“That idea was disproven years ago and you’re wasting our time by bringing it up again.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“This is bad science.”

Twenty-three years ago, I watched this invective rain down upon a postdoc at a small meeting on global change science.  His antagonist was notoriously irascible, but also justifiably famous, the kind of scientific leader whose disapproval could be psychologically damaging at best, career-killing at worst.  The stark discomfort of the moment, coming as it did during only my second year in grad school, remains vivid today.

I can still see the postdoc’s face, his thick beard insufficient disguise for a flush that was part embarrassment, part anger.  I can feel the discomfort in the room, I can hear the agitated shuffling of the postdoc’s feet and the almost casual aggression in the tone of his questioner.  And I can remember the way the postdoc hung in there, gamely pushing back for a bit, until he was ultimately steamrolled by barbs that went beyond scientific critique and into the realm of personal insult.  The session moderator floated an awkward joke to lighten the mood, found it lacking, then just hurried on to the next talk.  The meeting was a small one, where you tended to see everyone over beers at the end of the day, but the postdoc was conspicuously absent from that evening’s gathering.

Worst of all?  His antagonist was wrong.  Not just in his obvious lack of social or professional grace, but in the science itself.  We just didn’t know it yet.   Years later, I read a commentary from the antagonist on the very same issue, a nuanced and intelligent piece of writing in which he now gave credence to ideas he’d blistered and buried in that small Colorado meeting room.  I wondered if he’d called the postdoc to apologize.  Probably not.

Recently, memories of all this were exhumed by blog posts from the COMPASS gang: Brooke Smith, Karen Mcleod, Liz Neely and Nancy Baron have all written pieces of late that highlight the need for a supportive community in the world of scientific communication and leadership.  Nancy’s post on the “top ten qualities” of scientific leadership was the one that led me back to that Colorado meeting room, via numbers 4 and 5 on her list:

4) They are generous and think beyond their own work to support others.
5) They take risks and are willing to fail – sometimes publicly.

The Colorado antagonist was (and is) unquestionably a leader in some ways.  His scientific contributions are legendary and important.  But in that moment, he was neither generous nor risk-taking.  He chose to belittle the ideas and data of a more junior scientist, and chose not to carefully consider the possibility that the younger man’s ideas, even though they challenged the antagonist’s world view, might have merit — merit he later indirectly acknowledged in that commentary.  In short, he attacked first, thought later.

It would be easy to dismiss this incident as an anomaly, and in some ways it was.  Such public displays of professional animosity are thankfully rare.  But in a thousand more subtle ways, I find science too often erring on the side of asking what’s wrong with this? as opposed to first asking:  what’s right?  It’s a colleague more prone to begin a conversation about a paper’s flaws than its merits.  It’s a panel understandably looking to pare down numbers under thin budgets, but still creating a group culture of seeking problems over potential.  It’s questioners at meetings and seminars looking (consciously or not) to display their own smarts by knocking down the work of others.  It’s committee members still holding fast to antiquated academic beliefs about how a student needs to be put through the ringer to prove his or her worth.  It’s an entire culture that is necessarily built on the currency of peer review and rejection, but that extends a need to find flaws into a default assumption that they are always present and should be sought first.

Look, I get it.  Critique is essential to scientific quality, and if you can’t take well-intentioned criticism, science is probably not the gig for you.  But like almost any aspect of life, the optimal approach represents a balance of support and critique, of excitement and caution, of optimism and skepticism.  Culturally, our traditional reward systems and practices too often favor the negative side of this balance.  In part, that is why Nancy Baron is exactly right to highlight generosity and risk-taking as key features of scientific leadership.  Too often in science, it is (sadly) easier to criticize than support, and it can be risky to defend the merits of an imperfect idea or dataset.

Shifting that balance in a more positive direction has tangible benefits.  It keeps people engaged and happy, and thus more likely to be creative and push through science’s unavoidable challenges and disappointments.  It increases the chances that those who are less represented in science might weather their discomforts, join up and stay in the game.   It keeps ideas that might first seem worthless from premature dismissal…and some of those ideas will ultimately prove transformative.  And hell, it’s just more fun for everyone.

But it’s more than that.  We now live in a world where global change science and peer review in general are under political attack.  A world with declining support for higher education and scientific research.  A world where doing science is getting harder, and where the science that must be done demands broad-scale collaboration.  And above all, a world where the need for science to contribute to society’s challenges while simultaneously being part of the larger world rather than culturally separate from it is ever more pressing.   All of these issues demand a scientific culture of peer-support, of openness to different viewpoints, of broad engagement.

