Op-Ed: The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Thanks to Alex C for the link!
by Martin A. Schwartz
from Journal of Cell Science

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

Accepted April 9, 2008.

Great Op-Ed: Apes and Anthropomorphism

from NPR
by BARBARA J KING

Autumn begins tomorrow. Suffused already with a seasonal nostalgia, I'm replaying scenes of summer in my head. Among them is sitting in a dark theatre, watching apes clamber across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

In the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, alpha-male chimpanzee Caesar leads a band of apes against humans in a bid to escape the grip of their tyranny.

Before he is a battle-hardened rebel leader, however, we get to see Caesar as he grows up, transforming from playful primate child in a human household to confused adolescent to powerful adult.

"Careful, human no like smart ape," he's told by the orangutan Maurice. Nevertheless, Caesar learns human speech, and has the temerity to use it.

Two aspects of the film caught my attention. Marvelously, no living primates were forced to work on the set; CGI apes were used instead. What made ROTPOTA work as a film is our collective willingness — at least while watching it — to embrace anthropomorphism.

Defined as the attribution of human qualities or abilities to non-human animals, anthropomorphism is familiar to most anyone who lives with animals. Let's say I'm in a room with two of my cats. One jumps in my lap, and purrs as I stroke and whisper endearments to her. The other glares at me, and acts aloof for the next hour. "He's jealous!" I may think to myself. Or, after a tough day at work, you slump on the couch. Your dog nuzzles your hand and looks into your eyes. "He understands," you may conclude.

But is it valid to label animals' emotions and actions in this way?

It's one thing for Hollywood to dazzle audiences with anthropomorphic screen apes, but when we apply human terms to real-life animals do we wrongly superimpose our experiences onto theirs?

Real, breathing apes offer a good starting place for thinking about anthropomorphism. (Cats, dogs, and other creatures matter too; I'll expand my scope at a later date.) I often recount the following event noted by the biologists Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann. It stars the chimpanzee Brutus at Tai National Park in the Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa.

A young female chimpanzee, Tina, was killed by a leopard. Her body lay in the forest. Twelve of Tina's companions sat silently around her body, sometimes touching it gently. Brutus, the community's alpha male, sat with Tina for nearly five hours. When youngsters approached, he shooed them away, with a single exception — Tina's younger brother Tarzan, who came near, pulled on his big sister's hand many times, and gazed at her body.

We know, thanks to decades of field research uncovering aspects of chimpanzees' minds and emotions, that careful anthropomorphism is appropriate here. Working in context, it makes good scientific sense to conclude that Tarzan felt grief for his sister, that Brutus was able to recognize Tarzan's bond of affection with Tina and that Brutus chose to act upon that knowledge by compassionately allowing Tarzan to do what other youngsters could not.

A skeptic would balk. Maybe Tarzan was only curious about why his sister's body lay so still. Perhaps Brutus had noticed some kind of connection between the brother and sister, but had no deep motives for what he did.

Science needs skeptics in order to stay true to its self-correcting nature. I can't emphasize enough, though, the relevant weight of cumulative knowledge about chimpanzees. A new source to consider is Andrew Westoll's The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary. Westoll tells the stories of 13 chimpanzees, once trapped in biomedical testing facilities and now living in a Canadian sanctuary run by Gloria Grow.

One chimpanzee's tale seared itself into my mind. Westoll writes about Tom:

"For more than thirty years, he was repeatedly infected with increasingly virulent strains of HIV, went through numerous hepatitis-B studies, and survived at least sixty-three liver, bone marrow, and lymph-node biopsies. Tom has gone through more surgeries than anyone else at Fauna — by Gloria's estimate, he was knocked unconscious at least 369 times."

Upon arrival at the sanctuary, Tom readily complied with verbal instructions that enabled staff to care properly for his foot injury. When offered a tray of antibiotic cream and other supplies, Tom even treated his own wound. Later, Westoll recounts:

"The chimpanzee Regis sustained a bad bite wound. At first, Grow treated him, but when Regis's strength returned, that option was no longer safe. She then left for Tom all the medical materials on a trolley; Tom cleaned and treated Regis's wound for a week."

With the skeptic's help, we might dismiss Tom's behavior toward Regis as a product of curiosity or boredom, or as a conditioned response to human praise. Yet is it so hard to believe that Tom, who himself had suffered badly, might clean Regis's wound because he realized Regis's discomfort and wanted to help?

