Human beings are faced with the desperate need to alter the way people treat the ecosystems they depend upon. Are there things that ecologists can do now that will synergize with their other efforts and greatly increase their policy impact on the behaviors that threaten to bring down civilization?
Results/Conclusions
The answer is clearly “yes.” The first thing comes in the choice of research on which synergisms can easily be based. Ask yourself how, if my research yields all the results I’d hoped for, will it make any difference to the world? Just saying “we’ll know more about nature” is not a good answer – if scientists counted the grains of sand on Miami Beach we’d know more about nature, but it wouldn’t be a useful contribution to science. So ecologists should do research with obvious policy implications, or research that will broadly change understanding of the world (which, in turn, may well have policy implications later – think Einstein).
The second is to ensure that the research is of the highest quality and general scientific interest. That will enhance your scientific stature and make you more attractive as a contributor to policy discourse and public education. In turn that can attract students, collaborators, and donors to you research program, allow it to expand, and increase your policy impact.
The third is to include in your activities if possible assistance to NGOs and other institutions in their conservation efforts. Besides helping to preserve our life-support systems this can open up more opportunities for modeling, field work, collaborations, and education, as experience with Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve clearly shows. It started primarily as a site for one ecologists’ research and has metamorphosed in a half-century into a major facility supporting numerous faculty-graduate student research teams (often interdisciplinary), basic ecological education for undergraduates, and public outreach and education.
In short, virtually everything one does in action-oriented ecology can synergize with each other and provide increased benefits to the researcher, to ecology as a discipline, and to society as a whole.