February 2011 Archives
I have had the privilege of wearing lots of different hats in my 10+ years at RMBL. I spent 5 years on Gunnison County’s Planning Commission, most of that time chairing the commission. The body was responsible for making recommendations concerning land use decisions, from developments to oil and gas projects. At one point in a hearing, I was dismissed as an academic who didn’t understand how things work in the real world. I think what the individual wanted to say, but couldn’t, was that I didn’t understand the devil’s bargain. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want to accept the bargain. The applicant simply accepted money wasted on consultants as the cost of doing business. Individuals who were concerned about the environment accepted as progress the act of increasing the cost of business for the applicants. Everybody went home satisfied— the project continued, the enviros took satisfaction in exacting a pound of flesh, and everybody had good cause to complain when it was politically expeditious. The environment was no better off.
Why do I say that the money was wasted? More times than not, when faced with a decision, collectively we would fail to connect the dots in a meaningful way that led to informed decision-making. Much of the information generated lacked context and was irrelevant to the decisions. The consultants introduced opinion as fact, despite a lack of training to make highly subjective calls. When the county brought in experts, they did little to shed light on the issues. The logic linking the information to decisions that were being made was tenuous at best. Maybe my desire for logic in the real world was unrealistic.
This is not to blame anybody in particular. There were always a lot of good and well-intentioned people at the table, from consultants to staff to decision-makers. But using science for decision-making in ecological issues is hard; compared to understanding how ground disturbance may or may not affect a plant population is really hard, designing a roof to withstand Gunnison’s snowloads is like first grade math. And the problem is not unique to Gunnison. I see it whenever I interact with agencies trying to integrate science and management. The gap between decision-makers and scientists is huge. We make efforts to throw a rope across the chasm, but mainly the rope is about making us feel that something is being done, not actually making things better.
Building a bridge between decision-makers and scientists will take work from both sides. We need to make certain that decision-makers are empowered to use science. That involves knowing enough to evaluate the quality of science and ask hard questions. They need to understand how science works, including how scientists are funded and what motivates scientists, in order to leverage existing investments in science. When they are presented with information that doesn’t make sense, they need to be able to call that out, rather than tune it out.
While there is a great deal that managers can do, it is the responsibility of the scientists to establish our relevance. We need to articulate the relevance of our work. We need to understand the questions that resource managers need answering. We need to take the time with willing resource managers to explain how science works. We need to be willing to cast their science into a language and context that resource managers can understand. We need to define a logical framework that moves the focus of environmental law away from political action to integration of science and decision-making.
I constantly argue for the importance of investing in learning how our world works. Our economies and happiness depend upon making wise, informed decisions about limited resources. That investment is never going to happen unless we put all of the pieces in place for the value of the investment to be fully realized. If we can invest billions of dollars in putting a man on the moon, maybe it is time to thinking about investing in a bridge from Mars to Venus.
In the excellent article in The New Yorker’s December 13, 2010 edition , “The Truth Wears Off”, Jonah Lehrer summarizes the widespread phenomena that provocative experiments commonly fail to stand the test of time by being unable to be repeated. This analysis, assumes, however that the “gold standard” of science is repeatability. While there is considerable value in repeating experiments, an inability to repeat a result may not only be the result of subtle psychological tendencies on the part of scientists, but in some instances may reflect how the world works.
In our newly issued edited book, The Ecology of Place (Chicago Press), Mary Price and I note that variability is a fundamental part of ecological systems—Darwin’s “tangled bank”; an experiment run in one meadow may yield different results when run simultaneously in an adjacent meadow simply because the meadows are different. Yet good field scientists are able to develop general insights, sometimes not despite of the variability, but because of the variability.
Through sustained investigation of single locations, some scientists develop general insights by building a detailed understanding of a single ecosystem. False results are revealed not because other scientists fail to find similar results in other ecosystems, but because they are eventually undermined by other findings for the same system. For scientists committed to this approach, the incentives are not to produce flashy, false results that do not hold up, but to develop a rich understanding of a system based upon stitching together a large body of experimental results, observations and measurements.
One of the take away lessons of Lehrer’s article, in addition to the very real psychological phenomena which he describes, is that there is no one way to do science. All too often the general public, and even scientists themselves, fall back on overly simplistic descriptions of how scientists work. In reality, the richness of the world we live in demands that we be devious and subtle, and that we take a “no holds barred” approach to understanding.