The End of the Beginning
10/08/08 11:20
I am nearing the end of about 10 months of climate adaptation work. In terms of travel, that amounts to the equivalent of flying roughly five or six times around the equator over that period. And during that time I have developed a reasonable sense of what my job involves, met most of the people I will work closely with, and begun to develop some of the basic skills I need to shift from being an academic and government scientist to being a conservation biologist with a non-profit organization (also known as an NGO or, in many countries, a civil-society organization). Most of my intiial goals have been effectively met, and now I am starting to think about what tasks lay head now. In the words of Churchhill, I am at the end of the beginning. The hinge must needs turn. But where and how? How to begin the middle?
The fork I see before me offers on one hand a path further into policy development and engagement, my status of scientist largely a legacy rather than an active membership. This route makes me uncomfortable. I like being a scientist, which in part involves both learning and research that keep my worldview in some degree of flux and adjustment. I instinctively fear the ossification of ideas because too much is changing too quickly. New ideas have to be vetted and incorporated or discarded. I have changed too much in my thinking over the past year to believe otherwise. Humility is a key attitude.
When I was in publishing as an editor, I was struck by how most of the people I worked for knew less and less about books, authors, and markets the farther they got away from actually working with authors’ words. They also seemed to have a lot less fun, even if they made more money. It was occasionally depressing as an employee interested in doing good work that I sometimes felt I knew more than my betters. The economy of ideas felt more like a command system than a free market. And this hubris is in conflict with a desire to remain humble, close to the ideas, and receptive.
These points seem occasionally true with climate adaptation work, where balancing human economies and cultures, greenhouse emissions, and natural resource management bottleneck in a narrows that requires a lot of specialities to negotiate. We need lots of new ideas and old (and occasionally neglected) perspectives. And that means a lot of us need to change.
The other path before me means retaining more a technical perspective, developing a stronger role on the minutiae of climate impacts and adaptation science. I like being able to go broad and consider policy implications and perspectives, but I want to remain grounded. As a practical concern, keeping contact with the stream of science has not been easy since I began in this position, and this concerns me a great deal. I don’t know the solution, but I suspect that this dilemma is common with staff scientists in “science-based” NGOs.
Simply having a stronger connection to the science doesn’t mean that once again limit myself to talking to scientists. Indeed, I have arguably grown most in the past year from powerful conversations with several economists and one very thoughtful engineer. And perhaps my greatest professional challenge (described in “Managing Water Managers” ) is how to reach out to corporations and agencies that manage water, to shift their thinking and conversations. But these hurdles are really about the connective tissue that links the science with the management practice. Sorting this process out is clearly the business of the pressing middle of my work.
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