Our science must be of high quality, and it must stand up to the rigors of peer review.  And, as Simon Donner rightly points out, we must be willing and able to critically review ourselves and each other in realms of science beyond just the research core.  But to improve the standing and support of science in society, to recruit and retain the deepest and most diverse talent pool, to maximize the chances that our science makes a difference, we need to build up more than tear down.  Doing so does not have to mean a loss of rigor or accuracy.

Try it on for size.  Next time you go to a talk, read a proposal, read a paper: force yourself to look first for what’s cool, not what’s wrong.  Approaching science in that order, not the reverse, tends to change the nature and details of what you ultimately will identify as flaws.  Critically, it doesn’t mean you won’t still find those flaws – you’ll just slot them in a different context.  A context that can help make science a more inclusive, more enjoyable and ultimately more successful enterprise.

The following post was written at the request of COMPASS, a wonderful organization that has helped bridge the science-policy-communication divide for more than a decade.  Today, COMPASS published a commentary in PLOS Biology on the journey from science outreach to meaningful engagement. This post is part of a series of reactions, reflections, and personal experiences they hope will expand the conversation. Read the summary post here, or track the conversation by searching for #reachingoutsci

Late on Sept 7, 2001, I paced around a DC hotel room, practicing mock Congressional testimony.  Nineteen other Leopold Leadership Fellows were probably doing the same.  By lunch the next day, we’d sat in the House Rayburn room, said our piece, been gently roughed up by a Congressional staffer or two, and felt a certain electricity of hope.  Hope that we could engage policymakers on the world’s environmental challenges.  Hope that we could make a difference.

Three days later, a few of us huddled on the roof of that same hotel, watching smoke rise from the Pentagon while fighter jets encircled the nation’s capitol.  One person cried softly.  Others, casual acquaintances at best, held hands.  Two hours before, on a small and grainy TV tucked in a corner of the hotel bar, we’d watched the second plane hit, watched the towers fall.

My path through science communication, outreach and policy engagement began before 9/11, and continued after.  But the after was different.  In part, that’s because the Leopold Program has played such a central role in my own attempts at leadership and communication in environmental science.  But it’s also because of what happened three days after 9/11, on a train from Union Station.

For a day after the attacks, largely unable to leave town, we tried.  Tried to arrive at some patina of normalcy by returning to discussions of how to better engage with the public, with the media, with policymakers.   In a brief theater of the absurd, we laughed nervously and without heart as one trainer described why you should never wear complex patterns on TV.  The trainer seemed to be willing herself to be there at all, reciting words from a seemingly autonomic source, her eyes vacant, her mind elsewhere.

By the night of September 12, we collectively turned to getting home.  A group of three from the Bay Area managed to rent a car on Thursday, headed west, dropped an Arizonan in Flagstaff before continuing to California.  It took me until Friday afternoon to find passage on Amtrak #86 to Boston.

As we left Union Station, the packed train was largely silent yet palpably connected.  People helped with luggage.  They offered seats. And then slowly, they began to trade stories.  In Wilmington, a woman named Charlotte sat next to me, our introduction immediate and natural, but something we both agreed would not have happened the week before. Later, as the train made a slow turn east through the New Jersey meadowlands, Charlotte touched my arm and said “look at the city.”   And we stared, stunned and muted by a skyline on which the Empire State Building stood tragically alone.

Soon after, we pulled into Penn Station.  Where we sat.  And sat.  And sat some more, while passengers began to get conspicuously nervous.  Why weren’t we moving?  Had something else happened?

And then the reason for our delay filed onto the train.  Their faces covered in grime and dirt and godknowswhat, their eyes hollow, their every movement that of human beings who are still upright and moving because they simply have no other choice.  A group of first responders from Providence, suddenly engulfed in a round of applause from the train’s passengers, followed by those passengers standing up, shaking a hand, wrapping one soot-laden firefighter after another in bear hugs of gratitude and compassion and release.  Everywhere you looked, someone was crying.

And so, when two bombs tore apart one of America’s iconic celebrations of hope and endurance just days after the request for this blog piece arrived, I found myself back on the hotel roof, back on that train.  As I have time and again over the last twelve years.

What does any of this – beyond the juxtaposition of 9/11 with a Leopold week in DC– have to do with environmental science communication?  Or more importantly, with solutions to the environmental challenges we face?