Wide discussion of Westoll's book could sustain the summer's ape buzz well into autumn. Along the way, we might ask this question: Does a reluctance to assign human depth to chimpanzees' thoughts and feelings make it easier to tolerate what's done inside biomedical labs in this country to chimpanzees like Tom?

Dr. Mitani's NYTimes Op- Ed:Fearing a Planet Without Apes

From the NYTimes.com
by JOHN C MITANI

VIEWERS of this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” may be surprised to learn that before our earliest ancestors arrived on the scene roughly seven million years ago, apes really did rule the planet. As many as 40 kinds roamed Eurasia and Africa between 10 and 25 million years ago. Only five types remain. Two live in Asia, the gibbon and orangutan; another three, the chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla, dwell in Africa. All five are endangered, several critically so. All may face extinction.

A decade ago, Congress stepped forward with a relatively cheap but vitally important effort to protect these apes through innovative conservation programs in Africa and Asia that combined taxpayer dollars with private money. But attempts to reauthorize the Great Apes Conservation Fund have gotten stuck in Congress and may become a victim of the larger debate over the national debt.

Hollywood’s depiction of apes as cunning — if not conniving — creatures comes close to reality. Fifty years ago, Jane Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees’ using tools and eating meat demonstrated just how similar apes are to humans. Subsequent fieldwork has underscored this point.

Gibbons, long thought to be monogamous, occasionally mate with individuals outside their group. Orangutans fashion tools to extract seeds that are otherwise difficult to obtain. Gorillas engage in conversational vocal exchanges. Bonobos appear to have sex not only to reproduce but also to relieve stress. Male chimpanzees form coalitions to kill their neighbors and take over their territory. If all of this seems human, there is a good reason: The apes are our closest living relatives, and in anatomy, genetics and behavior, they are much more similar to us than they are to other animals.

Apes fascinate and captivate us like no other species. They are prime attractions at zoos, and scientists from disciplines ranging from anthropology to biology and psychology study them closely in captivity and in the wild. As our first cousins in the primate family, apes help us to understand what makes us human.

I have been lucky to study all five kinds of apes during 33 years of fieldwork in Africa and Asia. When I look into the eyes of an ape, something stares back at me that seems familiar. Perhaps it is a shock of recognition, or a thoughtfulness not seen in the eyes of a frog, bird or cat. The penetrating stare makes me wonder, “What is this individual thinking?”

But as the human population expands, ape numbers continue to dwindle. In previous versions of the “Planet of the Apes” films, greed and consumption by humanlike apes threatened the world. In reality, it is these all-too-human traits that imperil apes.

Habitat destruction because of human activity, including logging, oil exploration and subsistence farming, is the biggest concern. Hunting is another major problem, especially in West and Central Africa, where a thriving “bush meat” trade severely threatens African apes. Poachers are now entering once-impenetrable forests on roads built for loggers and miners. Recently, periodic outbreaks of deadly diseases that can infect humans and apes, like Ebola, have begun to ravage populations of chimpanzees and gorillas.

The Great Apes Conservation Act, enacted in 2000, authorized the spending of $5 million annually over five years to help protect apes in the wild. The act was re-authorized in 2005 for another five years. The program matches public with private dollars to maximize the impact. Since 2006, for example, $21 million in federal dollars spent by the Great Ape Conservation Fund generated an additional $25 million in private grants and support from other governments.

The federal money may not sound like much in this era of “big science.” But those dollars have gone a long way to protect apes in countries that are desperately poor and politically volatile. The money pays for protecting habitat, battling poachers and educating local populations about the importance of these apes.

For instance, in Indonesia, where habitat loss threatens the few remaining populations of orangutans, money has been earmarked to block the conversion of forests to commercial oil palm and rubber plantations. In Congo, home to the extremely rare mountain gorilla, alternative fuels have been introduced to discourage the cutting of forests for charcoal production. In Gabon, the program has paid for law enforcement training for park rangers battling poachers. The list goes on. In all, last year, the Great Apes Conservation Fund helped to underwrite more than 50 programs in 7 Asian and 12 African countries. If Congress does not reauthorize the act, it could make it much harder to continue even the modest appropriations the great apes fund now receives.

A planet without apes is not sci-fi fantasy. If we do not take action now, sometime in the future, as Hollywood continues to produce sequels to the classic 1968 film, our children and our children’s children will ask with wonder, and perhaps a certain amount of anger, why we stood by idly while these remarkable creatures were driven to extinction.

(John C. Mitani is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.)

Op-Ed: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.

