🚀 go-pugleaf

The part of the discussion I dropped in on began with:
>  Perhaps we need environmental ecologists and ecological
>environmentalists...  But, with what is happening to the global
>environment, it may one day be that most people will not like our
>environment, at that point we will only have bad ecologists who
>did not communicate well.  If there is any message here, it is that we
>must communicate.

John Lerter went on to add:
>I am a graduate student in the field of aquatic biogeochemistry and
>I find I am pretty frequently asked questions by family members and
>friends about large scale problems such as ENSO and sea level change.
>They pretty much accept my understanding (althought incomplete) of >these
processes.
>I think the peer recognized experts (and those fortunate enough to >study
ecology) should succinctly and more frequently share their >understanding
of ecosystem processes with the general public.   As a >result our populace
who "likes the environment" will become an >ecologically educated populace
who "likes the environment" much as the >"environmentalists" such as myself
who study ecology.  Then perhaps we >could create a society where aquatic
biogeochemists were in high >demand. :-)

    I agree that communication is important and I feel that it is not
effectively done by the scientific community.  There seems to be an "us vs.
them" attitude among some of us.
    Scientists who have been effective communicators seem to lose credit
amongst their fellow scientists.  Take Carl Sagan for example.  I read a
disturbing commentary in the May 1997 issue of Discover.
    It always seems to come down to communication.  Recent editorials in
Nature have also dealt with the subject of effectively presenting
information to the general public, and even scientists in other diciplines.
 Perhaps beginning in college the entertainment value of a good paper
presentation should be stressed equally with the research methods and
statistics and lifeless data.  The point of a presentation or publication
is to breath life into the numbers and to give them meaning.  My naive,
idealistic, first year graduate student self would like to think that
science is still an attempt at not just enlightening ourselves but everyone
else with whom we come into contact.


Marian Norris
AgBiotech Center-Foran Hall Room 135
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Cook Campus, Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
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Office:732-932-6785
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E-mail:mnorris@eden.rutgers.edu