Transition

“Hummingbirds have a very good ability to navigate long distances. However they do it, they manage to come back to the same place year after year. I guess as it turned out I was working with plants that are going to live longer than I am. That can sometimes make my lifespan feel a little bit insignificant. Part of phenology is the end of things too.” – Dr. David Inouye, from “To Know a Place”

The union of RMBL, a non-profit founded in 1928, with Gothic, an abandoned mining town, created a community beyond time.

While it can be hard to appreciate the uniqueness of RMBL, Brendan Young’s beautiful video, To Know a Place, provides a glimpse. In an age in which the internet makes the knowledge of the world available to us in milli-seconds, Young documents the multi-generational commitment of the Inouye Family to understanding the phenology, or the annual cycles, of wildflowers and their pollinators. For five decades and involving millions of data points, three generations of Inouyes have observed and counted wildflowers and hummingbirds, practicing the patience needed for the world to reveal itself.

It isn’t just the Inouyes. Every summer RMBL hosts hundreds of scientists, studying a diversity of environmental processes, from marmots to microbes, and from ecology to atmospherics.  In a digital, silicon-centered age our scientists focus on all things carbon, countless individual studies, and the inevitable, emergent collaborations, have led to a deep understanding of the valleys around Gothic that reveals fundamental truths, informing our ability to predict and manage the world’s ecosystems.

While RMBL may be a community that moves on its own timeframe, we are still bound by biology! We are excited to announce that after 24 years, Dr. Ian Billick will be passing the torch of the position of RMBL’s Executive Director to Dr. Jeni Blacklock. Jeni has a PhD in biomedical engineering from the Max Planck Institute and most recently she was the Dean of the Rady Engineering Program at Western/CU Boulder. She and her family live in Crested Butte. Ian will continue to work for RMBL through the spring, supporting Jeni in her new role.

Jeni’s children are multi-year participants in RMBL’s K-12 programs, but her professional involvement began last year. In her role as Dean of the Rady Engineering Program, she spearheaded a collaboration to more strongly integrate engineering into RMBL research. While long-term field biologists, like the Inouye Family, will always be the foundation on which Gothic’s scientific community is built, a revolution in remote sensing and big data is transforming our ability to scale field observations across space and time. Progress in science often comes as we learn new ways of seeing the world and RMBL’s collaboration with engineers is changing how we see the world. Jeni’s training as a scientist, and her experience in fostering and generating support for scientific communities, positions her for leading RMBL through its 100^th anniversary in 2028. Please see the accompanying piece for more about Jeni.

In joining the annual migration of scientists who, despite distance and time, manage to navigate back to Gothic every year, Jeni is poised to foster this community beyond time, celebrating and advancing the enduring legacy of what Ian and thousands of scientists and students have helped create.  This will be Ian’s last e-newsletter, but he and his family will continue to live in Crested Butte and be involved with RMBL. If there is any scientific institution that can appreciate the inevitable cycling of life, it is RMBL. Please join us in celebrating this transition!

“Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.” – The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ian Billick and Jeni Blacklock