Ecology for All…If We Want It: Three Transformational Imperatives
What would it mean to use the ESA Annual Meeting - and our day-to-day work back home - to make ecology relevant and useful to people whose decisions would benefit from ecological science? How would that change how we work and what we work on, who we work with and how we communicate?
At a time, when the pressures on Earth’s biosphere are near breaking points (and nowhere near diminishing), when public policy has set biodiversity and habitat protection targets while climate change undermines practically everything we work so hard to achieve, when species and ecosystem services are being lost ever-more rapidly and even our own spirits falter at times in the face of the mounting losses of all we love – something has got to give.
It is time to not just incrementally adjust our work, but slow down long enough to reckon with the transformations that need to happen. Yes, transformations “out there”, by others, but also in our own way of doing what we do, in ourselves. This opening plenary will lay out three imperatives for profound change in our work as academic and applied scientists that are required to meet the growing multi-faceted crises of the day. The stakes could hardly be higher. The benefits - immeasurable.
