Inside me lives a little boy who wants to rebel
For more than two decades, biologist Morten DD Hansen has shared his enthusiasm for nature in TV programmes, in lectures and on countless hikes through the unique landscape of Mols Bjerge national park. Meet the self-proclaimed ‘chief nature sleuth’ who received plenty of good advice during his student days at Aarhus University – but didn’t listen to it.
What is your favourite memory from your student days at Aarhus University?
Asking a former biology student to choose one favourite memory from university is like asking someone to choose a single piece of candy in a giant candy store. I enjoyed the Friday bars, the biology parties and the degree programme committee, and I especially loved the fieldwork association, where we embraced our nerdy appreciation of plants, birds and insects. But if I had to choose one memory in which I featured as the main character, it would be my Master’s thesis defence – my last day as a student at Aarhus University. It took place in a packed auditorium at the Museum of Natural History, and it was during this defence that everything I had learned about my subject, research and communication was put to the test. My thesis focused on the migration of the admiral butterfly, and I had to give a lecture on the migration of insects around the world before I was cross-examined on my methodology, results and analysis. It was great to have the opportunity to explore such a vast topic in front of a delightful mix of subject experts and non-specialists, and I can still remember the exhilarating feeling of being on home ground academically and being able to communicate my knowledge. It was a fantastic day, and it was my lecture on the admiral butterfly that led to me getting my first permanent job two months later.
Who was your favourite teacher and why?
That’s an easy one to answer. Boy Overgaard Nielsen, associate professor of insect ecology at the Department of Biology. He was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, always relevant and convincing when he lectured, always a positive listener when you wanted to talk, and always had good advice on what to investigate. And he was extremely knowledgeable about insects, which I slowly developed a love for during my studies. When he heard that I had started a thesis on migratory butterflies, he immediately went to his bookcase, pulled out a book and gave me the definitive work on migratory insects: The Migration of Butterflies by C.B. Williams (1930). I’m looking at the book now and tearing up a little, because I – like many others – miss Boy, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 87. We should all try to be like Boy.
What advice do you wish you had been given as a student?
I got plenty of good advice, but I didn’t listen to any of it. Inside me lives a little boy who wants to rebel and let out a fart at the most inappropriate moment — and discipline was certainly not my strong point. If I’m being a bit cheeky, I guess my laconic words of wisdom would be “drink a bit less beer”. But to my nerdy, intoxicated first-year-student self, I would also recommend supplementing biology with insights from the social sciences, the humanities and theology. The world, sustainability and biodiversity have become huge battlegrounds for value-based politics. When you have to navigate society as a subject expert, it’s important to know something about what other people think. We were quite bad at that 20-25 years ago.
What is the most important thing you learned from your time at AU?
My academic community is undoubtedly the most important thing I took from university, and you can benefit from it throughout your life. I always know who to call, and when I meet fellow experts at conferences and public meetings, it’s always a happy reunion with good classmates. During my time at the Museum of Natural History, it always felt like coming home when I turned into the University Park in the morning. I felt truly at home there.
What are your current interests?
Now I’m a self-employed biologist and make a living from giving lectures and courses on nature and biodiversity. One of the topics I’m most interested in is the distinction between subject knowledge and politics. For example, it’s not biology itself that dictates whether we should preserve all 60 species of mining bee in Denmark. We could easily say goodbye to the orange mining bee on the flowering devil’s-bit in western Jutland without the world falling apart. There is a lot of redundancy in nature. But do we want to live in a world without the orange mining bee? The answer is political, and I’m personally not afraid to stand by my enthusiasm for the orange mining bee, the little owl or the burnt-tip orchid. Just as I’m not afraid to acknowledge my deep sorrow that, here in the North Atlantic, we managed to wipe out the great auk — the ‘real’ penguin — or that the Niobe and heath fritillary butterflies have vanished from my local area over the last ten years. But it’s our expertise, not our emotions, that tell us what to do if we want to reverse this trend. Nature is, after all, free of spin and uncompromising, and if you don’t listen to the subject experts (and do as they say!), you won’t achieve the results you want. Understanding the distinction between science and politics is vitally important, and we forget it all too often.