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THE PRESIDENT'S COLUMN: DREAMS OF A MILLENNIAL PRESIDENT

What an opportunity: to be the millennial president of the Society for Conservation Biology. Here I am, representing the most important, most needed professional society on earth and proceeding over the meltdown of industrial civilization. The chaos of Y2K, the crumbling of the global information highway, mass frenzy in the streets . . . hmm, maybe nature will have a chance to recover after all! Actually, I'm not too worried, or hopeful, about the apocalypse (albeit I'd love to see the collapse of email and telephone communication). Why fret about a hypothetical crisis in our techno-culture when a much bigger crisis, the extinction spasm, is already well in progress? What concerns me most, in the here and now, is how to re-energize the membership of SCB, how to give us a kick in the collective butt. Conservation biology has a mission--science in the service of conservation--but we have only begun to fulfill our mission, and time is running out.

Despite the best of intentions, SCB has failed to live up to its promise. As a discipline, conservation biology has had a marginal impact on policy decisions made by government, land management decisions made by agencies, or even land (or water) protection decisions made by agencies, conservation groups, private foundations, individual philanthropists, and land trusts. I do not place blame for these shortcomings anywhere specific, certainly not on the past leadership of this society. I have been on the Board of Governors of SCB for seven years and have been honored to work with some of the most dedicated and capable scientists to be found. And yet conservation biology remains somewhere on the outskirts of conservation action. Despite new conservation biology programs popping up in universities across the globe, legions of brilliant students flocking to these programs and seeking careers in the field, and the profound success of our journal, I feel anxious. I am worried about where those fine students will go after they finish their degrees. I worry about what they will be able to accomplish in terms of real contributions to conservation during their careers. I wonder whether the window of opportunity for our discipline to help make the world a better place--or at least keep it as nice as it is now--is shrinking faster than we ever imagined. Are we really making a difference? Can we even hope to make a difference, given the odds and money and power lined up against us?

I believe we can make a difference, but we will have to pull together and speak with a more powerful and unified voice than we have thus far. As your new president, I have identified four areas of emphasis (in no particular order of priority) where I want to help SCB make a difference during my two-year term: (1) reforming the education of conservation biologists at undergraduate and graduate levels, especially to prepare students better for careers outside academia, (2) increasing employment opportunities for conservation biologists and funding for conservation research, (3) courting and engaging the media, to help them tell our stories better and more regularly; and (4) increasing the membership of SCB and expanding the involvement of our members in all we do.

Regarding the educational problem in conservation biology, I basically believe we are educating conservation biologists at the Ph.D. level only to be little professors. At the bachelor's and master's level, we essentially give students a water-downed dose of that same ivory-tower curriculum. This curriculum, a direct consequence of hiring faculty who have little or no experience outside the university, is reasonably good for training future academics, but does not reflect the current job market in conservation biology. Rigid boundaries between the subdisciplines of conservation biology (e.g., botany, zoology, wildlife, fisheries, and forestry) in many universities prevent true interdisciplinarianism, and the humanities are under-represented in most curricula. Similar points have been made by others. Yet few university administrators seem to be listening. I will work with our new education committee to develop recommendations for reforming the curricula and faculty of conservation biology degree programs worldwide, and to investigate how we might better contribute to the training (including mid-career re-schooling) of conservation biologists in agencies and NGOs worldwide.

My next agenda item, increasing employment opportunities for conservation biologists and funding for research in conservation biology, is directly related to the education issue. If we seek to prepare students for today's and tomorrow's job opportunities, then just what are those opportunities? Are there enough of them? Do they pay a decent wage? The immediate outlook is not encouraging. My personal observations are that agencies are reducing their hiring in the sciences, consulting firms appear to be slightly increasing theirs, and NGOs seem to be holding steady. Academic positions for conservation biologists, broadly speaking, are probably declining. (Positions with the title "conservation biologist" are almost certainly on the increase, but positions in the life sciences central to conservation biology, for example ecology and evolutionary biology, seem to be on the decline.) Considered together, the present job opportunities don't come close to matching the huge number of students graduating with advanced degrees each year and intending to work as conservation biologists. The solution is not to train fewer conservation biologists. Rather, it is to increase the job pool for them. This will require marketing conservation biologists to nontraditional employers.

Conservation groups, private foundations, and land trusts come to mind as organizations that would do well to have highly-trained conservation biologists on their staffs or to retain independent conservation researchers as consultants and advisors. These rapidly growing NGOs spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year for purchases of land, policy analyses, lobbying, and other conservation actions. Yet, little of the budgets of these groups is devoted to science to help determine which lands should be purchased, which ecosystems and species deserve priority attention, or, otherwise, how scarce conservation dollars should be spent to get the most bang for the buck. Most of the larger conservation groups have science staff, but smaller groups, foundations, and land trusts typically have few or none.
Land trusts have been identified as the most rapidly growing segment of the conservation community, yet most purchases are for "open space" and do not make use of scientific information on the distribution of biodiversity or follow principles of reserve design. This situation is changing for the better, but not nearly fast enough. Foundations, in general, seem to have scant appreciation for what conservation biology might offer them or the world at large. Or, if they do appreciate the role of science in making decisions about conservation, they assume that the universities and the National Science Foundation will support this work. Ha! As president of SCB I hope to create a new committee, perhaps involving other professional societies such as the Ecological Society of America, to develop strategies for marketing conservation biologists and other applied ecologists to nontraditional employers.

Another priority is improving our relationship with the media. We have yet to see widespread understanding and promotion of conservation biology among journalists. In newspapers, television, and other media, the statements of credible scientists are often countered by statements from other "scientists," often representing industry, who don't know what they're talking about. Or, equally troubling, the observations of conservation biologists are presented side by side with comments of environmental activists who don't know what they're talking about. Most journalists are woefully ignorant about science and conservation issues. I'm not sure yet how I will help SCB address this problem. Please send me ideas.

Finally, I want to reinvigorate SCB by involving the membership more in everything we do. A society is only as strong as its members. The membership in SCB has remained stable at around 5000 for the past three years. Some internal observers think we have saturated the market, at least in the U.S. I don't believe this is true. I think we have failed to make our presence and role known to many potential members. We are not out there "selling" the society. This suggests SCB is not meeting the needs of its members well enough to make them want to recruit others--or, in many cases, to renew their own memberships.

Why have our members become so apathetic? In recent years fewer than 10% of SCB members have voted in board elections. More puzzling to me is that only 92 of our 5000-plus members responded to a recent survey on strategic planning--the "vision" of SCB--published in this newsletter and on our web page. This is a dismal performance. If anything, I would expect participants in a mission-oriented discipline whose stated goals have much to do with saving the earth to be a lot more active and involved than members of a typical academic society. Alas, we are not.

Let's make the end of this millennium, and the beginning of a new one, a time when conservation biology assumes its rightful place as the preeminent discipline informing conservation decisions of all kinds. Help us enhance the status and influence of conservation biology worldwide. I am heartened that, under Dee Boersma's leadership, SCB made a major commitment to increased internationalization. President-elect Mac Hunter has played a big role in this effort. Mac and I strongly share an interest in increasing the involvement of our members. But the officers and board of SCB can accomplish very little without your help. Please support your local SCB chapter (or, if none exists, create one), participate in our committees, donate large sums of money (it's tax deductible!), or otherwise tell me how you will help SCB make a difference in this world. It can feel good to have a mission.

Reed Noss

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