The connection I see is in the hands held on the roof of that DC hotel.  In the response of passengers on Amtrak #86 to the Providence firefighters.  In the entire crowd at Boston’s first hockey game after the marathon bombing spontaneously belting out the national anthem.  In the countless other examples of people responding to the worst of what humans or nature can dish out with an almost ferocious unity that suddenly renders our everyday differences moot.

That is where my hope for a more sustainable planet lies.  Not in what we see in our average days, but in what we see just after our worst ones.   In the fierce devotion we have for each other, always there but only exhumed when the strata of everyday gripes and stresses and distractions are torn away by events we simply will not accept, no matter who we are, what we look like, how we vote.

Sooner or later, metastatically or all in a rush, the fate of our planet could be one of those events.   The real trick is: how do we sustainably harness humanity’s extraordinary capacity for unity and positive change before things truly hit the fan?

I don’t know the answer.  But I can’t think of a more important question.  And yet, when I look back over the last ten to fifteen years, I don’t see my work on science outreach and engagement targeting that grandest of all challenges.  I see moments of nibbling at its heels, but far more moments of largely inconsequential (and potentially counterproductive) sowing of dystopian fears.  For the most part, it’s not that I set out to scare (or bore) people.  It’s just that doing so is often the easiest and most natural extension of the scientific facts on which we all base our communication in the first place.

Going forward, I’m determined to focus more on tapping into emotions and hope, less on typically professorial (and undoubtedly maddening) attempts to tell you people how you’re ruining the planet if you would only listen dammit!  Yes, absent a more sustainable path, harder times are virtually certain.   Part of avoiding those times demands telling the truth about what we face, while another part requires seeking that truth through the power of science.  But in the end, true sustainability can only emerge from a collective desire to be something other than we are on most of our current days.

Five years ago, our president called hope audacious.  He was right.  When senators vote down a gun policy nine in ten Americans want, when fear-laden ideologies threaten our most basic forms of progress, when skies darken from coal and species disappear and fisheries collapse and the climate inexorably warms, staking our future on ideals of hope and unity seems tragically laughable at times, utterly absurd at others.  But there is no other path.  The communal will that a sustainable world requires cannot be born of fear, and it cannot be born from scientific facts seeking to override beliefs and ideologies.  It will only emerge from the fundamental human capacity for blending hope and desire and community to protect who we are and who we most want to be.

Yesterday, amidst a media blur of heartache and horror and heroism, I received a brief email from a friend. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” Still reeling from the discovery that one of the Boston victims was an 8 year old boy, fresh from hugging his father at the finish line, I welcomed the distraction. Steve* is an exceptional scientist, one whose work has a little overlap with mine, so I assumed the request was professional. A job inquiry. A proposal idea. A question about NSF. Something – anything – far removed from the unfolding and unfathomable misery of a beautiful afternoon gone terribly awry.

Steve called right away. His voice cracked; he struggled for words. “Can you help me”, he asked, “remember why we do this job? Why it matters?” Today, Steve has lunch with a major potential donor for his institution, and he wondered: “how the hell can I do anything but tell this man to send his money to somewhere, something in Boston?”

Steve is an extraordinary scientist but he is an even better man. Get to know him a little, and you’re not surprised to discover he is a volunteer firefighter. Had Steve been present in Copley Square yesterday, he would have been one of those people running towards the explosions. We were two thousand miles apart, but his pain was tangible, his need to help – now – seeping through the phone.

And therein lies a struggle I’ve shared, as have many others I know in the environmental science field. Many of us enter the business not only from a love of science, but from a desire to help society better itself, somehow, some way. We take threats like climate change and biodiversity loss and air pollution and ocean acidification personally. We see in them not only the erosion of a natural world we hold dear, but the danger to that we hold even closer: our family, our friends, our fellow human beings who wish only to carry on enjoying the good things in life, big and small.

And yet, the nature of our jobs is to experience little tangible immediacy. We don’t fix a broken bone, stop an imminent crime, save a home from burning to the ground. We find joy in scientific discovery, but often wonder even without the stark catalyst of a tragedy like Boston: does it matter? Is what I do ultimately just an indulgence that will have no bearing on society’s fate?

