I am not a big fan of hypotheses. This feels dangerously taboo to state. I’ve been in science my whole career and a professor for the past 15 years, teaching students to write hypotheses. What will they think? How will they feel if they read this? I feel like I have deceived them, but know that I first deceived myself.
A friend said to me this winter, “Heidi, do you think you can play the game sometimes?”. He didn’t specifically mean can I write hypotheses so my research will be published and my proposals funded. He did mean that I sometimes do what is expected. His guidance was well intended but is increasingly tough for me. I’ve done this for so long. What was expected. Including writing hypotheses when this isn’t a natural, intuition-guided approach for me to do science. I’ve found that I need to forget myself and what I know when I do science, but that isn’t what I was taught.
I first started writing hypotheses in seventh grade. Perhaps you all needed to do this too. I wrote a hypothesis for my science fair project about how we would know if laughter was good for one’s health. I used the ‘if, then’ format that is commonly taught.
In the ‘if’ part of the hypothesis one writes what they think might be true. In the ‘then’ part, one writes what they can see and measure as evidence to determine support for the hypothesis.
My friends and I wrote something like, ‘if laughter is good for one’s health, then it will increase one’s heart rate as much as running in place’.
Can you picture what we did for our methods? Yup. We asked classmates and teachers, I think even the principal, to measure their heart rate, then laugh for a minute and measure again. We told them stories and jokes, so they would laugh. We asked that they rest and let us know when their heart rate was back to a resting. Then, we asked them to run in place for a minute and measure again.
Often, it was unnatural laughter, because our delivery of the jokes was awkward, and they weren’t good jokes. That wasn’t important. What was important? That we demonstrated we understood the process of science. We had a hypothesis that was testable. We controlled for everything with just one variable being different, which activity took place. We had a sample size of ten or more folks who participated. And, we had results. Heart rates went up a similar amount after laughter and running. We got third place!
I’ve been conducting research for 30 years now, first as a PhD student, then postdoctoral researcher, and then lead scientist. I’ve almost never followed this process as I do science, though I’ve feigned it when I write papers.
I chose to study the Earth and found that she’s willing to tell me her stories. I don’t need to have a hypothesis. And when her story becomes my hypothesis, when I play the game so to speak, there is disbelief.
In 2003, I stepped off a helicopter onto polar desert on Kap Russell in north Greenland. I walked a short distance away and watched as the helicopter took off with the other scientists all on board. I think there were four of them and thousands of dollars of scientific equipment. They were all going to another location together. I had a notebook and tape measure, and I wanted to be alone. Though, I wasn’t alone. Willow (Salix arctica) was there and they had a story to tell me.
They began with “pay attention”. So, I did. I had learned to be present on mountains years ago during my PhD. To spend day after day ‘alone’ in the mountain tundra of Colorado paying attention. Noticing who grew where. Who grew and who didn’t. Who grew first and who grew with neighbors who were different species rather than in patches of mostly their own.
In Greenland, Willow said, ‘over here’. They said this often, directing me to walk further and further away from where the helicopter had dropped me off.
It was late July, maybe early August, at 78 degrees north. I was near the coast and the coast was home to Bear, polar ones. I had food, water, that tape measure and a notebook. No gun. I’d learned to allow myself to accept the possibility of death through predation. I knew it was unlikely. There weren’t many Bear. And Willow was who I was there to greet. So, I walked where Willow told me to go.
I had been living at the Thule Air Force Base on Kap Atholl (renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023), 76 degrees north, for the summer to study how adding water and heat to a polar desert might allow the plants to grow more or the soil microorganisms to eat more, the balance of which would determine how much carbon would move from the sky to the earth or the earth to the sky. Or maybe, nothing much would happen, because the plants and soil microorganisms were too constrained genetically to grow or eat more. I’d intuited early on that among the plant species only Willow could grow more. And as a result, I’d been paying attention to Willow all summer.
I’d walked the lands across Kap Atholl from the sea to the Greenland Ice Sheet, about 13 miles often though never all at once. I wanted to sense what was different if I was near the ice sheet, mid-Atholl, or near the coast. Willow was everywhere, though they preferred to be mid-Atholl. The winds were more extreme near the ice sheet and the grasses grew huge near the coast in an area that folks on the base had named the ‘green valley’. It was below a cliff where sea birds came to nest. The ocean nitrogen from their poop created fertile soil, for Greenland at least.
The plants in a polar desert don’t have much. There is limited water. It’s cold. It’s windy. And in contrast to what one might think, there isn’t much snow even though it can be cold enough to snow in July. The soil is rocky and lacks nitrogen. It’s tough. And, yet Willow was everywhere. It was their home.
