Essays of a Peripheral Mind

Framing a Story On occasion, usually on a sunny, warm Friday afternoon in the spring, Father Keane would knock on the door to our eighth-grade classroom. Sister Helen Loretta would answer and appear quite pleased to see that our parish priest had come calling. Father would ask her if she would allow Jim Sweeney and me to assist him with some chores in the chapel in advance of upcoming weekend events. Allowing her students to leave class early usually took an act of God, but Father Keane qualifi ed as an approved substitute in this regard. Jim and I were altar boys who could recite our Latin responses fast enough for Father Keane to move quickly through his Mass duties on the fall Sundays when the San Francisco 49ers had a home game he would be attending later that day. So, asking for 2 altar boys to assist him did not appear out of the ordinary. We would be excused from class, and Jim and I would quickly head out of the school building toward the gym that served as both church and chapel on Sundays and for special events such as weddings and funeral services. However, we knew enough not to bother stopping yet at the chapel but would proceed beyond the gym to the far side of the ball fi elds behind the gym. There we would sit and wait. Soon Father Keane would appear directly behind the gym, out of sight of the school, with his golf clubs and a bucket of range golf balls. As he launched short iron golf shots high across the fi eld, Jim and I would retrieve golf balls and throw them back for his next round of practice. When Father Keane sensed he was suitably ready for his approaching tee time, we would retreat to the chapel for a few minutes of work and then return to the classroom. We could honestly report to Sister Helen Loretta that the chapel was now ready for the weekend, but we would obviously leave out certain other details involving Father Keane’s back swing and his improving accuracy with his 9 iron. We just stayed with the facts that were most relevant to maintaining into the future our retrieval services for our parish’s senior priest. We sensed that describing the whole story would have confused the issue and may have jeopardized our opportunities to escape the classroom on other sunny, Friday afternoons. Several years ago Gary Paul Nabhan, the noted scientist who has written wonderful accounts of desert ecology, forgotten pollinators, and the need for consumers to return agricultural production to its local roots, stated that the natural resources science community has done a disservice to the American public by consistently oversimplifying descriptions of nature and nature’s processes. Nabhan (see Arid Lands Newsletter, 1995, 37:2–5) correctly pointed out that we live within complex systems, and we need to work to describe that complexity in understandable manners but not simplifi ed to the extent that explanations serve little value in contributing to either management practices or resource policies. In other words, we need to greatly improve our abilities to tell the whole story or, at least, what we think we understand. This plea has recently resurfaced but restructured to today’s realities of information access if not overload. In a recent issue of Science (see Nisbet and Mooney, 2007, 316:56), the authors argue that scientists cannot just resort to conveying technical information on complex subjects, but they need to frame their information in both relevant and personal ways to capture the public’s attention. Without that attention, there will be little interest in our stories and little opportunity to effectively communicate information. An example Nisbet and Mooney provide is on the embryonic stem-cell issue. Advocates frame their information on this