Interview with Matthew Taylor
Kamila Kinyon

Matthew Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Denver. He has been conducting research in Guatemala for the last 15 years. Taylor's research and publications include studies on the impacts of rural electrification on firewood consumption, how migration to the United States changes land use practices and ownership patterns on Guatemala's frontiers, how 40 years of civil war impacted the environment, how social capital influences resource use, the interplay of human population dynamics and biodiversity, long-term human modification of the environment in highland Guatemala, and water resource management on evolving frontiers. Taylor also involves undergraduate students in community-based research in rural Guatemalan communities.

Kamila Kinyon: I would like to find out about the type of writing that you do, and that your students do. For example, Ive been reading about the water projects that you and your students do in Guatemala, and Im curious about the writing that has emerged from this.
Matthew Taylor: Part of my philosophy is that my classes are very reading intensive, and by nature my classes are writing intensive. For example, my First-Year Seminar is a class about revolution and revolutionaries in Latin America. I make them read about five books throughout the quarter, such as Comandante Che and Carlos Fonseca. These are first-year students who are reading these books and I dont expect them to respond in one go in the form of a formal book review, but every time they come to class, they turn in just a brief response to what they read. So its not a repetition of whats in the book. The first few sentences may be a summary, but the rest is their response. I limit it to 300 to 400 words because I believe it is harder to write something short than waffling on for three or four pages. So in the course of a quarter, these students hand in 20 to 25 pages, which is not bad, and they get comments back from me.

I focus not so much on the grammar because I dont see that as my role, but, for example, for the class I teach in Guatemala, I have them read several books that are a background to Guatemala, such as A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala, Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, and Silence on the Mountain. They are a bit gory stories of terror, betrayal, and forgetting in Guatemala and then, to make sure they read the books, I make them write formal book reviews. I give them several that I have written, and it gives them an idea for how to write a book review. For each book they read, I expect them to write a book review, and, at the end of the class, I ask them to write an essay putting everything they have seen and experienced into context. When they come back, they can write a thematic essay, for example, about poverty in Guatemala, and they will tell me what they saw, bringing the readings into the essay, just contextualizing it. I do that even if the class is more of a service class because in my view it is pointless to go to a country and do service if you dont have the larger context of the background of the country and of why you are doing the service.

Revision based on feedback is something I expect of students too about writing. It is normal to get feedback and to get constructive criticism. I show them, for example, a manuscript I have been working on and the comments reviewers have put on it; I show them the editors comments, and then I show them how I changed it. I explain to students that it is a compliment that people have taken the time to do all of this work. I try to involve students in my writing process, so it is not just an example of my finished research. Before going into the field, in addition to the books, I give them a packet with a compilation of articles, and lots of the articles are mine, so they feel a connection between what they are doing and my connection to the place.

What is your own writing process like, for example, the process of writing for different audiences? In your public good essay on your website, you discuss how you have written both for esoteric journals and for popular audiences.
I think that all scholars should have a dual role. The first is to write for the discipline, for the other 27 people who read it. Second is the civic responsibility that we have to write publicly, whether it be for newspaper or invited editorial, regardless of our area of expertise. I think this is our responsibility. Sometimes it can be hard to think of that more general public audience, and one of the best classes I ever took as an undergraduate was taught by Alcock and Brown. Alcock writes really well; he is a biologist at Arizona State University. He takes evolutionary biology, complex ideas, and writes them for a general audience, and Brown also does the same thing. He is a biologist who specializes in jaguars. He takes complex ideas and makes them readable for a general audience. The class I took with Alcock and Brown was challenging. They would give us a topic, and often it would be just two words, such as elephant tree, and they would say: Off you go. Get across complex scientific ideas in 300 words. By the end, the reader had to feel satisfied in knowing what was going on about, for example, the elephant tree or the saguaro cactus. That was one of the most challenging classes I took. They had a good method get essays from one week, blank out the names, and then redistribute them among the students. It was really good. You could see if you learned something from the essay, look at the writing style, and say whatever you want. It was the idea of double blind review. And, after that, I always recommend that students read an article: The Science of Scientific Writing, which is a great article explaining how the brain reads and therefore how we should write.