I don’t think I helped Steve much, for I was adrift in my own emotional turmoil, my own recurring internal struggle for relevance. And yet, Steve’s call helped me find the faith again. I hope I can do the same for him. Just two months back, I wrote some thoughts about why I’ve stayed in this business. Boiled down, it’s two reasons. The first is the people – ones like Steve – who are kind and smart and inspiring and caring all at once, and who combine those traits around a desire to make a difference.

And they do, even if they don’t always see it, which is the second reason. Most of the time, that difference is incremental, not obviously making a dent in the sometimes frightening trajectories of our changing world. It’s a new finding that subtly shifts the debate. It’s a moment of inspiration and wonder for a student, the moment that sets that student on his or her own path of discovery and caring. It’s a door opened for a young scientist teetering on the edges of leaving the field, one that keeps them in the game, ready and able to do the same for the next generation. It’s thousands of little moments, occasionally punctuated by a few truly big ones, that make a difference in other people’s lives today, and when taken as a whole may – just may – help everyone live a little better tomorrow.

Is what I do or what Steve does or what any of us do in this field more important than the firefighters and police officers and EMTs and soldiers and doctors and nurses and countless moments of heroism from citizens spanning all walks of life who pushed back against yesterday’s evil? Not yesterday, and for me anyway, not ever. It takes a special blend of talent and courage to help in the face of imminent danger, to stay calm amidst searing images no one should ever have to see. But over the years I’ve reached some peace in a feeling that I can recognize and applaud and wonder at what such people do, while retaining a belief that what I and my colleagues do may, in some small way, help them continue to be there for all of us for generations to come.

*Steve is not his real name.

An addendum to above:  A friend and colleague I respect a lot, after reading the above, wrote this:

Thanks for sharing this. I actually have to say that I think you are wrong. I think almost any of us would have done the same thing the first responders did, without thinking. We might not have had the same skills to save lives, but I have no doubt you would have been in there, just as actual bystanders did, to rip the stands away so that medical personnel could get at the injured, to apply pressure to gaping wounds, to help carry people to the medical tents, etc. You would have done it too. There’s no question about that whatsoever. Me too. Ditto pretty much everyone I know. 

I hope he’s right about me, though can’t know that of course unless I was actually there.  More importantly, I do think he’s right about people in general – when dropped in the midst of unexpected chaos, most seem to have a remarkable capacity for resetting on the fly and simply doing what needs to be done for their fellow human beings.  I did not mean to suggest otherwise, but I can see how this line –  ”It takes a special blend of talent and courage to help in the face of imminent danger, to stay calm amidst searing images no one should ever have to see.” - might give that impression.  The intent there, however, was to set apart those who knowingly enter chaotic and dangerous situations on a regular basis, as a career choice.  To be a first responder of any kind is to know you will be in harm’s way, sooner or later, and that you’ll bear the responsibility of getting others to safety.  A special blend of talent and courage indeed.

There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and who only knows? - Magnolia, 1999

These are my people. - T. Balcezak, Rusty P’s Saloon, 1988

Weeks before the official start of my first tenure track job I was preparing to enroll in medical school. I’d lived a professional shadow existence for a year, writing papers and grants and running about the Amazon by day, even accepting my first graduate student and discussing my upcoming teaching assignments with the department chair, but volunteering in a surgery department and studying for the MCATs by night. All that was left was to shine a light on that shadow and tell the department that had hired me – a dream job if there ever was one – that I was done. Pulling the plug on academia, heading for a life of white coats and stark overhead lights and hallways awash in antiseptic.

But I couldn’t make the phone call. I wavered, I stressed, I talked with my closest mentors in and out of the field. Then I woke up one morning nearly crushed by a simple thought: what the hell am I doing?

More than fifteen years later, the memories of that time have faded a bit. But now and then the entire episode is exhumed, and I find myself mulling once more: Why did I almost leave? Why did I stay? Why do I still do this job (and like it so much)?

I’m there again of late, catalyzed by recent conversations with several disillusioned early career scientists, by multiple recent blog posts about the trials and tribulations of academia, by my imminent return to faculty life at the University of Colorado, and by a recent get-together with college roommates, one of whom is quoted above and helps run the very medical school in which I nearly enrolled. Those roommates – doctors, lawyers, business executives – have always joked that I’m the only one of us that doesn’t work in the real world.

And they’re right. For all its stresses and constraints, the job I get to do is an anomaly…and an extraordinary gift. Last week, I came across a post on the luck (or lack thereof) involved in landing a tenure track job. The post generated a bunch of responses and a healthy dash of vitriol. Understandably so. Parse the details however you like, but in the end there are more good people who want these jobs than there are such jobs available. So I’ve always felt lucky to have one.

