Common-sense science
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.