As I walked across the polar desert on Kap Russell, Willow said more. They said, “That’s my sister and that is my cousin. That’s my brother and I have a few friends down that hill”. This might sound absurd. Perhaps.
As I walked the land for several miles away from the coast, I noticed that each plant was distant from the next. These distances in rocky soil that moves with freeze and thaw events sorting stones to the top and fines to the bottom were an unlikely place for a belowground stem to be. These plants were not one, but many. They were not clones, but neighbors, friends and cousins. Willow is a dioecious plant with flowers that form catkins (the shape of the flower), and male flowers on a different plant than female flowers. This is one clue that two nearby individuals are not the same plant connected by a belowground stem. If so, they’d be the same sex.
But Willow had more to say than this. They offered me their leaves as a clue to their story. Some more narrow. Some more wide. Some already yellow. Some mostly green. The leaves of Willow were another indication that most plants were genetically different from another. And, the only possibility for this was sexual reproduction. For a dioecious plant, this means that pollen from a male plant was received by a female flower leading to a seed being formed. A seed that has genes of both parents. Willow’s seed would have been blown by the wind, landed and grown up away from their parents, and other seeds would have landed near parents less related to them. From coast to ice sheet over time since the ice had retreated, Willow and their children had grown. A village of many rather than one.
I collected a few leaves during that day on Kap Russell and took a lot of photos. I collected more leaves on Kap Atholl and returned to where I lived more of the year in Colorado. I was certain that Willow was reproducing sexually, not asexually via belowground stems. So, I wrote a proposal and submitted it for funding. In graduate school, I'd often read that sexual reproduction is rare in Arctic plants. This would be a story to challenge that understanding of the Arctic. Indeed, in the proposal, I wrote a hypothesis that sexual reproduction was frequent rather than rare.
The proposal wasn’t funded. The reviewers stated that it was well established that sexual reproduction was rare in the Arctic. They weren’t willing to take a chance on a proposal with a hypothesis that was the opposite. I couldn’t write that it was asexual reproduction, because I’d seen it wasn’t, known it wasn’t, and that wouldn’t have been interesting to study. I did the study without the funding. I asked friends to collect Willow’s leaves and asked them to ask friends who would be in the Arctic the next summer. The leaves were sent to me in Colorado, and another friend asked one of her students to do the genetic analyses. The genetics, much like heart rate, was something we could measure to show that the DNA varied too much for Willow to be clonal, to reproduce by a belowground stem. Sexual reproduction was frequent.
I don’t like writing hypotheses. I hadn’t gone to Greenland to study plant sexual reproduction, but Willow asked that I study what they’d been up to. Willow asked me to “pay attention”. And I had. I didn’t know how to be as convincing as Willow had been with me. I didn’t know that there would be resistance to an alternative, a possibility, wildly different than what Arctic scientists had been saying since the early 1950’s or perhaps before.
The Earth and her species have stories to tell, including ones that are different than we’ve understood from research of the last several hundred years.
European-influenced, often of European-ancestry, and from wealthy nations, we as scientists have gone places that we don’t live. We have done studies in 2-3 years that are not meaning-rich, because the grant was for this long and a next grant wasn’t funded. This is in part the reason that scientists thought sexual reproduction is rare in Arctic plants. Our sense of time is different than that of a plant who lives for hundreds to thousands of years, grows slowly, and has offspring when possible but not in most years. We have not trusted all we can know if we pay attention and let go of what we have read and what our minds tell us. And, let go of what others believe.
In the film I watched last night with my family, Katniss and Peeta realize they have been part of an illusion created by those in power to maintain their power. Peeta asks Katniss, “Your favorite color is green. Is that real?”. She replies, "Yeah. That's real. Yours is orange. Not bright orange. Soft, like the sunset.". This is why I don’t like writing hypotheses. As I wake up from the system of science in which I was trained, in which hypotheses are essentialized, I am questioning everything. How much of what I have read is real? How much is what one can learn and publish in a system that funds few and rewards even fewer? How much of what is published is the story as Willow would tell it?
When our hypotheses, our ideas about the planet or a species including our own, are informed by more than what we can see, our world may shift.
First in us. Then among us. When Willow said, “pay attention”, their guidance was to live into being here in the moment in relationship with them and the polar desert. To forget all that I thought I knew. What becomes possible when we forget? When we explore through trust, first in ourselves, that we can see what cannot be seen and hear what is never audible but is spoken to us by a planet who has stories to tell.
*note: I completed this essay for an assignment in theology school on mysticism as an example of how we can know through intuition and connection with the Earth.