And yet, I almost left. In part, going off the rails that year was a product of personal circumstance – I was struggling in a marriage that eventually failed, and I had to move from the place I most wanted to work to one I didn’t even know. But I’d landed my dream job and was given carte blanche to pursue any line of research that compelled me. What’s not to like? Put another way, if the essential elements of happiness in this profession boiled down to a bit of job security and a genuine desire to do science – two things I had – why nearly give it all up?

What I’ve learned over the ensuing years is that having only those two elements is a stool with two legs. I can sit on it, but pretty soon I’m going to fall down. The anchor of my happiness in this career is, and has always been, the people around me. It’s the undergraduate advisor who took a chance on a recently disillusioned pre-med major and first lit the fire of primary scientific research. It’s the graduate advisor who captivated with tales of a foreign science applied in the familiar land of my birth…and then gave me the chance to try it for myself. Even though what I knew about ecosystem science at the time could be summarized in ten seconds. It’s a pair of postdoc advisors (here and here) who used my love of backcountry skiing to instill sufficient confidence for me to approach that graduate advisor, treated me as both friend and equal colleague, gave me a job. It’s another postdoc advisor, someone else who took a chance, offering a landing spot when life precipitated the above-referenced move and then opening the doors to a whole new scientific arena. It’s this same group of people who used a deft touch to help keep me in the field when I nearly left. It’s my first graduate student, a friend first, a colleague second, a student in name only. It’s another student from my first year in the job, one I didn’t know and who wasn’t mine, but who reached out in science first and in so many other ways over the ensuing years. It’s countless other students since, like those referenced in this recent story, who keep life fun and refresh the hope that draws many of us to this field in the first place. It’s fantastic colleagues at and beyond my institution who are balanced people first, scientists second…but first tier scientists all the same. It’s a colleague who’s selflessness and support during this past and often challenging year was truly extraordinary. It’s a few university administrators I’ve known who marry vision with humanity (e.g. here and here and here and here). And it’s my wife, whose boundless creativity, courage and compassion in science (and beyond) is a source of endless inspiration. A long and yet unquestionably partial list.

There’s nothing insightful in saying that work’s more fun and satisfying when you’re surrounded by good and supportive people. But, though I obviously can’t render an unbiased judgment, I believe it’s especially important in academia and scientific research. By its very nature, science is both a collaborative and intimate vocation. It’s one that relies on flashes of creative insight and that for most is more than just a job, it’s a passion and an identity. And yet, it’s one whose central currency is peer critique. Add those up, and the right social environment – one that pushes, supports, inspires, stabilizes and forgives – is more likely to both forge scientific breakthroughs and keep people in the game to do it again.

Of course, science can and does advance without such an environment. There are those whose drive to pursue a topic is virtually natal, who would do so under almost any circumstance. I respect but don’t really understand those people. I love what I do. I believe in its importance. But take away even a portion of the people referenced above, and for better or worse, I’d probably be doing something else. I used to worry that was a deep flaw, a concern that fueled thoughts of leaving the field. But over time, I’ve just become deeply grateful for the chance to work in a career that contains so many terrific people, engaged in a common purpose that can so readily marry fun and inspiration. Everyone should be so fortunate.

And what of my opening quote on chance and circumstance? Is my own good fortune to land a great job, and to be surrounded by so many wonderful people over so many years just that: good luck? To some degree, sure. I was not more qualified than others on the short list for my job. I didn’t make a college choice with the mentor who set me on this path in mind. Likewise, I didn’t choose graduate school based on the man who would become my PhD advisor.

But in every case, I consciously prioritized locations I thought would provide a diversity of options if I wanted to follow a new direction, and that would provide a human and physical environment in which I could thrive. In college and in graduate school, each mentor took a chance on me, but I found the confidence to seek that opportunity despite a lack of optimal qualifications. And as I’ve moved though my career, my deciding lens for choosing students, colleagues and collaborators is not “what’s on the CV?”. It’s “what kind of person do they seem to be?” Whether I’ve succeeded or not is for others to say, but I’ve tried to be a generous collaborator, and I can state this with confidence: whatever generosity I’ve extended has been returned multifold, and that return is the foundation of any sustained success I’ve enjoyed.

