Tag Archives: scientific jobs

Should All Ecologists Become Social Scientists or Politicians?

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Two items this week have stirred me to write about the state of ecology. The first was a talk by an eminent biologist, who must remain nameless, about how scientists should operate. All very good, we should be evidence-based, open to falsification of hypotheses, and we should work as best we can to counter media misinformation. He/she talked about the future of biology in optimistic terms and in the entire one hour talk the word ‘biodiversity’ occurred once and the word ‘environment’ once. So my conclusion was that to this eminent biologist ecology was not on the radar as anything very important. We should be principally concerned about improving the health and wealth of humanity, and increasing economic growth.

This got me to thinking about why ecology falls at the bottom of the totem pole of science so that even though we work hard to understand the functioning of nature, ecologists seem to have value only to ourselves rather than to society. Perhaps society as a whole appreciates us for light entertainment about birds and bees, but when ecologists investigate problems and offer solutions they seem to be sidelined rapidly. Perhaps this is because taking care of the biosphere will cost money, and while we happily spend money on cars and new airplanes and guns, we can afford little for the natural world. One possible explanation for this is that many people and most politicians believe that “Mother Nature will take care of herself” at no financial cost.

If this is even partly correct, we need to change society’s view. There are several ways to do this, perhaps most importantly via education, but a more direct way is for ecologists to become social scientists and perhaps politicians. My experience with this recommendation is not terribly good. Social scientists have in my experience accomplished little for all their work on the human foibles of our time. Perhaps going into politics would be useful for our science if anyone wishes to cross that Rubicon, but there are few role models that we can put up.

So we continue in a political world where few ecologists sit in high places to challenge the modern paradigm of economic growth fuelled by non-renewable resources, and many of our national leaders see no human footprint on climatic warming. Short-term thinking is one element of this puzzle for we ecologists who take a longer view of life on Earth, but it must really rankle our paleo-ecologists who take a very long term look at changes in the Earth’s environment.

The second item this week that has encapsulated all of this was the announcement from a developed country that a new institute with over 1000 scientists was to be set up to study molecular biology for the improvement of human health. Now this is a noble cause that I do not wish to cast aspersions on, but it occurred to me that this was possibly a number greater than the total number of ecologists working in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The numbers are hard to document, but I have not seen anything like this kind of announcement for a new institute that would address any of our many ecological problems. There is money for many things but very little for ecology.

None of this is terribly new but I am puzzled why this is the case. We live in a world of inequality in which the rich squander the wealth of the Earth while the future of the planet seems of little concern. Luckily ecologists are a happy lot once they get a job because they can work in the laboratory or in the field on interesting problems and issues (if they can get the money). And to quote the latest Nature (March 13, 2014, p. 140) “If ecologists want to produce work useful to conservation, they might do better to spend their days sitting quietly in ecosystems with waterproof notebooks and hand lenses, writing everything down.” That will cost little money fortunately.

On the Need for Ecological Meetings

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Perhaps I am the only ecologist in the world who is overwhelmed by the number of conferences that go on every year. I think we need to consider why we have so many meetings and consider some of the problems of the current model for ecological scientific communication. The problems that bring this to the fore for me are five:

  • Travel in its many forms increases greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. Ecologists in particular are not supposed to be happy about that.
  • The number and frequency of meetings operate on a time scale completely inconsistent with having any new experimental data to report.
  • Large meetings operate with 6 or more concurrent sessions that cannot all be attended and there are so many people you cannot possibly talk to many you wish to meet.
  • Many of the talks at some meetings are poorly presented and a complete waste of one’s time.
  • Modern forms of electronic communication produce much more rapid and efficient transfer of scientific information than attending conferences.

I have of course left out the somewhat frivolous but true observation that really important people at meetings never go to any of the talks except their own.

The advantages of scientific meetings are many, and I am a believer in communication in person rather than via electronic media. So we must be careful here – I do not propose getting rid of all meetings. And I recognize that they are very important for young ecologists to help their careers develop.

So I think we have a problem and we need to think of possible solutions. One solution is to space meetings every 4 years instead of annually. Many societies do this already and do not seem to suffer. Even if we had an ESA meeting every second year we would have less stress. Another solution has been to divide up meetings into smaller groups, so the small mammal population ecologists meet as a unit, and the stream ecologists meet separately, and the carbon cycle ecologists meet on their own. This works to cut the size of meetings down and again they do not always need to hold meetings annually. Further reductions can occur by regional meetings, so the East Coast stream ecologists get together readily with minimal travel and so on. Much of this is already happening.

We have not yet used electronic forms of communication very effectively. Plenary lectures could be streamed on video and thus be available around the world for little cost and less CO2 emissions. I am hardly the one to tell you about modern communication but even I use Skype and other platforms to keep in touch with colleagues and ask questions.