This is an AMAZING op-ed about technology, social media, environmentalism, conservation and love. Enjoy! -MA

Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
from the NYTimes

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

CI replies to accusations of misconduct

CI replies to accusations of misconduct (http://dnapes.blogspot.com/2011/05/conservation-international-agreed-to.html)

from the Huffington Post

by Peter Seligmann, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Conservation International
Partnerships for the Planet: Why We Must Engage Corporations

Conservation International (CI) has actively and transparently engaged with corporations for more than 20 years for the purpose of improving environmental practices and preserving the benefits we all receive from nature, like fresh air and clean water. Because the environmental issues facing humanity are massive and complex, we believe that the most effective way to find solutions is to work with other organizations, including corporations, governments and other NGOs. It is simply not sufficient to throw stones from the sidelines; we must work together to address the needs of a rapidly growing global population that is dependent on a fragile and already overstressed environment.

CI's corporate engagement practices have been attacked recently in a so-called "sting." The original article explicitly states that, "There is no suggestion of illegality or wrongdoing on behalf of CI." However, the headlines that accompany the original and follow-on articles are sensationalist and misleading. Moreover, the accusations leveled in the articles are baseless and dishonest. At CI, we take our mission to protect the environment very seriously.
Here are the facts:

A CI employee in London was contacted by two individuals posing as representatives of a defense corporation. The individuals set up an elaborate hoax, including fake identities, a phony corporate website and a made-up inquiry about the corporation's interest in working with CI on conservation projects. They recorded the initial phone conversation and a subsequent lunch meeting.

They then edited these recordings to remove key elements, while using other parts out of context to paint a highly inaccurate, biased and incomplete picture of CI's work with the private sector. Specifically, they omitted discussion of CI's due diligence process and the need to focus on real, technical work that benefits nature and human well-being as the core of any corporate partnership.

The central issue in these articles is whether conservation organizations should engage corporations. We believe that often the biggest improvements to environmental conservation and human well-being can come from effecting change amongst those who have the biggest impact.

Part of that belief in engagement and partnership drives us to have conversations. We absolutely must work together to find new ideas and solutions to the daunting challenges before us. Therefore, we will always come to the table to have conversations -- with communities, with governments, with scientists and with businesses that express an interest in doing their part to help us tackle these challenges. Failure to do so would be irresponsible. What was recorded on the tape and emails was simply an initial conversation with a corporation that approached us. But initial conversations are only a first step in a long process of due diligence about an organization's commitment to environmental leadership.

We challenge and collaborate with companies to improve their business practices and invest in conservation initiatives. Our commitment is to engage with corporations to minimize environmental impact and encourage them to proactively participate in programs to preserve healthy ecosystems and biodiversity; this is in their enlightened self-interest. This is why we created the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business in 2001.

CI's position has always been that corporate financial support -- communicated transparently, directed toward vital conservation programs, and linked to our expectation that our partners will pursue best environmental business practices -- does not compromise our integrity, independence or effectiveness. To this end, we seriously consider the risks and responsibilities of such partnerships, and conduct rigorous due diligence to ensure that the corporations are committed to significant, substantive improvement before we enter into any such partnerships, and to ensure that they maintain their commitment to environmental stewardship.

Our engagement with corporations is a pragmatic effort to create positive change by improving business practices, helping them lessen their environmental impact, and incorporating environmental protection and improvements to human well-being into corporate decision-making. It is not a blessing or stamp of approval.

Ultimately, the answer to the challenges we all face lies in partnership. Together we have created the strains on our planet's ecosystems, and together we are confronting the impacts of these changes. Only together, in partnership, will we harness the innovation, energy, investment and commitment needed to turn the tide, and safeguard nature's essential services for the long term benefit of all people. The knowledge that human well-being, healthy, sustainable economies, and sound business practices are intrinsically linked is what drives CI's corporate engagement strategy.

Oh Snap! Welcome, Nature. Seriosuly

From the PLoS.org facebook page

On January 6, 2011, Nature announced a new Open Access (OA) publication called Scientific Reports. Nature’s news underscores the growing acceptance of OA, as reflected in recent OA journal launches from other traditional publishers such as the BMJ, Sage, AIP (American Institute of Physics) and APS (American Physical Society). Please spread the word either via this blog post or download this PDF.

Op-Ed: Fear and conformity in conservation

"Once we realize that the struggle is truly endless — that we will never “win” the war — we can step away out of our internal straitjacket and become the smart, nimble, flexible, adaptable, compromise-seeking and solutions-focused movement that we need to be."