In part, this post is motivated by a certainty that the nature of my job is facing major change. In the broadest sense, academia today is not very different from when I started graduate school 25 years ago. But 25 years hence, I can’t imagine a similar period of stasis. From the democratization of online learning tools, to shifts in funding landscapes, to the increasingly outdated mode of single PI or even small group research, academic science is facing an era of overhaul. Some of it is worrisome, some for the better.

But what won’t change, and may become even more essential, is the importance of basic humanity and the need for settings that foster creativity and support. So for those of you looking up at the bulk of your career, making choices, feeling stresses, keep it simple. Seek the environments that make you happy, take a few chances, try not to care too much about individual credit, strive to give more than you get. I know: it’s a Hallmarkian bit of advice. But it’s clichéd because it’s true. It’s just too often forgotten in a world awash in rejection and whose opportunities can appear dauntingly thin.

And for those in stable, post-tenure positions, perhaps our most important job is to seek ways to increase those opportunities, and to make that balanced and supportive environment happen whenever possible. Yes, this can be a great business. But too many women leave the field early. Too many from underrepresented groups don’t find their way to the entrance, or stay in the game. Too many in positions of power still prioritize critique over support, individual credit over generosity, and the trappings of an increasingly antiquated system for making judgments about someone’s worth.

A few years ago, I read a letter of recommendation for a job candidate, written by one of the most famous people in my field, someone with on-paper credentials that are nearly overwhelming. The candidate was also impressive on paper, as the letter’s author helped make clear. But his bottom line was this: “Yes, X is an exceptionally accomplished scientist. But above all, he is kind and generous and balanced. He seeks the best in any idea, and to support those around him before himself. He is, by all measure, a good man.”

Academic science is facing a lot of pressures from the outside. But for those of us on the inside, man or woman, the bottom line of that letter is the bar we should seek, every day. Be grateful for what we have, help others to feel the same way. The former is something I feel deeply, the latter something I’ve been fortunate to receive the bulk of my career. The best way I can repay it is to carry on the tradition. If you’re in the business, I hope you do the same. The more we all can approach science and academia with gratitude, humility and generosity, the better the entire institution will become – and the more likely it is to achieve its central goals.

A postscript: This is a long and somewhat wandering post. It started as one thing, in part became another. So it goes sometimes. But I do want to note this: a good job, ANY good job, is something too many don’t get to enjoy, let alone the utter luxury of stewing over happiness in this particular career versus that one. It’s not something I forget.

The following post does not represent an official statement by NSF or its Division of Environmental Biology.

The release of initial statistics on the latest round of proposals submitted to the DEB and IOS core programs has understandably catalyzed a new round of discussion on several blogs (and elsewhere).  My intent here is not to dig into all the details of those statistics or to represent NSF in any official capacity.  I can’t do that here.  However, I am hoping to clarify one piece of the broader story that’s leading to some misunderstandings and erroneous assumptions: the comparison of this year’s success rates to years past.

The short story:  one should not compare this year’s rates so far with past years and try to draw any conclusions about the effects of a review system change. Here’s why. So far this fiscal year, programs are operating under only 80% of last year’s budget due to the ongoing continuing resolution for FY13. As with all continuing resolutions, that may or may not change before the fiscal year ends on September 30, 2013, but for now, program officers have less money to allocate to new awards.

A key but largely unrecognized piece of this:  budget cuts tend to have disproportionately large impacts on success rates in a given year.   That’s because NSF programs must balance standard awards (funding entirely allocated in a given fiscal year), and continuing awards (funding mortgaged across three or more fiscal years). When budgets decrease, the mortgage still must be paid, so there is less available for new awards. This means the effective reduction in funds available for new awards is almost always greater than just the percentage cut to the budget.

Here’s a purely hypothetical example.  Imagine that over the past few years, program ABC had an annual budget of $10M, and that $4M each year was needed to cover continuing increments to past awards.  That leaves $6M each year to fund new work.  Now, imagine that the program is hit with an unusual and unexpected 20% budget cut – i.e. they now have an $8M budget for the year (or at least for the time being under a CR-style scenario).  The $4M from past awards must still be paid, leaving $4M for new awards.   If everything else stayed flat across this time period (e.g. submission rates and budget sizes), that 20% budget cut would not result in a 20% drop in success rates.  Instead, the money available for new awards drops by 1/3 (6M to 4M).

