What inspired you to undertake the telling of the Museum's story?

The Museum's director, Betsy Bennett, first suggested a commemorative book about the Museum, to mark our major expansion from the old space to the new Museum facility next door. She was thinking of something with lots of pictures, a coffee table book. Then I ran across a collection of photographs that portrayed natural history specimens as aesthetically interesting and culturally significant objects-seen from another angle than as data or documentation. I contacted the photographer, Rosamond Purcell, who agreed to visit our collections and hear our stories, and she turned out some wonderful photographs. The text plays off of the photographs to some degree-it describes the Museum and natural history collecting in the broader context of how society has come to perceive the natural world at the habitat level, through the Western/Linnaean lens of collections.

What do you hope readers will learn/gain/enjoy?

To reflect on the ways that our concepts of the world derive from our methodology, and our culture in turn determines our methodology. The Western world was engaged in a great race to discover when collections came to the fore in the 17th century. Collections fed our competitive nature and analytical turn of mind. Natural history collections helped shape a view of nature-birds here, frogs there, easy to study in parts. Habitat dioramas in natural history museums reintegrated the components for the public in a sort of ecological model. Our recent dioramas incorporate a conservation message as well-about how bigger biological systems can be impacted by loss and degradation of habitat.

Tell us one of the most fascinating or unexpected things you learned while writing the book.

We knew that the Museum was founded as a 19th century public relations branch of the N.C. Department of Agriculture, to promote the state's resources to industry. I didn't realize that the state's natural resources had been carved up as early as the 17th century. The eight lords proprietors of Carolina laid claim even to the products of whales in the ocean. Natural history study was just as important as an inventory of goods as it was in furthering scientific knowledge. Environmentalists find themselves making the same argument today: preserving biodiversity is important because endangered species may have medicinal or other dollar value to humankind.

If you had to pick one person who has inspired you from among the many who have cared about and chronicled NC's natural history, who would it be?

Just one? That would have to be John Lawson, who traveled the colony in 1700 and lived to write about it in A New Voyage to Carolina. He was a collector and a real estate surveyor, but had a genuine, amateur naturalist's curiosity about nature. He was of the same mold as many who followed-Bartram, Curtis, the Brimley brothers. Not university researchers, but self-learners who were fascinated with the wonders of the natural world. I like to think the Museum appeals to that type, and that we all have some of that curiosity alive in us.

What experience or experiences with nature compel you in your career?

Sailing by rookeries in Core Sound. Spotting snakes in Merchant's Millpond. Living on a beaver pond by the Eno River. Collecting insects in a mountain meadow in Madison County. Spring wildflowers at Hemlock Bluffs. This is an incredibly diverse and beautiful state we're in.

Do you plan to write another book?

Let me check with my family and get back to you.

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