Here is a fantastic Op-Ed by Eric Meijaard from Mongabay.com. I don't necessarily agree with it all, but I think constant re-evaluation, acceptance of our faults and building on our successes and failures is necessary in conservation and life. Staying stagnant isn't going to get us anywhere, and sometimes things do seem a little ol' school. A great read and food for thought -MA

From Mongabay.com
Fear and conformity in conservation
by ERIK MEIJAARD

Conservation is like guerrilla warfare. But are the similarities flattering for conservationists?

No matter how big, conventional and entwined with power conservation organizations get, they still have the posture of guerrilla groups. While conventional warfare seeks to reduce an opponent’s capability through head-on confrontation, guerrillas seek to undermine the opponents’ strength and their public support. Guerrillas often also have popular backing and are financed through outside supporters.

Conservation works similarly through strategically picked battles (our conservation projects). Public and outside support is crucial to conservation’s success. And our “armies” are so much smaller than those employed by “the enemy.”

You might be encouraged by these comparisons. But conservation and guerrilla organizations have other, less comforting similarities: the way they communicate, their near-religious underpinnings, and their penchant for groupthink.

Guerrilla fighters are dispersed and their organizations need strong internal communication to ensure that everyone is in line. External communication through propaganda is vital to ensure public support. Strict loyalty to the group is also crucial. You are either in or out, although “out” is not really an option once you are “in.”

Judged by the hundreds of daily emails, frequent meetings and many papers to sign and forms to fill in that plague our business, conservation workers encounter similar views of communication and a devotion to (if not obsession with) process. Process and groupthink bring coherence to an organization, but they also control its individuals. Holding alternative views and speaking your mind about the direction of conservation, or criticizing management, are generally frowned upon within a conservation organization as harmful to its unity.

This impulse to police makes sense: Conservation and guerrillas are strongly mission-driven. And even if the practical implications of that mission are often unclear, the organizational principles that follow it have quasi-religious powers. Stepping outside that framework and being openly critical are often seen as heretical. Also, those who control and administer the process — the priests or apparatchiks, if you will — become focused on and defenders of process to the exclusion of substantive goals, because that is how they defend their position of power and authority.

As with conservation, the success rate for guerrilla war is mixed. Some guerrillas fail in their mission and either fade away or join regular, established governments. Those that succeed often stay in power for decades, rarely if ever through democratic means. Somewhere along the line, they pass a tipping point in growth, stop being flexible and creative, and become sclerotic.

This is where I see conservation now — as a collection of aging guerrillas, holding on to an old vision, old ways of organizing and communicating, and an aging constituency as we slide toward irrelevance. We’ve forgotten the guerrilla’s ability to improvise under difficult conditions and strategically pick the battles that will lead to the biggest net gain. Do we still have that entrepreneurial spirit in conservation? Does conservation generate enough creativity and reward it appropriately? And can individuals still have a major impact on conservation, or has the agenda been hijacked by conservation organizations that have become too big and cumbersome to function effectively?

Where I hope conservation can differentiate itself from guerrilla fighters is in the nature of our wars, and what we consider success or failure. Our wars are not black and white; this is not about winning the mother of all conservation battles, after which we can rest on our laurels or sleep in our graves. Our battle is never over. Conservation is not about right and wrong, either. There are no religious conservation principles to adhere to; there is only muddling through.

Conservation will forever be a struggle to defend the wildlife and environments of this planet against human greed and indifference. Once we realize that the struggle is truly endless — that we will never “win” the war — we can step away out of our internal straitjacket and become the smart, nimble, flexible, adaptable, compromise-seeking and solutions-focused movement that we need to be. Unfortunately, these are characteristics I rarely encounter in conservation organizations, which tend to be conformist, bureaucratic, internally-focused, opaque, unaccountable, and often in competition with other conservation organizations.

All this leaves me a bit uneasy. I seem to be preaching some neoliberal agenda where conservation is driven by individuals and small groups in some meritocratic framework. While I think this is what conservation needs, there is definitely some personal irony here. Because while promoting that agenda, I realize at the same time that conservation success requires broad-level societal support and a social agenda. This puts me back on the left side of politics. No wonder I feel a bit torn these days.

Maybe I confuse practical needs now with ideal solutions in the long term. In the short term, conservation should become an accepted societal goal with practical solutions to everyday problems. Ideally, it should become a way of life, with individual people building their ethical systems on a basis of respect for nature. The key to either model is the dedication of individuals to set examples about how things can be done better. When choosing between the three spirited fighters depicted above this piece, we might want to be a bit less like Che, stop acting like Don Quixote, and walk and talk more like Nelson Mandela.