Again, this is a simplified and hypothetical example!  Success rates depend not only on the money available for new awards, but on submission rates, budget sizes and various other budget requests and directives that can and do vary across years.  But the need to distribute some funds across years means that one cannot extrapolate a budget cut into a change in success rate on a 1:1 basis.  Program officers try hard to manage funds in such a way that buffers against budget oscillations (especially cuts), but awarding some continuing grants is often unavoidable, and at times desirable, for all kinds of reasons.

Bottom line:  Nobody is happy with low success rates, but beware of trying to compare the effects of a review system change  on success rates during a year in which a major budget deviation has occurred (at least to date).

Finally, none of the above implies that the new review system doesn’t merit continued discussion and analysis.  It does, and as the recent email to DEB PI’s noted, that analysis and discussion is coming via a variety of mechanisms.  As part of that, we still hope to launch a pilot blog from DEB in the near future, but the necessary review and implementation pieces of that blog are not yet complete.

Hope this helps.  Hang in there everyone.

Just a quick note on a story that will be more developed in a guest post by those truly responsible.  Roughly two years ago, a wonderful undergrad engineering major named Hana Fancher started work in our lab.  She did everything we asked and more, but was not content to just be an assistant – she wanted to explore possible research topics of her own that might link our lab’s interests with hers in environmental engineering.   Hana and PhD student Phil Taylor – now Dr. Phil Taylor! – began scheming about a look at palm oil plantations in Costa Rica, where one finds both substantial environmental concerns but also unmet potential for bioenergy generation.  But of course, the path from idea to execution can be tough indeed, especially when said idea is about a system in which none of us have ever worked, in a country thousands of miles away.  Not to mention the likely suspicion with which a “hey, can we come measure some stuff on your property?” request might be greeted for this kind of project.  (And indeed, such suspicion was a part of the early days of the project.) Nonetheless, the two of them had a vision and weren’t to be denied.

Fast forward eighteen months.  Hana and Phil, along with Nemergut Lab PhD student Terry Legg, have now completed a variety of studies looking at patterns and processes in methane loss from the waste stream of a major palm oil mill — including some exploration of how that methane might be captured to produce energy.  Hana gave her first ESA talk.  As is the hallmark of all great new projects, Hana, Phil and Terry have answered a few first questions, but raised many more.  I suspect this work and its progeny will keep us busy for years to come.

Here are Hana and Phil about a year ago, doing some classic truck-side field biogeochemistry:

But most impressive of all?  They made a difference.  Here’s Phil in Costa Rica last week, standing with the manager of the palm oil operation in which they did their work:

The construction activities you see in the background?  Here’s the explanation, in Phil’s words from an email earlier today:

As Hana graduates today we can all celebrate alongside her not only for her excellence in school but also in helping put science into action! I dressed up and visited Coopeagropal to see there 1.4MW biogas project. I met with Deyvid (in pic below), Coope’s Director for Envrionment and Energy, and he told me that our research directly inspired Coopeagropal to develop a anaerobic digester for energy production that would completely satisfy their mill’s electricity demand. They broke ground last month and have contracted with a german engineering firm that hopes to have it up and running by July 2013. The total project cost is 6.5 million USD and they expect a payback of 3.5 years. There is a good chance this may not have happened without Hana’s vision for the the project. 

That’s right, Hana graduates today.  Congratulations Hana!  It’s students like you that make our jobs fun and give us all greater hope for the future.

This time there is no levity in this very non-biogeochemical post. Both levity and biogeochemistry are far from my mind. What I write below is neither new or eloquent, but ultimately, I’m not really writing for anyone else. I write in the hopes of feeling just a notch better by doing so…while simultaneously hoping that we all stay heartbroken and angry enough to this time…finally…stand up and refuse to accept the status quo. (NOTE: 12/17 update at end of post).

I am sitting in the distressingly sepulchral light of a guest bedroom, watching my beautiful and perfect three year old daughter sleep. I am crying. I am crying for the slaughter of twenty others beautiful and perfect, for the slaughter of the caregivers and educators and heroes to whom they were entrusted. I am crying for the 680-some other children who should never have faced such an unthinkable moment in time, and who will never shake its searing images.

And I am crying at the probable meaninglessness of it all.

Eleven years past, I stood in shock in a DC hotel while, on small screen high in the corner, an airplane slammed into the second tower. Two hours later, I was on the roof of that hotel, still speechless, watching fighter jets circle above and smoke rise from another iconic building just across the Potomac.

