It's a good feeling as a mom to have them move on."Įddie is studying chemistry James, computer science engineering. Now that Lowman's sons have gone to college, she said she "misses them like crazy. I really enjoyed being able to do so many different things." I think it gave me a few insights that other people have to find in different ways. James Burgess, reached by phone during final exams last week at Princeton, described his childhood as "interesting and unique. "It was a real advantage for me, and also for some of my male colleagues with whom I worked, staying close to family in a physical and mental sense." "The people in the villages where we worked are so kind and generous," she said. Lowman made it a point to take photographs of herself and her sons to share with the villagers if Eddie and James stayed behind. In the end, it probably just forced me to be a little bit ahead of everyone else in terms of how many things I could juggle."Īlthough some of her scientific colleagues looked askance at Lowman bringing her sons with her, she found that the indigenous peoples welcomed her family, and in fact frowned upon scientists who came without their families. It required more organization and more planning on my part. My colleagues were packing the calipers and the binoculars and the plant keys. Her luggage for a research trip to the rain forest would include "books and juice boxes and muesli bars. "There was the mental element of partitioning my brain between the science and the rudiments of child-minding," she said. Shortly after, she was a single parent trying to keep her career and her sons thriving. She also married and gave birth to her sons. She found herself studying tree diseases of the eucalypts. "On a whim" she applied for a full scholarship to Sydney University to study the rain forest, and got the scholarship. Lowman had grown up in the Northeast and studied to be a field biologist. I just remember carrying him in that little sack on my hip, praying that my mother would come and visit and help me." "Eddie came with me to the rain forest in Australia when he was just an infant," she said. "Suddenly, we found a treasure trove of data which made it very feasible for them to recollect how they felt or how they thought."įrom the vantage point of having her children in college, it might look easy to combine motherhood with the arduous life of a research scientist Lowman said it was anything but. "When I was cleaning out their closets, I found all their journals," she said. Lowman will be discussing the book at this weekend's Efest at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.Įdward, 20, and James, 18, currently are studying at Princeton University, leaving their mother to her academic work in Sarasota, where she is director of environmental initiatives at New College of Florida. The resulting "paper" is "It's a Jungle Up There: More Tales From the Treetops" (Yale University Press, $27.50), in which Lowman and her sons recount their experiences as scientists in the rain forests of Peru, Samoa, West Africa, Panama and India. In the hierarchy of the scientific community, she said, "the reward system is that any good research assistant or lab assistant co-authors papers with the senior scientist." Lowman took her sons on her scientific expeditions into the Australian and South American rain forests from an early age, sometimes to the chagrin of her co-workers.īut, she said, "my sons have been the best research assistants ever." "I could call upon the journal exercise to allow a reprieve from parenting." "It was a little baby-sitter moment for me," said Lowman. When scientist Meg Lowman assigned her young sons the task of keeping personal journals of their time in the rain forests, little did she know that she was planting the seeds for a future book project.Īt the time, it was a great way to occupy young Eddie and James Burgess while Lowman attended to business in the rain forest.
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