Life, fortunately, is complicated.
Tim Lindblom’s life got a lot more complicated recently when he was
appointed interim dean of the new college of Arts, Humanities and
Sciences at Jacksonville State University. JSU had formerly siloed
Sciences and Math in one college, where Tim was already building a
reputation as Dean. Arts and Humanities was neatly isolated in another.
Now Tim, the cell biologist who sometimes teaches fly fishing, is
managing art, music and drama majors along with biologists, chemists
and mathematicians.
Tim has long taken an interest in our work here at Paint Rock Forest
Research Center. But his new-found complication is already proving to
be a boon to us. Tim brought faculty from art AND sciences to explore the potential at Paint Rock. And each of those faculty members
brought their own wonderful complications
Depending on whom you talk to, Jimmy Triplett is either one of the best
old-time fiddlers in the country, or the top researcher on the genetics of
North America bamboos. You can find his recordings of West Virginia
fiddle tunes on many internet sites (Kathy Horton and I have a special
fondness for Shakin Off the Acorns, and Jimmy’s version is the best since
Edden Hammond let loose with it a century ago). While you’re listening,
you can wonder, as I do, how Jimmy had to time to make Alabama the
center of bamboo diversity and bamboo studies in North America,
identifying two very distinct species new to science.
Bryce Lafferty, Department Head of Art and Design, is an artist whose
watercolors are geological, ecological and mystical all at once,
exploring the deep strata of rocks and stream and forests and turning
them into scenic anatomies of earth. If you see his work, you’ll
immediately recognize why he would be taken with Paint Rock, where
mountains plunge into caves, and the innards of earth have been sliced
open for all to see.
Tenzing Ingty is a conservation biologist and superb photographer
whose beautiful book about a biological hotspot in the Himalayas has
drawn wide praise. Tenzing’s range of scientific vision is immense. He’s
focused one week on the difference in flower evolution in tropical and
temperate plants, and the next on human social interactions with
natural systems and the growing impacts of climate change. He’s seen
surprising similarities in Alabama and the Himalayas, and I think he may
have even been impressed by the steep ride up to the top of the
preserve.
These are all scientific artists, and their broad, interdisciplinary
perspectives on nature are precisely the kind of complications we hope
to encourage here at Paint Rock. Tim understood that all along, and we
look forward to working with him, with these, and with others at JSU over
the next few years, fiddlers, photographers, watercolorists, geneticists,
evolutionary biologists and all.