Almost overnight, our country changed. For the better? No, I don’t think so. But 9/11 showed that when our government wants to, it can rapidly transform the reality of our daily lives.

It won’t do that here.

The leaders of the country in which my daughter has spent just three largely blissful years will profess great sadness. They will, like our president did yesterday, feel true emotion. But they won’t do anything that matters. Except for those directly affected, the moment will fade into the dustbins of history, 9/11esque Never Forget stickers appearing only on the windows of Newtown residents and a handful of family members. For the rest of the country, a small New England suburb’s enduring horror will only re-emerge the next time someone slaughters our children.

And until we refuse to accept it, slaughter they will. Virginia Tech. Binghamton. Tucson. Oak Creek. Aurora. And now Newtown. Our children, our family, our leaders, our friends and our neighbors. All just since 2007. Twenty-nine mass shootings since 1999. Each time, the same script. Shock and horror, speeches of dismay and empathy…and no action.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As Jeff Sachs noted, Australia responded to the horror of mass shootings with significant attention to gun control. Since then? Sixteen years free, and a notable drop in gun-related suicides and homicides.

No citizen needs an automatic weapon. The second amendment does not guarantee the right to such tools of destruction. But gun control is not the only answer. As many have written today, mental health services in this country are woefully lacking, while cultural glorification and desensitization of unspeakable violence only grows. Media coverage of any event has never been more divisive, more sensationalist, more likely to feed into a metastatic circle of violence. As a nation, we are growing apart – financially, intellectually, spiritually, culturally.

But we could change it all. As Nicholas Kristoff wrote today, it just takes collective courage. Courage most of our elected leaders of any party are too unwilling to display.

If ever there was a reason to hold the government hostage, to threaten its closure, to resort to unprecedented rhetoric and obstructionism, this is it. Our president fought tears yesterday because he is a father and by all indications a good man. Yesterday was for comfort. Today and going forward he should affix himself to the gates of Washingtonian power, refusing to budge until Newtown and its horrific brethren are no longer tolerated.

But he probably won’t, and nor will any of his colleagues. So I sit here and cry.

12/17 UPDATE : Roughly 60 hours have passed since my Saturday pre-dawn drafting of the post above. The raw emotion and anger I felt then has faded, though only a little. And by this morning, I started to feel a little hope: the president and many members of Congress, even some with NRA endorsement, are responding differently this time. New legislation is being discussed, changes of heart on gun policy announced. I would like nothing more than to have the pessimism above be proven wrong.

But for the most part, my pessimism remains. This piece by Patrick Keefe in the New Yorker explains why. Keefe writes:

What does it take? If a congresswoman in a coma isn’t sufficient grounds to reëvaluate the role that firearms play in our national life, is a schoolhouse full of dead children? I desperately want to believe that it is, and yet I’m not sure that I do. By this time next week, most of the people who are, today, signing petitions and demanding gun control will have moved on to other things. If you want to understand why the gun debate can occasionally feel rigged, this is the answer: the issue is characterized by a conspicuous asymmetry of fervor.

In other words, if we want to see meaningful action, all of us – from national leaders to everyday citizens – must fight human nature, hold on to the raw emotion and use it to organize and stay engaged in a long and difficult policy struggle. Because as Keefe also writes, it will be a struggle indeed:

Following the Newtown shooting, Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners for America, suggested that these massacres might be avoided in the future, if only more teachers were armed. As Pratt’s sentiment should make clear, the United States has slipped its moorings and drifted into a realm of profound national lunacy.

That lunacy extends well beyond debates on gun control. From health care to education to science to the basic function of government — all of which are directly relevant to reducing violence — mountains of evidence show that we have indeed slipped our moorings. Will a moment in time this horrific ground us again? We’ll see.

Though if we only sit back and watch, the answer is already known. So please, if you’re heartsick and fed up, do something. Keep doing something.

This site was not created as a portal for advocacy. It originated as a silly little science site and it will probably go back there. But some issues merit discussion and action everywhere, from all of us. My voice may be small, but I intend to use it. I hope you do too. For only in the sustained collective of millions of small voices can we craft a future in which our children are less likely to face an unthinkably violent and untimely fate. We can’t keep them or us free from all harm, and we can’t eliminate violence or even mass slayings. But as our president said yesterday, we can do better. Will he – and will we?

I don’t know. Per Keefe and others, pessimism may be justified. And I feel it. But as I watch my young daughter sleep once more, I refuse to accept it.