An important concept in ecology is competition—competition between and among organisms and groups of organisms. It makes just as much sense to construe this interaction as cooperation. How best to teach students this notion that cooperation may be a better way to think of how the so-called lower organisms interact?

My answer developed slowly: to emphasize cooperation not by merely lecturing about it but by having students participate in it and by eliminating competition entirely from in-class activity. So I developed noncompetitive examinations, in which students must first collaborate on gathering data. Since in science today very few papers are published by a single author, I also required students to write team term papers: the team had to work out its own equitable workloads and duties, and deal with shirkers. While not exactly "real life," it still is good training for cooperation.

I believe in developing friendships between students and students, and students and instructors, and I have a reputation of knowing every student by face and name. Similarly, I insist that the students know their classmates. This has had fantastic results in terms of creating a comfortable learning atmosphere and trust between us.

Learning should be fun. Complex and sophisticated principles can be taught very effectively via demonstrations, anecdotes, fables, and good science fiction. The central kernels to be learned stick better when such media are used than when rigid formulas or dry conventional measures are offered up.

I believe in using subtle redundancy. Far better than the practice of drill, drill, drill is to come at a problem or concept from many different directions. Science fiction novels and even simple puzzles and games lend themselves to the teaching of systems ideas: using these provides drill without students realizing it. Nothing can squelch learning faster than the intimidation of profundity.

Today the important problems are not social or political or environmental or those of any other single field—they are the "wicked" environmental/geochemical/ sociopolitical problems that cannot be tackled by any single person. I tell my graduate students not to fear complexity; there are ways to handle it without simplification and fragmentation. I encourage them to expand, rather than to narrow, the boundaries of their vision.

In spite of my deep devotion to my students, still they come second. In all of my teaching, the Earth—handling it gently—has always come first.