AIBS Executive Director's Weekly Blog

AIBS is getting ready to launch later this year an exciting new program with other major scientific organizations to celebrate 2009 as the Year of Public Understanding of Science. The initiative got underway last May, at the Council meeting of AIBS's member societies and organizations, where the following resolution was passed:

- Whereas the AIBS Council believes that it is within our members' and society's interest to increase understanding and appreciation of how science works, we therefore advise the AIBS Board and staff to designate 2009 as the Year of Public Understanding of Science.

- The AIBS Council will promote this idea within its individual member societies and advises the AIBS Board and staff to seek alliances with others (National Research Council, American Chemical Society, American Physics Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, etc) to promote and further develop this idea.

AIBS is just now getting its 2009 planning efforts underway (e.g., even though we have not yet contacted all of the organizations named in the above resolution, those that we have contacted are already starting to help with the planning activities); some staffing up is required at AIBS's end (we have new public policy / affairs staff coming on board very soon). Another true partner in this effort is COPUS, the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science, of which AIBS is a founding member. COPUS, which expects to be ready to go public later this year also, got started prior to and independently from any plans to make 2009 the Year of Public Understanding of Science, but the synergies between the two endeavors are obvious.

I'll have much more to say about these two projects very soon, and how others can get involved.

Posted by Richard O'Grady at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apologies for the radio silence since my last posting. I've been away on vacation, then I turned around and headed off for the annual AIBS Executive Committee Retreat with President Kent Holsinger, University of Connecticut; President-Elect Douglas Futuyma, State University of New York; Immediate Past-President Marvalee Wake, University of California at Berkeley; Secretary Dan Johnson, University of Lethbridge; and Treasurer Richard Norgaard, University of California at Berkeley. We were meeting on Tilghman Island, on the Maryland Eastern Shore, which is a fascinating location from which to contemplate the health of the Chesapeake Bay and human effects on large waterways in general. I'll post a blog entry on how the Executive Committee Retreat went re AIBS's future programmatic planning as soon as I have gathered together some notes.

My vacation with my family (children aged 6, 8, and 10) was once again in the Lake Champlain - Adirondacks region, a beautiful part of this country that we keep returning to (it also feeds the native-born Pacific Northwesterner in me). I wish to draw special attention to the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain in Burlington VT, also known as the ECHO science center, for Ecology, Culture, History and Opportunity of the Lake Champlain Basin. This is a top-notch center for the general public, deftly melding science--including a good dose of evolutionary thinking--with cultural, historical, and socioeconomic topics.

Suitably enough, the AIBS Executive Committee and I subsequently got a grass-roots version of the same big-picture thinking at the AIBS Executive Committee Retreat when we visited with the captain of a Skipjack (a sail-powered fishing vessel used on the Chesapeake Bay, still to this day). Captain Wade Murphy, a third generation waterman, shared with us a great many common-sense ecological and economic observations on the history and precarious future of the Bay's health in connection with oyster and crab harvesting. Captain Wade couched his remarks in terms of humans' responsibilities for effective stewardship of the environment; in this, we can also see a Tragedy of the Commons at play.

Posted by Richard O'Grady at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)