There is a slightly frantic nature about ecological meeting e mails that reminds me of the Church in the good old days when every Saturday or Sunday you were supposed to attend for some reason never quite clear. If we are to continue to have large meetings often, we might at least have them in less developed countries that could use the economic stimulus that is clearly a large part of large scientific meetings. Which raises the issue of how much money should we spend on going to meetings versus doing some scientific work.

And my final complaint, having just witnessed the G20 Meeting in Australia, is that we should not adopt their model of meeting every year in very expensive places like Sydney and not having accomplished a single thing in recent memory except to say that they are a very important group.

10 Limitations on Progress in Ecology

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Ecological science moves along slowly in its mission to understand how the Earth’s populations, communities, and ecosystems operate within the constraints of human impacts on the Biosphere. The question of the day is can we identify the factors currently limiting the rate of progress so that at least in principle we could speed up progress in our science. Here is my list.

1. A shortage of ecologists or more properly jobs for ecologists. In particular a scarcity of government agencies employing ecologists in secure jobs to work on stable, long-term environmental projects that are beyond the scope of university scientists. Many young ecologists of high quality are stalled in positions that are beneath their talents. We are in a situation similar to having highly trained medical doctors being used as hospital janitors. This is a massive failure on many fronts, regional and national, political and scientific. Many governments around the world think economists and lawyers are key while environmental scientists are superfluous.

2. The lack of proper funding from both government, private companies and private individuals. This is typified by the continual downsizing of government scientists working on natural resource problems – fisheries, wildlife, park management – and continuing political interference with scientific objectives. Private companies too often rely on taxpayers to fund their environmental investigations and do not view them as a part of their business model. Private citizens give money to medical research rather than to environmental programs largely based on the belief that of all the life on Earth, only the human component is important.

3. The deficiency of taxonomic expertise to define clearly the species that inhabit the Earth. The estimates vary but perhaps only 10% of the total biota can be given a Latin name and morphological description, leaving out for the moment all the bacteria and viruses. Equate this with having a batch of various shaped coins in your pocket with only a few of them giving the denomination. This problem has been identified for years with little action.

4. Given adequate taxonomy, the lack of adequate natural history data on most of the biota. This activity, so critical for all ecological science, was called “stamp collecting” and thus condemned to the lowest point on the scientific totem pole. The consequence of this is that we try to understand the Earth with data only on butterflies, some birds, and some large mammals.

5. A failure of ecologists to map out the critical questions facing natural populations, communities, and ecosystems on Earth. The roadmap of ecology is littered with wrecks of ideas once pushed to explain nearly everything, and we need a more nuanced map of what is a critical issue. There are a considerable number of fractures within the ecological discipline about what needs to be done, if people and money were available. This fosters the culture of I win = you lose in competition for money and jobs.

6. The confusion of mathematical models with reality. There is a strong disconnect between models and data that persists. Models rapidly proliferate, data are slow to accumulate, so we try to paper over the fragility of our understanding with mathematical wizardry, trying to be like physicists. Connecting model predictions with empirical data studies would go a long way to righting this problem but it is a tall order in a world that confuses the number of publications and h scores with important contributions.

7 The fact that too many ecologists do not adopt the scientific method of investigation, to carry out experiments with multiple alternative hypotheses with clear predictions. Arguments continue endlessly based on words (‘concepts’) that are so vaguely defined as to be meaningless operationally. If you need an example, think ‘stability’ or ‘diversity’. These vague words are then herded into pseudo-hypotheses to doubly confound the confusion over what the critical questions in ecology really are.

8. The need for ecologists to work in stable groups. Serious ecological problems demand expertise in many scientific specialities, and we need better mechanisms to foster and maintain such groups. The assessment of scientists on the basis of individual work is long out of date, the Nobel Prize is an anachronism, and we need strong groups concentrating on important issues for long term studies. At the moment many groups exist to do meta-analyses and fewer to do science.

9. Placing the technological horse in front of the ecological cart. Ecology like many sciences is often led by technology rather than by questions. The current DNA bandwagon is one example, but we should not get so confused to think that that most important questions in ecology are those that use the most technology. Jumping from one technological bandwagon to the next is a good recipe for minimizing progress.

10. The fractionation of ecology into subdisciplines and the assumption that the only important research work has been done since 2000. Aquatic ecologists do not talk to terrestrial ecologists, microbial ecologists live in their own special world, and avian ecologists do not talk to insect ecologists. The result is that the existing literature is too often wasted by investigators who have no idea that question XX has already been answered either in another subdiscipline or in existing literature from 50 years ago.

Not all of these limitations apply to every ecologist, and at best I would view them as a set of guideposts that need to be considered as we move further into the 21st century.

Krebs, C. J. 2006. Ecology after 100 years: progress and pseudo-progress. New Zealand Journal of Ecology 30:3-11.

Majer, J. D. 2012. Critical times: How has ecological research responded over the past 35 years? Austral Ecology 37:149-152.

Sutherland, W. J. et al. 2010. A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25:1-7.