That must have been a great class. What are some of the methods you use with your students here at DU?
For the First-Year Seminar, and every class I teach, I take that approach of a gradual assessment of peoples ideas. It is a lot more work for me. For the Core class, Human and Environmental Change, I make them read Lawn People, about chemicals, and Earth Odyssey, a journalists journey about our environmental future. And with thirty students in a class, two essays a week, granted one page long, thats a lot of reading to do. However, I dont give midterms or final exams because its not how I learned, and I dont agree with that as a mode of assessment. And, as you know, you get familiar with a writing style and know where the student is. I like to give feedback, continual feedback, to students. Often they get into the practice of writing because when you get out of the habit of writing, then it becomes difficult. But, once you start, you cant stop, and thats what I notice with students, that their voices really come out as the quarter progresses. At first, very stilted, almost a repetition of what they read, but when I give the right sort of feedback, lets move beyond that, or maybe have the reading and context, they can focus on the structure of the reading, how the author gets things across, because thats a way to start getting at the material. For instance, they can note that the author jumps around here, and it gets a little complicated because of reasons A, B, and C, and they can get the message across by doing this. In a core class, there are a number of business students who arent necessarily interested in the material, which is why I try to give them interesting books to read, including a book by the owner and founder of Patagonia, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. The business was founded on good social principles right from the beginning, using organic cotton. Now its more common to use organic cotton in clothes. He thinks, if we make a loss, we make a loss, but it turns out that doing the right thing was a benefit to the community.

My challenge is to get students reading and writing, finding material that the business students are interested in. It used to be that teaching the same class, I had a syllabus that I called the "doom-and-gloom" syllabus because it was a bunch of scientific articles from geography and science journals that were all the time banging you over the head: Humans have done this; were bad; weve messed up the world with global warming. People are much more aware now. They are aware of pollution. They are aware of global warming because of automobiles. Especially with films like Gores Inconvenient Truth, I would argue that there is much more awareness now of environmental problems. So I dont need to bang them over the head. Lets make that assumption. There are environmental problems that have been caused by humans. What can we do to try and address those problems? The books I give are examples of how we can improve our actions. I get them to read, and they love it. Alan Weisman, you can call him a science writer, wrote a book called Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, based on a real community. It is really optimistic, and they love it. That is their last book review for the quarter. That is one thing I have found with writing from students. If there is something you can get them excited about, you can get good responses, and you get really good essays. Alan Weisman just wrote a book that reaches a popular audience. If you can see it at airport bookstores, that is my guideline for whether it reaches a popular audience. This book is called The World Without Us. Tomorrow there are no humans, so how long does it take nature to break down what man has done? It is incredible the information he got from interviewing dozens of scientists. It is a good book to get students thinking about human impact but in reverse. So every one of my classes I structure the same way, and I give detailed instructions of how to write.

What are some of your research directions right now?
Several. I just applied for sabbatical leave and applied for funding agencies to fund work in Guatemala and Nicaragua. In Guatemala, this will be on the science side of water issues, using tree ring records to reconstruct past droughts. We know from Mayan history or from Spanish records if there were droughts. The tree rings can corroborate, and this is important with growing populations in the Guatemalan highlands. If we see a cyclicity in these droughts, when can we expect the next drought? How severe will the drought be based on the tree ring records? The whole idea of this research, for which we submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, is to really involve the locals in the research and the school kids, so they can understand the hydrologic cycle, the significance of water, and where it comes from. The whole hydrologic cycle but also preserving the landscapes and the water supplies slightly down the slope. So thats one project.

