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BECOMING ORDINARYAlthough I've been awake for the hour it takes me to drive to work, I really don't start to think clearly until I hear the pilot's voice through the headset: "Seven eight four, four hotel hotel." A women's voice replies, "Four hotel hotel, go ahead." "Heading west from the Beard Center to 80 47 20, 25, 20 34, three souls on board, two hours of fuel." The women's voice echoes the numbers and falls silent. The words condition me to expect the 80 knot wind that now blows past, for we fly without doors on the helicopter and before sunrise, it's cold. I lean in, away from the draft. Below, colors are muted. The pine trees are dark green, the prairies are dark buff, and an imperceptible breeze rumples the thin white mist that lies over them. "Number 40"--Sonny Bass's voice is equally terse--"Four zero," I reply. We land and I stand with my feet in the mist and head above it. The helicopter leaves and I take off my flight helmet and Nomex gloves. In the distance, there's a faint "buzz," and "1" goes onto my clipboard with the date, the time, and location. At least one Cape Sable sparrow survives. Much of what I do every day is quite ordinary for an academic. I teach students, mentor graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, sit on department and university committees, and write papers with a wonderful slate of students and colleagues worldwide. What Sonny Bass and I are doing in Everglades National Park before sunrise is not ordinary. Neither is how I spent much of last week. I was getting lost in various U.S. Senate buildings awaiting the chance to meet senators and their staffs to deliver a letter signed by 6000 scientists--likely many of you who are reading this--on the Endangered Species Act. I'm hugely honored and flattered to receive SCB's 2006 Edward T. LaRoe III Memorial Award because it notices that what I've done isn't--as yet--ordinary for an academic. It should be. I once promised myself I would never work in Hawai'i. Surely, the proper places to do ecology were those where humans trod lightly, if at all. How could one understand how nature worked where many of the species--life's cogs and wheels--were already missing? At a 1976 meeting in San Francisco, the food service was appallingly slow--you've been to meetings like that, right? As we both waited 45 minutes for a tasteless hamburger, Charlie van Riper persuaded me to visit Hawai'i. I did, and we used my week there to write a grant proposal for work on the i'iwi, a species extinct on some islands and much reduced on the others. That grant, awarded by Tom Lovejoy at the World Wildlife Fund, supported a six-month field trip. My daily experiences there tortured me. I knew that thirty years later, that's 2008--papers in good journals would not prevent the stinging question, "What were you doing in Hawai'i while all those species were going extinct?" "Writing erudite papers" was manifestly not a sufficient answer; only "Doing something to prevent extinction" was acceptable. The fieldwork taught me something about why some species are vulnerable and others less so, so I understood that science could make a difference. More than any experience later in my life, Hawai'i taught me that science had an obligation to do so. I had no idea what to call that work. In the early 1980s, Michael Soulé invited me to a meeting in Michigan. This meeting and SCB's founding in 1985 gave a name to what we do: conservation biology. It also embodied Michael's extraordinary vision that it was to be very much more than just biology. We must understand Bryan Norton's philosophy, Herman Daly's economics, Don Worster's history, and many other wonderful people whom I could have ignored totally if I had remained an academic ecologist. SCB's rapid growth is unequivocal proof that staying within an academic discipline is not sufficient to stem the irreversible loss of biodiversity. My first of five points is that the task of making biodiversity conservation ordinary is not complete. SCB is still heavily North American. Our leaders show an admirable commitment to become more international and it's essential that we support them. Meetings in Brazil in 2005 and South Africa in 2007 are a wonderful start. The ultimate goal must be to provide a home for everyone who shares the conservation mission, wherever they live, whatever their job titles. My second point is that I could not have started when and where I did were it not for that initial grant. Precious few grants put would-be conservation professionals into the trenches where they will learn their craft. Much of my time goes toward finding funds for students' first forays into practical conservation. Like you, my frequent flyer miles support several of my international programs. Their location looks suspiciously like the route map for Delta Airlines. We urgently need more small grants programs. In the late 1980s, National Audubon asked me to be on a committee to examine a dispute between the U.S. Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service over plans for expanding Everglades National Park. Promised "long hours, no money, and no academic reward," I naturally accepted, expecting to invest weeks, but not a career. In the Park, I first heard Federalish, the strange language spoken by federal employees. I'm now so proficient that "A section 7 consultation on the planned CSOP and the present IOP and ISOP, representing USACE's RPAs in response to the service's BO" seems a perfectly clear description of how Sonny Bass and I spent Thursday. Stranger still was the experience of flying with Marty Fleming across the Everglades. Until then, I had never thought about ecological processes at the scale of tens of thousands of square kilometers. Marty did so every day, and with extraordinary clarity. The subsequent invitation to work in the Everglades meant that since 1992 Bass and I have watched most April sunrises from a helicopter. Everglades' problems promised much work, annual grey literature reports, few published papers, and work that refuses to be pigeonholed into recognizable sub-disciplines of ecology or anything else. What a privilege it has been to work on them! My third point is that one should never say "no" to a chance to work on world-class conservation problems. More than that: seek such opportunities vigorously. Journals rarely capture any of the bare-knuckle conflicts I experience in trying to solve conservation problems. Published papers and academic tradition aren't the place to determine a conservationist's future. I was 40 before I understood that one should actively seek trouble and most likely find it where people clash with sensitive ecosystems and threatened species. I fret that even conservation journals have too many papers about the tools we know how to use, rather than the tools we need to use. The solution is to find tough problems and solve them using whatever tools are needed while admitting the near-certainty that one lacks them. I next went looking for trouble, worried by the fact that I was doing conservation in a well-funded national park in the richest country in the world, which isn't exactly typical. My group's research suggested the coastal forests of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil held more threatened species than anywhere in the Americas. For a decade, we've worked with Maria-Alice Alves at the State University of Rio de Janiero, helping her map priorities for conservation. Trouble also found me in the form of Rudi van Aarde, who suggested a visit to the University of Pretoria, where I now have my secondary appointment. These programs require constant attention, but above all, they require an invitation. I can't imagine metaphorically parachuting into some country and announcing, "I'm a conservation professional who will now solve your problems." My group has worked internationally because we've found ways to be useful to colleagues in countries that face serious conservation challenges. Again, it's a huge privilege to do so. My fourth point is that developing conservation programs in biodiversity-rich countries is difficult, but that cannot be an excuse. I'd feel foolish accepting this award if my students and I worked only in the United States. We have important conservation issues, but far more are in developing countries. Three years ago, Steve Schneider wrote much of I might say about communicating science. By way of addendum: every academic has a responsibility to teach. There is no fine print in my Duke University contract to "teach only Duke students," no prohibition on informing the media, church congregations, and politicians about what we do. So how does one approach politicians in Washington, D.C., or any other national capitol, suggesting how science should inform how they vote? There are many answers and most are a matter of just asking to meet with local, state, or national politicians. I know from inumerable questions that many find an initial approach difficult. My final point is that in the United States, staff in SCB's Executive Office dedicated to national policy issues should provide those answers. They should advise on the policy issues that matter to conservation and how we can influence them. If we do not do this now, how can we expect other nations to follow suit? Stuart Pimm
Stuart Pimm received the 2006 Edward T. LaRoe III Memorial Award from the Society for Conservation Biology for his leadership in translating principles of conservation biology into real-world conservation. The award will be conferred on the evening of Saturday, 24 June at the 2006 annual meeting in San Jose, California.
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