdoors in direct contact with plants and animals and not in smelly, dusty museum basements where the taxonomists worked. My father used to argue with the taxonomists who just could not understand ecology. They would tell him, show us a relationship, let us touch and feel it, there is no such thing! I was prepared to follow in my parents ecological footsteps, but in my early twenties I quit after three years of college, two of them at the University Of Alaska at Fairbanks. I struck out on my own a very scary thing to do. The University of Alaska was a small college with few courses to choose from. I had yet to have a single class in wildlife management my major, and I was flunking two years of French which like the other courses had little to do with ecology. I did not feel I was getting educated, only indoctrinated. I could not articulate it at the time but unconsciously I knew that academia was all about obedience and conformity and little about free thinking and creativity. I would like to make it clear that I believe that there are some bright academics who have managed to avoid having their creativity stifled and suppressed by academia. My concern is with those academic elite, those high priests of science, who are no different from the high priests of our religious past. Credentials and position, just as with the high priests of old, are everything. It’s not about true scientific inquiry at all, but about control. These scientific autocrats, living in their institutional ivory towers divorced from overall reality, are no different from other autocrats outside of science. This idea promoted by academia that one cannot do good science without a degree is pure rubbish! It’s the same thing as saying, you can’t know God without a high priest for a intermediary. Neither my father nor Herb Stoddard had formal degrees and they did excellent science. My father had to drop out of college in the great depression to help support his family and went off mammal collecting in what was to become the Smokey Mountains National Park. Herb Stoddard started off as a museum taxidermist and bird collector and soon began studying the Bob White Quail in Southwest Georgia in the 1920s which led to his ecological discoveries. http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/eh/11.3/way.html My father Ed Komarek Sr. did get a honorary doctorate from Florida State University for his ecological work late in life. My mother had a degree in Botany from Florida State University. Neither Herb nor my Dad had much appreciation for advanced degrees feeling that the educational process stifled creativity and promoted excessive specialization in the ecological field. 104