10/21/2026
I feel this every day. “When did “it’s complicated” become an unacceptable answer.
As this person touches on two potential causes, I have to say that both are symptoms of one main thing: Culture. The cultural change that has occurred has also lent itself to the idea that one side or the other is not just wrong, but evil. This developed culture thrives on being “right” through simple arguments that paints the others as not just wrong but evil and worthy of hate. Complicated answers require discussion. You cannot have long discussions and sharing of ideas, thoughts and more information with simple ideas that require adherence to one simple answer.
I see this in every level of culture. A lack of a sophisticated context and curiosity for what else may affect the subject.
The dumbing down of conversation. Who benefits? Not you. Not in any manner.
I teach complicated things. And it requires open, long and deep discussions. It seems that few wish to spend any time to learn deeper and more. This is not a complaint, just reality. Many of my students and colleagues, over the years, have cajoled me, begged me, gotten mad at me because I won’t join the mass lemming movement over the cliff into “marketing”.
My answer has been “most will never be interested” or”they are not ready and may never be”. For years I have heard “I don’t get it”, “it’s too hard”, “you make it too complicated”, “just tell me what to do when -“. No! You can go anywhere else and get those answers. They won’t be your answers, they will be someone else’s simple “how to”. It is easy to teach the what and how. All you need is modern marketing lies. I will not do that to you. 
This is not a complaining post. This is a definition of what to expect if you should choose to learn the subject matter I teach. I want to define exactly who we are and what we do so your expectations are correct. This isn’t the easy “how to do it” performative presentations you can get ad infinitum. It is everything more than that.
I hope to meet and work with the curious you, the unsatisfied people who have the sense that there is more, the ones that have a thirst for more knowledge.
Sometimes I wonder whether the internet is making us stupid, or whether we've always preferred simple explanations and the internet just gave us a bigger stage to show it off.
I'm leaning toward the latter. Although social media certainly isn't helping.
Take the Yellowstone trophic cascade. Please. I'm beginning to wish I'd never met it.
For years, we've been treated to the wonderfully simple story of how wolves returned to Yellowstone and practically waved their magic paws over the landscape.
The elk changed their behavior. The willows grew. The beavers returned. The rivers changed course. Cue the inspirational music. And wolves lived happily ever after. Except that's not quite ecology works.
So I wrote about it. I explained that yes, wolves influence elk populations and behavior, and yes, those effects can contribute to changes in vegetation. But climate, water availability, other herbivores, hunting, and local conditions also play important roles.
In other words, wolves were part of the story. They weren't the entire cast, director, producer, and special effects department.
Seemed straightforward enough. Apparently not.
Because now someone has interpreted my criticism of the oversimplified Yellowstone story as an admission that science doesn't support wolf conservation.
Wait. What?
How did we get from “wolves didn't do everything” to “wolves don't do anything”?
Did we just skip all the words in between?
And here's the funny part. Both interpretations make exactly the same mistake.
One takes a complicated scientific relationship and turns it into a conservation fairy tale. The other hears that the fairy tale isn't entirely accurate and decides the whole scientific argument must be nonsense.
Congratulations. We've managed to oversimplify the oversimplification.
But this isn't just about wolves.
We do this with politics, medicine, economics, wildlife management, and pretty much anything else that requires us to hold more than one thought in our heads at a time.
Someone presents a piece of evidence, and we immediately start sorting them into teams.
Are you for us or against us? Do you support wolves or hate them?
Are ranchers good guys or bad guys? Is Yellowstone a miracle or a fraud?
Good grief. Sometimes the answer is neither, or it's both. And sometimes the answer is that we need more information.
I know. How terribly inconvenient.
And heaven forbid someone says, “Well, it depends.”
Depends? On WHAT?
Apparently, we're supposed to have a firm position on everything, preferably one that fits on a bumper sticker.
But here's the thing.
Wolves can be ecologically important and still cause serious livestock conflicts. Ranchers can have legitimate concerns without every proposed solution being reasonable. Nonlethal deterrents can work without working everywhere, every time. Predators can influence prey populations without being responsible for every increase or decline.
And questioning an exaggerated scientific claim doesn't mean rejecting the science behind it.
See? Nobody's head exploded. At least I hope not. Or maybe it would be a kindness.
Human brains have always liked shortcuts. We look for patterns, draw conclusions, and build stories that help us make sense of the world.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. We'd never get through the day if we had to conduct a research project every time we made a decision.
But there's a difference between simplifying something so we can understand it and simplifying it until it's no longer accurate.
And social media has turned the second one into something of a competitive sport.
A confident declaration gets shared a thousand times. A carefully explained answer gets skimmed, misunderstood, and turned into an argument about something nobody actually said.
Sometimes I wonder whether people are reading to understand or just scanning for the sentence they can disagree with.
Because there's a difference.
Science isn't a collection of convenient talking points we can pull out whenever we need to win an argument. Science is a process of asking questions, gathering evidence, testing explanations, and sometimes discovering that our favorite explanation wasn't quite right.
Science isn’t failing. That's science doing its job.
And when someone says, “I don't know,” or “the evidence is mixed,” or “there are several factors involved,” that doesn't necessarily mean they're uninformed.
It means they understand the subject well enough to recognize how much they don't know. That's beautiful because I'm up for exploring more.
Personally, I'm far more suspicious of someone who has a simple, absolute answer to every complicated question. Especially when they deliver it in ALL CAPS.
Maybe we're not getting stupider. We've just become so accustomed to instant answers that we've lost patience with the work required to understand them.
Or maybe we've become so invested in being right that we've forgotten there's something more valuable than winning an argument.
Learning something. Imagine that.
So here's my question.
When did “it's complicated” become an unacceptable answer?
Because if we can't handle a little complexity in a Facebook discussion, I'm not terribly optimistic about our ability to solve the problems we're arguing about.
And for the record, wolves are still wolves. They're not magical forest restoration technicians, and they're not four-legged ecological disasters.
They're predators. Remarkably interesting ones. That’s just f()cking life on Earth, whether by divine design or evolution.
It can’t get any simpler for the back row who already left the room when they got to the part they disagree with.
If you made it this far. You deserve a gold star.
