Predirections year in review

A reflection on my first calendar year on Substack.

Hi folks,

I hope you’re enjoying the festive season! We’re busy firing up the barbie, fishing, swimming, and generally messing around in the sun with the kids. Christmas down under is a little different.

We’re lucky enough to be visiting family in the beautiful Coromandel.

I thought I’d spend a few words recapping 2024 from the perspective of the newsletter. I haven’t been around for a full year yet but I’d like to do this each year to reflect on what worked, what didn’t and what you’d like more of.

First of all, a true highlight for me has been in getting to know many of you, either through the comments, Substack Notes, or in the Predirections chat. Starting this newsletter has led to many new connections, which I’m really grateful for. I started this to connect with a different audience. But I’m also very happy to have crossed over the 1,000 subscriber mark sooner than I had anticipated. I’m now about nine months in and have ~1,100 subscribers, including five very generous souls who are paid subscribers. There’s currently no extra benefit to paying other than to support the newsletter, but I very much appreciate the generosity of these folks as I do spend a lot of time putting my posts together in my own time. I may begin to offer extra paid benefits in the future, but the informative posts will always be free. In the meantime, if you feel like supporting Predirections by paying for a subscription, I’d be super grateful.

Growth has slowed a bit of late but I’m sure things will come around. However, my request of you is to share the newsletter with your friends, family, colleagues etc. Encourage them to subscribe too. And if you’re a writer on Substack, please consider recommending the newsletter — a lot of the newsletter growth has come through recommendations but this has slowed down of late due to a couple key recommendations dropping off. (I hate writing such things, but I hear it’s important to make it obvious that this is how we grow — by others sharing and recommending our work.)

What would you like to receive and how often?

This year has probably been the busiest of my life work-wise. Despite this, I started Predirections. I didn’t do this because I wanted to create more work for myself. I did it because I wanted to get my ideas, research, and the things I read about daily out into a wider audience, and trial some ideas. Academic research is all well and good, and I’m not stopping anytime soon, but more of the results need to reach more people, particularly in the age of polycrisis.

If I’m honest, at times I’ve struggled to keep up with posts. I wanted to make them weekly, but it hasn’t happened so far. I’ve been on a schedule nearer to fortnightly (many are spaced around 10-14 days in between). I’d still like to aim for weekly scheduled posts on the minute. Not least because it sounds like that helps with newsletter growth. (I still want to grow this as big as I can, not for egotistical reasons, but because I hope for it to make a positive dent on the world.)

So I thought I’d ask you, what frequency and regularity would you like to see? Would you prefer to see posts come out at the same time each week? Does lack of consistency make you lose trust in the newsletter? If I go for scheduled weekly posts at a particular time, it might be that most posts are shorter form with, say, one longer form deep dive a month. I am committed to making this work, so my lack of consistency doesn’t reflect a lack of care for my audience. It just reflects a particularly busy period over the last few months of this year. Here’s a poll to make things easier.

On that note, what sort of content have you enjoyed the most? What would you like to see more of? Let me know in the comments. All ideas welcome. Below, I reflect on some top posts from my first calendar year to give this some context.

Top posts

Most read and liked:

Nature-based solutions are not enough to solve the climate crisis

This one emerged from a feeling I had that nature-based solutions had been thrown around a lot as a climate solution, but often incorrectly. NbS are a fundamentally useful part of the toolbox, but they’re not the be-all-and-end-all. Dig in to read more.

Most enjoyable to write, but with the least attention:

We should think like the Stoics

I enjoyed writing this post. As my second real post, it went out to just 34 subscribers! It still hasn’t been seen by many. I’m a fan of Stoicism as a concept and I found it fun to try to apply this concept to environmental management. I had considered pitching this idea as an editorial type paper to an academic journal. Posts like this are one of the reasons I decided to start a newsletter — to experiment with ideas that might not necessarily cut the mustard as papers in peer-reviewed journals. This one hasn’t been very popular, but perhaps that’s just because it hasn’t found an audience yet…

Most useful for academics (in my opinion):

To address grand challenges, we need transdisciplinarity, but what actually is it?

In this post, I discussed the different forms of disciplinarity and how we need to push for more inter- and transdisciplinary research to address grand challenges like biodiversity loss and climate change. I think it’s a useful post for people to quickly grasp the difference between these different forms of research (they often get misused and are widely misunderstood).

Most useful for practitioners:

Rules for reforestation

Should we just plant trees everywhere to fix climate change?

This one is a tie between two posts focused on tree planting initiatives for climate and biodiversity benefits. The latter went out to just 46 subscribers at the time. I’m glad it seems to have been read more widely. The former condenses the finding of a very useful paper on reforestation.

Most discussed:

On hope, apathy and scaremongering

In this post, I pondered the balance between hope, apathy and scaremongering in communicating issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. I asked you about what the best way for us as individuals to help make positive change is. It’s clear that it requires collective action and responsibility. But I asked how we can make the biggest impact with our communication. You all stepped up and dove into the comments. But I’m still keen to hear more if you have ideas. This post went out to 167 subscribers. I now have a thousand more, so I’m sure there are a lot more good ideas to go around.

Most surprisingly popular:

Lost connections with nature and lack of progress towards biodiversity and climate goals

This post was of a different kind to most of my others. It was a bit cobbled together from various short-form social media type posts I’d shared on Substack Notes, Bluesky and LinkedIn. It turned out to be quite well received. So I’d be interested to hear if you’d like to receive more of these sorts of posts?

Most controversial (maybe):

On science and activism: can we be truly objective as scientists?

This one may have been a little controversial. I argued that us scientists are never really disconnected from what we research. We’re not robots after all. But we can still be objective in our work, despite having a connection to what we do. For instance, I got into ecology because I love the environment, so I’m going to have some implicit bias towards wanting to protect the environment. So long as I acknowledge that and declare it when necessary, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

Nearest and dearest to my heart:

Give river ecosystems a chance

As you may or may not know, most of my research revolves around studying the ecology of river ecosystems. River biodiversity is disproportionately threatened. Rivers receive and transmit the stressors that happen on land. This post lays out a few ideas for what I believe should be priority areas for protecting river ecosystems now and into the future.

While you’re here…

The Aotearoa New Zealand government is cutting humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund (our main blue skies research fund), and cutting basic science from 50% of the remaining projects. I’ve talked widely about it on social media but not here. I was involved in writing two open letters to the government objecting to this decision. I talk a lot in my newsletter about the need for cross-disciplinary research and social sciences for addressing grand challenges. This is absolutely a backward step for our country and it needs all the opposition it can get. Please consider reading these two letters linked below and even writing your own. There’s a lot of material in the letters that you may find informative or helpful.

Letter From Winners Of The Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize

Joint Statement by 80 Rutherford Discovery Fellows Denouncing the Minister’s Decision to Cut Humanities, Social Science, and Fundamental Science Funding

Finally…

Thanks again for reading Predirections — your support allows me to keep doing this work. I’m grateful to have you here and particularly grateful to the kind souls who have chosen to pay to support the newsletter. I want this to be a place with a strong community of motivated individuals.

If you enjoy Predirections, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. There’s even a leaderboard of those who have referred the most new readers.

Thank you for helping get the word out about Predirections! I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

See you in the new year,

Jono