Another project is in Nicaragua. It is a more vague project, discussing the dilemmas of development and globalization. There has been a big recent foreign investment and tourism along Nicaraguas coast. As foreign investors see Nicaragua as safe to invest in, there is a second ownership by foreign investors. It is no longer the Nicaraguan image of the person with the gun on his back and the rocket launcher. Rather, Nicaragua is seen as safe. In 1990, at the end of the Sandinista revolution, it was possible for individuals to sell land for ridiculously cheap prices to foreigners. It is only now that people have started building resorts and second homes on the land. In the meantime, people have sold their land and spent the money, the little money they got, and now they are back. There they are still trying to eke out a living by living in those resorts changing sheets, cleaning toilets, working as cooks, as security guards, etc.

The project we have in mind, in collaboration with a local university, would be, first of all, to assess who owns what along the coast. By using satellite imagery and just driving along the coast asking questions, asking the surveyors office, finding who owns what, we can construct a live map that will go on the web. The people will help to make this map, so that they find out who they are and what they need to do in the future. It will also be a simple fact-gathering exercise, so we can make statements about foreign investment, what has happened, land ownership to land cover as well. For example, by 2008, we can say 70% of the trees have been removed in lots purchased by outsiders. We also want to do a case study of communities along the coast, of the indigenous people of those communities, to see how they have been impacted by tourism. It will take a couple of years. Both my wife and I have been working in Guatemala since 1990. We just started working in Nicaragua in 2006. This is just the beginning of a long relationship there.

In Nicaragua, we have purchased a small piece of communally owned land and are going to experiment with alternative sustainable livelihoods. We say: Look, this is the reality, youve sold most of the land, youre fishing, some of you work as security guards this is called guardia, a sort of glorified security guard, to make sure nobody comes. So we did a survey, what would be best for people to lift themselves up in education and gain access to education. The way they have to get to the secondary school is to walk five miles, which adds up to at least four hours a day getting there and back. One of the solutions was to buy transport, through a mini-loan for transport busses. The second thing was agriculture, horticulture, ways they could grow crops and participate in the tourist economy. One of the needs was good, locally produced food. Everything that is not fish now comes from Managua. So what we do is use submersible water pumps.

This November, I am going with students to Nicaragua. We will drill a well, going in about 50 feet, and connected to a solar panel, and connected to a big water tank. Quite simply, during the day, when there are eight hours of sunlight, this produces a couple of gallons a minute, and then we do agriculture on this flat piece of land. This place, of two or three acres, would be a place of experimentation. It would be a collaborative process, bringing expertise. Both sides would get something from that. The whole idea was to involve interdisciplinary teams of students, so they could come up with plans together with the community about what would be best to do. It would be a collaborative process. So, for example, the business student might explain how to grow vegetables, offering a micro-business plan. It is happening through my efforts in taking students there. We work with locals and slowly get things done: solar panels, worm composting, selling worm-created compost to other places that want to grow vegetables. And the whole idea, especially in Latin America where it is a male-dominated society, is horticulture. People can create household gardens around the house that all family members (except males, who are out fishing or drinking away the family income) can participate in. If we can show them an easy way, this will increase female ability to earn money. But they dont necessarily have time or information about how to start this. We can show them an easy way to do vegetables. Why dont you do vegetables? They will look at us like we are idiots and say Well, dont you see the pigs? So you have to find a way to overcome that.

This will, of course, involve writing -- writing proposals for example. I have done several undergraduate research projects. I talk to students, and they want to come back and do research, so they come back with academic references about tourism. I tell them to write a proposal based on questions we discussed. I edit it, and we submit it. And they can get money. Students can $1500 to go to Guatemala or Nicaragua to do research. So those are future research directions. Both of them are of a very applied nature. It tends towards two camps. One is the academic camp, lots of questions about tree ring chronology, but then the other is of a very applied nature future droughts and the cyclicity of these droughts and what that means to people.

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