If someone had told me years ago I would be designing experiments for children at one of the most respected organisations in the world, AND being paid for it, I would have laughed. I love my job, i feel like a kid in a candy shop most days and cannot believe my job is producing science content for children. It combines loads of things I am interested in, including science communication and education, and most importantly, it's opening the world of science to people who may have never considered it previously. I love the emails and tweets and letters we've had, thanking us for scientific content. But something is missing.
Even though I love my job and thank my lucky stars I'm here, I can't help but feel like a fish out of water. Working and living in Salford Quays, I am surrounded by water, but all I can see are the artificial lights of our building glimmer in the murky water. The industrial locks are all I have at the moment linking me to the ocean. There's very little wildlife, only the odd fleeting sight of a gull or a goose in the quays, especially at this time of year. I miss the outdoors, the wilderness. Glass and concrete structures are no place for me. The people I work with have had very different experiences to my own, and love the straight lines of the buildings and the squeakier than clean world that has been built around them. I miss nature, working in the field, getting stuck in the mud (or in the sand)... but these are things I feel no one around me can relate to. And, as lame as it sounds, I even miss collecting data. Adding numbers to a spreadsheet, as boring as it sounds, is incredibly rewarding, especially when you know that each count is filled with information of biological relevance. I've been formally studying Biology for 5 years now... 5 years of learning about the natural world, the perils it faces and the work going on to protect it. I've only been in my job for 6 months, but I already feel like the natural aspect is lacking immensely. I read somewhere that most children in the UK spend less than half an hour outdoors each week, and frankly it breaks my heart. As a child, and an adult, I was outdoors as much as I could be. I've never been one for the cold, but even in the depths of winter I would try to at least walk around a local park or go to the beach. Since moving North, this has massively depleted, mainly as the area I live in has very few green spaces and not a beach in sight. Another problem is that barely anyone I know would want to be outdoors for longer than absolutely necessary. So instead, I've tried to bring nature to them. I've shared article after article, news story after news story, pestering colleagues with popular science and new research, making them realise our connection to nature is a lot stronger than it might seem. But I still feel like a fish out of water. How do you get people so detached from the natural world to engage with it more? It's something I have been trying to work on as my own little side project. I have, once again, massively neglected this blog, but in the coming posts, I will be talking about the subtle ways in which biology can be snuck into the office, without anyone realising! First up: plastics. Stay tuned!
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